Our coverage of Piccolo Spoleto in Charleston continues with Nunsense at Footlight Players. Saints preserve us.

Lauren Gunderson is widely renegaded as among the best and brightest of American playwrights. She can be thoughtful and provocative. With The Taming, however, which is being given an energetic and ambitious production, the comedy of brought down as too clever, thinky and talky for its own good. It was just too difficult to connect with and care for the unmanageable characters and their absurd situations.

The latter part of The Royale which played Broadway’s Lincoln Center Theater earlier this year, features one of the strongest, most powerful scenes of dramatic tension I’ve encountered in a theater in a long while

It's observed that great operas are often based on weak plays. Not so the new opera by Gerald Barry. While Barry cut about two-thirds of Oscar Wilde's perfect play, the spirit remains. The result is more like composers taking up Beaumarchais than Johm Luther Long..

Great Champagne and Great Cava are made in the same process. The only difference are the grapes and the lower Cava price points. Most wine critics agree that sparklers made with the methode champenoise style are the ultimate sparkling wines and have no rivals.

Currently Long Day's Journey Into Night, the masterpiece of Eugene O'Neill, is enjoying an all star Broadway revival. One of the last of his plays before a decade of illness he left instructions that it not be published until 25 years after his life. It was produced in Sweden within three years of his death. Based on the horrendous circumstances of his alcoholic, drug addicted family he hoped to avoid collateral damage to survivors. It begs the question of who owns the moral and legal rights when artists draw upon family and friends as material for their art.

Piccolo Spoleto Festival is officially the outreach arm of Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of Spoleto Festival USA, and thirty-eighth year of Piccolo Spoleto.

Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra where he will continue, assumes the role at the Met Opera in the 2020-21 season. He is a wonderful conductor of opera. What remains to be seen is Peter Gelb's role as "artistic director" of the opera company. Many first-rate conductors have not accepted the role because Gelb has insisted on control. The Board may not allow Gelb to continue to assert himself in artistic matters.

The annual New York Philharmonic concert at St. John the Divine in New York was started a quarter century ago just as Kurt Mazur took the helm of the orchestra. The conductor was honored today in a wonderful New Orleans Funeral March led down the long aisle of the Cathedral by Wynton Marsalis and also a performance of Brahms' Second Symphony led by Alan Gilbert.

Having returned to Annisquam where she grew up during summers Lindsay Ann Crouse is performing annually with Gloucester Stage. We saw her launch the season with a lively and hilarious production of Lettice ad Lovage. As kids my sister Pip was Lindsay's age and I was a bit older than her brother Timothy. On a rainy day we met in her vintage village home and discussed a remarkable life in theatre with numerous stage, TV and film credits including an Oscar nomination and an Emmy.

Boasting a rich ethnic mix on the Caribbean coast, Belize attracts visitors to sun and sea. Lamanai, a 26-mile scenic ride away on the New River, is an ancient city within a subtropical forest, where the Maya lived for over 3000 years.

Spinning is notable for its fine direction and acting. Dan Waller is one of those solid Chicago actors who plays many types of roles and makes each one his own. His portrayal of Conor is wrenching and passionate as he gradually learns so accept his responsibility for his actions.

Devinssi Vineyard in Priorat, Catalonia, Spain gives its customers a chance to adopt a grapevine. This adoption opens doors ot the winery and community in rural, Priorat, Spain (only two hours from Barcelona).

If the Haymarket story is unfamiliar, you can read about it before you see the play. The creators do a good job of telling a complex story, but everything will make more sense if you read before seeing this production.

The Flick by Annie Baker is being staged all over America. Given the scale of the movie theater with a theater the length of the individual productions varies greatly depending upon how long it takes for the trio of actors to sweep up all the popcorn between screenings. This is a review of a Miami production where it weighed in at about three hours.

Barrington Stage Company is launching its Pittsfield season with a commissioned musical Presto Change-O which is having its world premiere on the intimate St. Germain Stage. On many levels this perky production is zesty and magical and that's not just an illusion.

Music of all genres and spirits is overflowing the halls of David Geffen Hall and embracing the citizens of New York. Gustav Holst's The Planets brought amateur astronomers to Lincoln Center's Plaza for a viewing of Jupiter and its moons after we had heard the composer's interpretation. Wow!

The superb Jeremy Irons stars as the brilliant, eccentric, and passionate Cambridge University mathematics professor G. H. Hardy. When Hardy is confronted with the mathematics genius of a young twenty-five year- old completely self-educated Indian student from Madras, named S. Ramanujan (stoically and poignantly played by Dev Patel) Hardy’s faith and passion for his chosen profession is put the test.

For the best chowder in New England head for Gloucester. But steer clear of the downtown and harbor tourist traps. Don't even bother with Rockport. Seek out the fringe lunch places like Charley's and Causeway where the locals belly up. It will take a bit of poking around to find them but it's worth the effort.

James Levine is gloriously winding down his tenure as Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera. The man who brought us the full Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera may have aged, but he is blossoming still and the stage of Carnegie Hall is the perfect venue to display his monumental talents.

Can men and women find themselves and satisfaction at the same time? This question has been asked since the beginning to time. Theatre for a New Audience, in their remarkable home, the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, features John Douglas Thompson and Maggie Lacey in Ibsen's A Doll's House and Strindberg's The Father, running in repertory.

Founded as the seat of Spain's colonial government in a valley towered over by Volcan de Agua, Antigua is a treasure trove of art and architecture of Colonial Guatemala. Tikal and Yaxha are national parks within a vast tropical jungle with a reserve area of magnificent ruins of ancient cities that pay tribute to the accomplishments of the great Mayan civilization of Central America.

This is the fourth year the Hudson-Berkshire Wine & Food Festival dominates the scene for the Memorial Day weekend. Enjoy the sun and warmth in a local setting with NY and Massachusetts vineyards and distillers products.

Veteran actor Lindsay Ann Crouse left LA several years ago to relocate to Annisquam the summer home of her theatrical family. In a now annual production she has been offered great roles by the local Gloucester Stage now launching its 37th season. She is stunning in the meaty role of an eccentric docent of a seedy British mansion. While entertaining she doesn't stick to the script. The play was written as a vehicle for Dame Maggie Smith by Peter Shaffer who wrote Equus and Amadeus. This play, as you will learn, is the cat's meow.

Unlike in another Sondheim revue, “Side by Side by Sondheim,” has no narrator to link the songs. Rather, a dramatic framework exists in which two couples are attending a cocktail party at an upscale residence. This allows the characters to sing nearly 30 Sondheim songs outside the context for which he composed/or wrote the lyrics.