It’s pure Judith Chapman totally immersed and completely in command within the skin, body movement, quirks, and tics of Tallulah Bankhead that reaches out and grabs the audience turning them into acolytes of an actor who knows how to take the stage and perform her special magic.

In 1955 with funding from select patrons The American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut was launched. It was the third major Shakespeare festival conflated with the name Stratford, the home of the Bard. Initially there was less competition in the region for its season of summer and student oriented productions. Relying on a few with deep pockets the company failed to seek a broad base of support for its 1600 seat venue and lavish productions. When founding donors died in the 1970s decline set in with the company ceasing operations in 1989. The property was abandoned and decrepit when recently it went up in smoke.

In 1970 I was hired to cover jazz and rock for the daily Boston Herald Traveler. To my dismay soon I was writing obituaries. It started with Al Wilson (July 4, 1943 – September 3, 1970) of the blues band Canned Heat. Then Jimi Hendrix (November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970). Not long after Janis Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970). That was the class of 1970 with an average age of 27-28. A year later we lost Jim Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971).

Renee Fleming has gone for the jugular in addressing the problem of song’s survival. How do singers communicate with an audience so people want to come and hear them? Her SongStudio took place in the Resnick Education Wing of Carnegie Hall.

In Jeffrey Lo’s new comic farce, Spending the End of the World on OK Cupid, a prophet of doom named Alfred Winters had accurately predicted “The Vanishing” in which half of humanity recently disappeared at once without a trace. Now Winters has assured those who have survived that the world will end at midnight on the day that the action of the play takes place.

Imagine Meeting You Here (Alister Spence Music, 2019) is the latest release by Alister Spence, a recognized leader in Australia’s new music directive and one of his country’s most original and distinctive jazz pianists and composers of orchestral pieces.

When it comes to culture, Berlin is always worth a trip. And a great trip it was, to experience the opening night of Barrie Kosky's interpretation of La Bohème, by Giacomo Puccini, on Sunday, January 27 at the Komische Oper (Comic Opera) in Berlin.

Red Rex, beautifully directed by Jonathan Berry, poses the contentious question of who gets to tell the story. It’s a play about a Chicago storefront theater staged by one of Chicago’s foremost storefront theaters in a space that used to be a grocery store.

In Jordan Tannahill’s Late Company, that time has passed. Debora and Michael’s teenage son, Joel, has committed suicide. Although the obvious path for the parents is to suffer in silence and live with the memory of the lost loved one, Debora is driven by a need to find closure. That target would be someone who can be implicated for the condition that she feels had caused Joel to take his own life.

With the iconic music of My Fair Lady deleted this stripped down production, with a multi-tasking cast, gets at the essence of Shaw's masterpiece. Directed by Eric Tucker of Bedlam it is on view at Cantral Square Theatre in Cambridge. Much is done by few.

Coyote StageWorks of Palm Springs delivers an early Valentine to fans and lovers of Country Music with a country-western comedy romp and hoot called “Honky Tonk Laundry”, written and directed by prolific playwright Roger Bean. It all comes out in the wash.

Opera Philadelphia has mounted a delightful production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The company reminds us, as it does so often, that opera can be highly entertaining and occasionally hilariously funny. Created by Robert Carsen thirty years ago in Aix-en-Provence, the stage is full of royal blues and lime forest greens until all is resolved in white. A new moon hangs in the sky.

Yet again Williamstown Theatre Festival mixes old and new for its 2019 season.

The Father by French playwright Florian Zeller is a play about aging and dementia. But it’s not your typical touching human story designed to gain your sympathy for a troubled person and family.

The 2019 program of Bwerkshire Theatre Group will occur at The Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield and on the Fitzpatrick Mainstage as well as Unicorn in Stockbridge. The season starts with previews of The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? by Edward Albee on May 24 in Stockbridge.

Buckle your seat belts; the plane is still on the tarmac and we the audience, seated in airplane style aisles, are already anticipating a turbulent trip. There are technical difficulties. Flight attendants are rushing up and down the aisles shutting the overhead compartments, allaying our fraying nerves with snacks.

The Recirquel Company Budapest is presenting Non Solus at the Howard Gilman Opera House at BAM. The front of the stage is swathed in a glimmering material that reflects like plastic and moves like silk. Behind the curtain, misty lights of yellow and white are haloed like a desert mirage. The translucent curtain billows and then collapses in waves of light and texture.

Abe Koogler’s play, Fulfillment Center, is the story of four working people (two of them educated ex-New Yorkers) trying to get by in a mid-size New Mexico city. Jess McLeod smoothly directs an excellent cast of four.

Coral Gables theater company presents robust production of play about a controversial 1920s Yiddish work. Indecent tracks the path of The God of Vengeance' success across Europe, until its shut down on Broadway. Music, dance and dialogue combine to celebrate Yiddish language and theater while exploring a dark period in theater history.

Brian Coleman has published several successful books on hip-hop. The latest of which is a picture book “Buy Me Boston: Local Ads and Flyers, 1960s – 1980s, Volume 1.” It is compiled from thousands of scans of pages of vintage publications.

Good Faith – Four Chats about Race and the New Haven Fire Department now having its world premiere at Yale Rep through Saturday, Feb. 23 fits into the category of documentary theater. It is also referred to as theater of witness or theater of fact. This form combines elements of documentary – reliance of interviews, documents and media reports of an event.

The program at Cutting Edge Concerts at Symphony Space opened with a delightful bird romp by Maria Newman. Hal Ott on the flute, Scott Hosfeld on viola and the composer on the violin created pictures of four different birds. Olivier Messiaen recorded birds in their native habitats, focusing on their identifying songs. Newman widens the frame to include pictures of the birds' movements and suggests purpose, like the melancholy watchfulness of a snowy owl and the ravenous detection of prey for the falcon.

On his highly acclaimed and awarded release, America’s National Park (2017, Cuneiform Records), Leo Smith won DownBeat Magazine’s Best Album of the Year, 2017. It also earned DB’s Annual Critics Poll in 2017 for best artist and trumpeter.

The play is Twilight Bowl by Rebecca Gilman, in a world premiere at Goodman Theatre, directed by Erica Weiss with an all-female cast and crew. Bowling is a backdrop throughout—the sport is a symbol of the working class life these young women dream of escaping or are complacent about.

If you have ever walked into an art gallery and wondered why, or what, or whether about any particular piece – or the venue as a whole, be prepared to laugh! Fitzgerald's rapid-fire dialog and a versatile and well-cast cast make this visit to the gallery worthwhile. Mark Marcante, Mathew Thomas Burda, David Jones, Lytza Colon Kanako Nagayama and Quinn Therrault have set the scene; the stage becomes a most credible Gallery Zuzu replete with works of art. Director, Tony White knows his subject well. His characters walk out of the art gallery scene like pieces in the exhibition