Cuckoo's Call, is an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Wayne Hopkins and Cathy Wysocki that reflects on the sea of humanity, ever restlessly heaving up and down. It opens at the Eclipse Mill Gallery in North Adams on August 3 and runs through September 3.

New Conversations (live music world premiere) choreography, Roland K. Brown with music by Arturo O’Farrill & Resist was developed during a residency of the Roland K. Brown/Evidence company at Jacob's Pillow. It was founded in 1985 and this was their first Pillow peformance in more than a decade.

The historic home of the Choate family, Naumkeag, located in the beautiful Berkshires of Massachusetts hosts their annual Garden Party, this Saturday. With beautiful grounds, a historic 34 room house and tours daily, this gem in Stockbridge is the place to be on July 28th.

Fleeing the Russian Revolution Tamara Lempicka (born Maria Gorska, 16 May 1898-18 March 1980) settled in Paris. Initially the couple with an infant girl survived selling the last of family jewlery. Her husband, Tadeusz Lempicki, a lawyer and aristocrat at first refused to get a job. She took up painting society portraits as a means of supporting their daughter. During the 1920s she was a leading exponent of the Art Deco style. It fell out of fashion during the depression and war years. Williamstown Theatre Festival has a world premiere musical about her life and career.

As magnificently performed by Kristin Wold, her Tesla, in Strindberg's Creditors is a strong, complex, progressive woman. For the first time Shakespeare & Company in Lenox is producing the modernist Swedish playwright. In his own words, however, he stated that "... a woman is a scaled down man, a form whose development was arrested between adolescence and full manhood. ...Woman is inferior to man.”

Lawrence Brownlee names his performance in July "Up Close and Personal". Brownlee is a singer who feels up close and personal on the stage of the great opera houses of the world, because his voice is warm and inviting. As we listen to a program which begins the iconic ‘single tear’ from L’Elisir d’Amour of Gaetano Donizetti, we too have "our hot pulses beating", like Adina, whose tear is addressed. Andrew Ousley of Unison again produces a gem.

The storyline of Pericles is the odyssey of the title character. It shares devices with other Shakespeare comedies, such as Twelfth Night’s shipwreck separation of characters then thought dead. But in the clever opening challenge, opera lovers will find what may have been the inspiration that ultimately led to Puccini’s Turandot.

Based on a real life incident, the informal push for diversity or inclusion in the arts motivates James Ijames’s (pronounced I’ms) complex, provocative, and entertaining play White.

Nicholas McGegan and his San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra performed Handel's Atalanta at Caramoor. The pastoral opera was written to commemorate the marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales and son of King George II to a German princess. This is Handel the craftsman at his best, with enchanting melodies, cascades of inventive orchestration and vocal fireworks.

Five Women Wearing the Same Dress speaks to today's male-dominated society, while also producing laughs.The Alan Ball comic drama runs through Aug. 12 at Miami Lakes' Main Street Players venue. Despite some flaws, the company turns in a solid production of a play that unites a group of women.

The Swedish realist/ naturalist playwright, August Strindberg (1849-1912) published Creditors in 1889. Some 129 years later it is the first play by the Swedish modernist to be produced by Shakespere & Company. Since it is a must see play of the Berkshire season you wonder what took them so long?

Ninagawa’s Macbeth packs a wallop at the Koch Theater. Presented as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival, Shakespeare in Japanese sits well in the highly dramatic Gabriel Fauré Requiem, and other music of the classical West.

A great day trip that enlightens and enriches the soul is as close as Berkshire county, home of Hancock Shaker Village. Spending a day learning about the Shakers, sharing dinner and thought with Peter Jennings son, Chris Jennings, and attending a concert with members of WILCO and transplanted local troubadour, Johnny Irion, can turn any day into sunshine.

American Players Theatre is nestled amid the beauty of southwest Wisconsin's countryside. The American Theatre Critics Association gathers in hills of rural Wisconsin for theatergoing and discussion. This year's APT line-up features strong acting, design work. American Players Theatre focuses on the classics.

The Damned by Ivo van Hove, based on the screenplay of Luchino Visconti, tears through the Park Avenue Armory. The stage is in four parts, if you don’t include a scene which goes out onto the Park Avenue where a shocked dog walker sees the mad Sophie von Essenbeck running wildly in search of her son.

For the past few years the annual appearance of Dorrance Dance has been a highlight of the Jacob’s Pillow season. This time the tap company featured an all star, world premiere of the playful All Good Things Come to an End . The second half of the program featured a recent piece Myelination (2017). It was yet again a glorious evening of tap dancing.

Valpolicella, a wine from the Verona area, in the Veneto appellation, exhibits summer drinking potential when chilled for twenty minutes. Like Peosecco and Rose wine, Valpolicella, a red wine, has a soft and fruity profile, one that loves the summer desire, as well as year round.

Performances of American Players Theatre (APT). More coverage of the ATCA conference in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

American Players Theatre (APT), a highly respected outdoor repertory company, hosted the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA) to several top-flight theatrical performances and well-organized extracurricular activities during ATCA’s annual conference at Spring Green, Wisconsin, in July, 2018.

On a Clear Day You Can See is running at the Irish Repertory Theater. Charlotte Moore adapts and directs this musical in an intimate production. The story has been pared down and shaped to display the lush score of Burton Lane. The cast has been reduced to 11 and the chamber orchestra four instrumentalists multi-tasking on cello, harp, flute, clarinet, alto saxophone, violin and viola. The result is delightful theater.

Spring Green is an arts center in nearby south central Wisconsin that’s easily accessible to Chicagoans interested in theater and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. In a long weekend, you can see classic theater at the American Players Theatre (APT) on a hilltop in Spring Green and tour Taliesin, the home, studio and school built, rebuilt and rebuilt again by Frank Lloyd Wright, his apprentices and family.

As in typical French farce fashion there are misunderstandings, sexual innuendo, doors which lead to near collisions and misidentifications. The play is set in the late 1800s during what is called “La Belle Epoque.” It involves upper middle class people; infidelity or the appearance of it plays a major role.

With the current production “Queens”, the La Jolla Playhouse mounts a powerful drama about the plight of both legal and illegal immigrants, and their desperate drive to remain in the United States, in order to make a better life for themselves and their separated families, some of whom remain back in the countries they fled.

In the beginning, Eureka Springs, Arkansas, was all about the healing waters. In 1880, the area’s numerous naturally flowing springs were credited with restoring the sight of a woman who had been blind for years.

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, the Alan Jay Lerner/Burton Lane musical, is getting a delightful production at the Irish Rep under the skilled hand of director (and adaptor) Charlotte Moore.