Welcome spring with a double header exhibition by Stephanie Boyd and Jane Hudson at Spring Street Market and Cafe in Williamstown. It will be on view from April 1 through June 17.

Friends have asked for reports about our Antarctic cruise. I have broken it into categories for picking and choosing. It was a 9-day journey on Atlas Ocean Voyages, a new luxury brand, on the World Navigator. We had previously decided to give the Antarctic a miss because of the potential misery of four days on the Drake Passage. Then we learned of "Fly the Drake" (i.e., launching the cruise from South Georgia Island rather than Argentina or Chile) and became interested.

In its essence, the opera is an intimate triangle of love, predation, betrayal, and murder. Yet the intimacy of “Tosca” plays against a grand canvas of three unrelated settings, which LVO executes deftly.

Long Beach Opera presented an intriguing new music and dance performance, The Horse. Created and performed by Chris Emile, Cody Perkins wrote the music and vocals are by Alexis Vaughn. When you arrive, you are impelled to look around Rancho Los Cerritos.  The area is wooded, a lone rabbit makes its way to a tree, looks around and across the road. It bounds off into the woods.

FreshGrass, MASS MoCA’s annual three-day festival of bluegrass and roots music, announces the initial 2023 lineup, featuring Dropkick Murphys Acoustic—playing songs from their two albums with the lyrics of Woody Guthrie - plus acoustic arrangements of all your DKM favorites—Lukas Nelson + POTR, Sierra Ferrell, Rhiannon Giddens...

WORKING celebrates the everyday laborers who create purpose in their lives by doing their life’s work. Ever wonder what your teacher is really thinking? Does your waiter really want you to, “enjoy your meal”? Witness these often unsung employees take center stage and tell their side of the story.

Lawrence Brownlee came to Carnegie Hall to present a program he has developed called Rising.  In the second part of his show, Jasmine Barnes, Branson Spencer, Damien Sneed, Shawn Okpebholo, and Joel Thompson, young up-and-coming composers, set poems to their music.  Carlos Simon offered vocalese

Send-ups can be tricky, since pastiche, and particularly farce, can wear thin. But “Ruthless! The Musical” pushes all the right buttons, offering a bright script and bouncy music with clever and provocative lyrics. Altarena Playhouse gives it a rousing rendition that is enjoyable from start to finish. The casting and acting are superb, and the creative elements sparkle.

The producers of Art Bath, who dance together at the Metropolitan Opera, are warm individuals who make inspired selections for programs that range from conventional songs accompanied by live, drawn art to wild Moroccan sintir music which inspires accompanying clapping and ululation in joy. 

The Boston Symphony Orchestra  announces that Elvis Costello and The Imposters with Charlie Sexton as special guest have joined the lineup for the Popular Artists Series at Tanglewood. This will be the 2003 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee’s first appearance at Tanglewood.  

Noche Flamenca creates a diverse theatrical body of performance through song, music, and dance that expresses a rigorous, spell-binding aesthetic in the form of flamenco; one that exceeds the highest artistic expectations.

The Clark Art Institute recently added three new paintings to its permanent collection, enhancing its holdings of works by women artists. The paintings, two by Marguerite Gérard and one by Evelyn De Morgan, are the first by either artist to enter the Clark’s collection.

Cicely Carew, Venetia Dale, and Yu-Wen Wu have been named the recipients of the 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition. Their exhibition at the ICA, on view August 24–January 2, will encompass a wide range of media—from sculpture and installation to time-based media and works on paper.

The flamboyant bon vivant Noël Coward excelled in many aspects of the performing arts, but he is best remembered today as a playwright who exposed the foibles of English society in several between-the-wars, comedy-of-manners plays.  The last of these was “Blithe Spirit.”  Many of us, having seen the movie and perhaps productions of the play as well, may wish to pass on seeing this war horse once again.  That would be a mistake.  City Lights has produced a sparkling rendition that hits the mark on every measure.

Composer Allen Shearer and librettist Claudia Stevens's “Prospero’s Island” borrows from the “The Tempest.” But they have moved it a significant measure from the source material. In addition to lyrics in modern American-English vernacular interspersed with poetic accents, a plot update and revision gives the material more contemporary relevance while altering the moral profile of the main character. The result is a riveting chronicle of moral corruption followed by a quest for redemption that is accompanied by equally compelling music, calling on diverse idioms. Although the narrative arc is clearly dramatic, the creators frequently punctuate the proceedings with humorous interludes.

Born to immigrant parents, Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi looks at a part of a global industry that has derived from the ubiquitous nature of English – teaching English to non-native speakers.  Calling upon her own heritage to generate a narrative, her incisive dramedy “English” won both the Lucille Lortel and Obie awards for best new play in 2022.

Richard Strauss preferred to spell the title of his most popular opera: Der Rosencavalier.  Although the opera began with conversations between librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Count Kessler, a diplomat, scholar and director of the Cranach-Presse in Weimar, the opera is very much Strauss’s.  Kessler promised Hofmannsthal that he could pay for his children’s education with the proceeds from productions.  That he did. 

In 1923 Edward Hopper spent his second summer in Gloucester. He met and later married the artist Josephine Nivison. That summer he painted several pictures and created a number of water colors. They worked side by side. A century later, on the occasion of Gloucester 400 Plus their work will be on view at the Cape Ann Museum.

The Huntington announces its complete lineup for the 23/24 season, featuring an eclectic mix of 7 highly acclaimed shows by a wide variety of diverse artists, the first full season completely programmed by new Huntington Artistic Director Loretta Greco. 

As part of a rolling world premiere, Refuge is running at Theatre Lab in Boca Raton, Fl. in an intense and believable production through April 23. The production features music, magical realism, and puppets. Refuge is about the migration crisis, but does not deal with politics. Rather, it is a piece brimming with humanity.

In their respective practices, Sue Williamson (b. 1941) and Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990) incorporate oral histories into films, photographs, installations, and textiles to consider how the stories our elders tell us shape family narratives and personal identities. Implicitly and explicitly addressing legacies of racial violence and social injustice, their work offers a cross-generational dialogue on history, memory, and the power of self-narration.

Bill and Nancy have been married for 50 years, and on the surface, they have been happy, or at least content.  But when they dispassionately announce their decision to divorce to their visiting adult sons, Brian and Ben, the boys are flabbergasted.  As expected, they have questions like “What happened?” but worse, they have answers, like “We can fix this,” as if the breakup could be within their control.  And when they finally realize that it could actually happen, it’s “Why couldn’t you get divorced when we finished school, like normal people?”

Endgame livestreamed from the Irish Rep. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame enjoyed a must-see run at the Irish Repertory Theatre.  Starring Bill Irwin, the clown and Beckett aficionado, as Clov and John Douglas Thompson as Hamm, here uncharacteristically for Thompson, the “insider.”  He is bound to a wheelchair, blind and dependent on painkillers, yet the clear force of the moment. Clov lurches around him

Barrington Stage Company (BSC) announces that Broadway’s master songman, Mandy Patinkin, accompanied by Adam Ben-David on piano, will bring his newest theatre concert Mandy Patinkin in Concert: BEING ALIVE, to the Boyd-Quinson Stage for one night only on Tuesday, June 27.

In the heart of Cape Ann, with its boulders and cellar holes, Dogtown Common stokes the cauldron of witchcraft and early New England mythology. Dogtown Common by Percy MacKaye, adapted and directed by Peter Littlefield will be performed at the Windhover Center for the Performing Arts, Rockport, Ma.