Karen Hartman’s work launches VOLT at 59E59 Theaters, an unprecedented festival of three simultaneous off-Broadway premieres by a single author. Denver Theater Center presented the world premiere musical Rattlesnake Kate, book by Hartman with a score by Neyla Pekarek earlier this year.

More than a year after co-producing a filmed production of "The Belle of Amherst," Palm Beach Dramaworks in South Florida presents the show live. The Belle of Amherst is a one-performer show about the life of Emily Dickinson. Dickinson, a world-famous poetess, lived from 1830-1886 in Amherst, Mass.

As the lights go up, standing in front of the stage door of Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre, we find ourselves in the midst of an intense and rapid rat-a-tat-tat- conversation between Judy, a rather plain-looking, dressed down Judy (Sas Goldberg) and the obviously gay (he makes no bones about it), Jeff (Max Jenkins), two theater loving actors, and longtime best friends since college.

Heading into Memorial Day weekend after our smashing opening of Mae West’s 1927 banned-from-Broadway The Drag, the tickets are selling quickly, and the raves are pouring in…

Six Boston-based artists in Above Us Only Sky speak about the infinite and euphoria in dark times. Romantic hopeful dream-like paintings elevate while embracing the light and lightness via stellar cascades; avian night-flight and starlike bouquets; a luminous energy field; the legacy of passion; meditation and a flow state; community and seeking new worlds.

On a line-by-line basis, the text of “Hat Matter:…” is dramatic and compelling.  Audiences will find much to cheer and reflect upon.  Some tracts may seem stream of consciousness and disjointed, but overall, the language is colorful and riveting, and the thoughts are profound. “

Jane Anderson’s “The Quality of Life” depicts this schism within a family, and it feels even more pertinent today than at its premiere in 2007.  How “today” are family rifts resulting from moral/religious differences as well as the loss of virtually all material possessions due to a California home being consumed by wildfire?

MASS MoCA is inviting concepts for the old Sprague Electric Company guardhouse at the main entrance of the MASS MoCA campus located on Marshall Street in North Adams, MA.  

Paradise Square directed by Moises Kaufman with choreography by Bill T. Jones, is an exuberant, refreshing and intelligent presentation of a significant moment in our history.  It has been nominated for ten Tony awards, among them best musical, best choreography by Bill T. Jones and best actress in a musical,  Joaqulna Kalukango.

In an implicit nod to the growing marijuana and hallucinogenic drug culture of the decade, David Crosby famously said that if you can remember the ‘60s, you weren’t there.  Fortunately, for most of us who lived through it, that is a canard. 

Following an all too familiar trend the playwrights, Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, have rewritten the iconic epic poem The Iliad, to the here and now. In the one act play McConnia Chesser compresses a ten year war into 110 minutes. It's a daunting task that exhausts the performer and her audience.

Although “The Pajama Game” may not come across as an expressly political play, it was written when over 300 entertainers were still blacklisted as a result of House Un-American Activities Committee investigations.  The central clash is certainly a classic between capital and labor.  “Old Man” Hasler, the factory head, is played unsympathetically for his dishonesty and for his rigid rejection of a workers’ raise when the factory is doing extremely well.

The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA)  presents Frantz Zéphirin: Selected Works, an exhibition of ten paintings by the renowned Haitian artist, whose work is also featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale. Tomm El-Saieh, a Haitian-born artist and curator who lives and works in Miami, organized the display for WCMA. El-Saieh’s work is the subject of Tomm El-Saieh: Imaginary City, a year-long solo exhibition at the Clark Art Institute.

Overall we loved this new play. The actors were compelling in their roles and the direction of Skip Greer navigated them nicely. There were twists and turns that kept us engaged.Henry Stram was a very good if not great Warhol. He was actually too pretty with none of Andy’s awkward enigma. This was a play after all and not a documentary. To portray an authentic Andy would have added another half hour at least. This production kept it tight and sweet.

American Symphony Orchestra  hosted American Masters, a symphonic concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center featuring the world premiere of Roberto Sierra’s newly commissioned Concerto for Electric Violin, performed by acclaimed electric violinist Tracy Silverman. The program also offered works by three Pulitzer Prize-winning composers: Melinda Wagner, Richard Wernick, and Shulamit Ran. Tickets were free, a gift to New York music lovers,

Thinking Cap Theatre, based in South Florida, has mounted a strong production of the classic play, Fefu & Her Friends by Maria Irene Fornes. The mostly plotless play is an absurdist piece featuring eight female characters. Fefu & Her Friends touches on themes such as female relationships, insanity, and gender roles.

The Ringo Starr All Stars were cancelled from Tanglewood's Popular Artists last season. It was rescheduled for this coming week, Friday, June 17. The BSO announces that it yet again will be rescheduled.

Harvey Milk, the re-tooled opera, premieres at Opera Theatre of St. Lotus.  It is a smashing hit. Composer Stewart Wallace talks about again looking at the work, first draft  created in 1994-5. He now lives in Rome and is in St. Louis for event. He presents the title character and his friends as human. Michael Korie is librettist and contributes a journalist's eye for detail in moving scenes.

Ira Levin (author of novels Rosemary’s Baby and A Kiss Before Dying) wrote this play that he billed as a comedy/thriller in 1978. It had a long Broadway run and was made into the 1982 film starring Michael Caine, Christopher Reeves and Dyan Cannon.

The Peabody Essex Museum has long collected Native American material and is now doing so intensively. In that regard it is an outlier. Contemporary Native American artists have been egregiously neglected by the mainstream American art world — we lag far behind Canada. The PEM has just reinstalled its American collection, which runs from the Colonial era to the present, and it is an ambitious, intriguing, but problematic exhibition.

Attending a performance in the Ted Shawn Theatre, a renovated barn, at renowned Jacob's Pillow could be a sweltering experience. Having been closed in 2019 it reopens for the 90th season of 2022 with a $9 million upgrade. That features a new cooling and air ventilation system, orchestra pit, expanded accessibility for artists and audience members, an increased stage depth by 10 feet and enhanced technology.  

Artistic director, Julianne Boyd, in her storied career will be remembered for her many stunning musicals. That run ends this season with a revival of the 1978, Tony winner, Ain’t Misbehavin: The Fats Waller Musical Show. The jukebox musical runs some two hours with an intermission.

A Musical Offering is Bach’s final work.  After his visit to Potsdam during which King Frederick offered him a phrase to elaborate on, he returned home where he died three years later,  The work’s complexity is often noted.  Running many musical lines simultaneously in canons and fugues yields rich linear results. Bach undoubtedly heard the vertical harmonies which the canonical runs create. They are as radical as any composer’s who followed him: dissonance, chromaticism, even odd and undefinable sounds abound.  The performance makes the case for Bach, known as the pinnacle of baroque music, as the founder of all music that followed.  

A Strange Loop, the musical, is an exuberant yet sad story about a young, queer Black man who is struggling to write a musical.  In fact, Michael R. Jackson, winner of Tonys for Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical, spent twenty years putting this show together.

Jonathan Berry (no relation) directs this script, the midwest premiere of a debut work by playwright/actor Eboni Booth, a Vermont native. It’s the first production in Steep Theatre’s new home, a short walk from its earlier home on Berwyn Avenue. She was one of 10 playwrights awarded a 2021 Steinberg Playwright Award, given annually to up-and-coming American playwrights.