Fat Ham turns Shakespeare’s Hamlet upside down without minimizing the issues the original raises or the brilliance. The play by James IJames won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and it is easy to see why.

Chad Smith is a visionary credited with advancing the orchestral music tradition through cutting-edge programming and cultivating industry-defining partnerships. Smith brings strategic expertise, commitment to musical excellence, and a tested ability to expand audiences and generate revenue.

Elizabeth Yilmaz and Mara Driscoll, two dancers from the Metropolitan Opera troupe, have created a performance series that’s as wonderful as it is unique.  The final performance of the spring season, and the 9th produced by this team with associate Cesar Abreu, was in the spirit of a happening.

A New Brain features music and lyrics by BSC Associate Artist William Finn (BSC: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The Royal Family of Broadway), book by Finn and Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner James Lapine (Broadway: Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George), and direction by BSC Associate Artist Joe Calarco (BSC: Waiting for Godot, Into the Woods, Ragtime), with music direction by Vadim Feichtner (BSC: The Royal Family of Broadway; Broadway: Falsettos, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) and choreography by Chloe O. Davis (Paradise Square).

The headline concerts include two striking vocalists: Roberta Donnay with the Prohibition Mob Band, and the first pairing of vocalist Alexis Cole with the Amherst Jazz Orchestra. Free “jazz-al-fresco” takes place on Saturday, June 10, and there will be two jazz brunches.

In a thoughtful introduction, Gadsden makes her case for Modernism, and then hones in on five wonderfully talented but quite different trailblazing industrial designers: Paul T. Frankl (1886-1958), Donald Deskey (1894-1989), Viktor Schreckengost (1906-2008), Harley J. Earl (1893-1969), and Belle Kogan (1902-2000).

Diana (Laura Linney) and Alice (Jessica Hecht) are mothers of 5-year-old daughters; it is summer in Columbus, Ohio and both are connected to The Ohio State University.

Tan Dun became famous for his Academy Award-winning track for Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger.  A crossover classical composer who grew up in the country in China, and had not heard Beethoven until he was eighteen, he has made a career, merging East and West, using the conventions and tonalities of each culture.  This merger is most effective in his operas, symphonies and concertos.

Most years, we in New England experience massive storms called Nor’easter’s. In the winter months these epic events usually stop everything for a few days while we dig our way out of snow drifts and wait for electricity to resume. As artists, we relish any reason to stop in our tracks, slow time, and experience stillness.

This classic musical was originally written specifically for Ethel Merman, a huge Broadway star, by Jule Styne (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) and Arthur Laurents (book). It was loosely based on the autobiography of Gypsy Rose Lee, the stripper/actress/writer.

Rather than a simple blood-sucking horror, the play focuses largely on the relationship between Oskar, a bullied teenage boy from a broken home with a drunken mother and a largely neglectful father, and Eli, a new neighbor - who possesses an androgynous look; acts mostly like a girl; but insists that she’s not a girl, with no further explanation.

Blessed with soaring romance-style music and a dramatic source from Heinrich Heine’s take on Celtic mythology (influenced in turn by stories of the Wandering Jew), Wagner produced his first operatic masterpiece.  However, he shifted the venue to a Nordic locale more compatible with his desired social iconography.  The composer was particularly empathetic toward the title character as he identified with the isolation and persecution suffered, creating a highly engaging opera centered on this desolate soul.

By popular demand Barrington Stage Company brings back a world premiere by Mark St Germain on the stage that bears his name. The Happiest Man on Earth is a one-man show based on the holocaust memoir The Happiest Man on Earth published by Eddie Jaku when he was one hundred years old. It is profoundly performed by Kenneth Tigar.

Many of Mark St Germain's plays have premiered at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield. One of his most successful was Freud's Last Session with some 200 global productions. Recently he discussed how the play is being filmed in Ireland starring Sir Anthony Hopkins. He also spoke about his new play The Happiest Man on Earth which is having its world premiere at BSC.

Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the failure of the Amrerican Dream. A top-notch production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play runs through June 11 at South Florida's Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach. .

Whenever it's on the menu I generally order osso bucco. I have enjoyed it from Palm Beach to Bologna. Even made it from time to time at home. The version at Frankie's in Lenox was among the best ever

The new Flying Dutchman at the Metropolitan Opera transports.  Grounded shortly after its debut as the pandemic erupted in March of 2020, the cast has changed. Like many of the Met's new productions, singing is excellent across the board and gives great pleasure.

In recent months, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics has been deemed by journalists and other critics as demonic forces that will endanger the future of humanity.

Jack Torrance, an unstable recovering alcoholic and unsuccessful writer, hires on as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies during its off-season. He hopes that the seclusion will not only give him undistracted time for writing but also allow him to rebuild his relationships with his wife, Wendy, and son, Danny. What the parents don’t realize is that Danny possesses “the shining,” which is the psychic ability of clairvoyance. This attribute will allow the boy to see the hotel’s sordid past and set the stage for the horrors to come.

This summer, the Harvard Art Museums present over 100 years of dazzling and imaginative artistry through the medium of watercolor. American Watercolors, 1880–1990: Into the Light showcases more than 100 watercolors by over 50 well-known and historically underrepresented artists selected from the museums’ deep and diverse holdings—a rare opportunity because of the light-sensitive nature of these works.

Master of Puppets suffers from problems that afflict many new works. It doesn’t know what it wants to be or what it wants to say.  Is it a comedy? Satire? A thriller? It tries to be all of these, which results in uneven shifts in tone.

Gallery NAGA’s 46th season concludes with an exhibition by two mid-career painters working in exuberant colors and venturesome compositions. Rick Fox: From Feral Footing and Masako Kamiya: Kaleidoscope are both on exhibition from June 9 through July 14. 

"Soul Doctor," a film about the unlikely relationship between an Orthodox rabbi and a musical/Civil Rights icon, will be shown at movie theaters nationwide on Tuesday, June 13. Nina Simone introduced Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach to Soul and Gospel music, which influenced the kind of Jewish music that he composed. Taping of the film took place in Israel five years after the original Broadway production of Soul Doctor opened in New York in 2008.

Alfred Uhry’s musical Parade, co-conceived by Hal Prince with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, is now playing to sell-out crowds and rave reviews, and back on Broadway after 25 years (for a limited run through Sunday, August 6) at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in New York City.

About 200 hardy souls braved a damp and chilly Sunday at Shakespere & Company in support of a fundraising event for Berkshire Immigrant Center. In every sense it was a wicked cool event.