With a 150 year old recipe, the Alberti family tradition of distilling Strega is in full gear in 2016. Over 70 herbs and spices are used to make this digestive beverage.

The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival (TWP Fest) announces that the multi-award-winning actor Brian Dennehy, recognized for his interpretation of many of Eugene O’Neill’s complex characters, will be the guest of honor at their annual dinner. The gala is to support this fall’s 11th festival, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams: Beyond Success with performances from theaters around the world throughout the charming seaside town from Sept 22 – 25, 2016. The Gala will take place on June 4.

If Eugene O’Neill is the master of dysfunctional family plays, then Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the masterpiece of the genre. Recognized as one of the greatest plays of the 20th century, the play won the Tony for best play and the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1957. Currently it is being produced by Court Theatre in Chicago through April 10.

Lexington is in the heart of the Bluegrass Region , the second largest city in Kentucky and Horse Capital of the World. It is famous for horses, bourbon, tobacco and Southern Hospitality. The Bluegrass region is renowned as the world’s largest equine “nursery”. Hundreds of horse farms surround Lexington , giving this modern city a park-like setting.

The American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA) announces that Jonathan Norton has won its 2016 M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award for an emerging playwright. The award will be presented at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville on April 9.

We began our visit to Hampton, Virginia with a tour of the Hampton History Museum. This museum recounts the history of America’s oldest, continuous English-speaking settlement from its inhabitance by Kecoughtan Indians to its role as original home of NASA and the U.S. space program.

Writers Theatre opened its spectacular new theater in Glencoe this week with an appropriately spectacular production of a play by Tom Stoppard one of today’s greatest playwrights, smartly directed by Michael Halberstam. It was almost a four-star evening.

April is National Poetry Month. Berkshire Fine Arts, LLC announces the publication of two books Shards of a Life and Total Gonzo Poems by Berkshire poet and arts critic Charles Giuliano. In July, 1970 he coined the word gonzo while telling an outrageous story. He was the first to publish gonzo in a rock review that summer for the former daily Boston Herald Traveler. With these two books and a third nearing completion Giuliano has morphed gonzo journalism into a vibrant, hip, compelling form of cutting edge poetry.

This is the third year of one of the best wine and food festivals on the Northeast. Over 700 wines will be poured, educational seminars will take place and chefs will entertain the audience. All at Mohonk Mountain House.

Based on the Goethe novel, which set off a plague of copy-cat suicides in 18th century Europe, the late Romantic opera is arguably Massenet's masterpiece - at least it still speaks to us today. Lyrical throughout, it becomes intensely dramatic in Act III and IV. The BLO cast was not ideal, but they did the best they could and had many affecting moments.

Did you know that 40% of all Italian trains pass through Campania? It is the hub for overseas business, thanks to two ports, a large manufacturing community, numerous pasta factories and water buffalo mozzarella farms.

The combination of Michelle Williams (Una) and Jeff Daniels (Ray) should have been Broadway gold. When the curtain went down at the Belasco Theatre my companion’s comment was “well there was a whole lot of garbage on the stage.” Indeed the entire play takes place in a lunchroom strewn with leftover food wrappers and empty paper cups. For a play about the damaging relationship between a 40+ man and the woman he had sex with when she was a girl of 14, there were no surprises and little character development. The play was a disappointment given such a potentially explosive topic and talented cast.

Writer/Lyricist Bill Russell has brought us some of the best of on and off Broadway – yet many do not recognize his name. Creator of the moving and critically acclaimed Side Show, Russell recently staged a benefit performance of Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens (for Broadway Cares Equity Fights AIDS) at the Birdland Jazz Club in NYC which was spectacular. 2016 will be a big year for Russell, with world premieres and revivals of three of his shows (Side Show, Pageant, and premieres of both Brave New World and Unexpected Joy) in London and across the U.S. from Cape Cod to the Carolina's and the Black Hills of South Dakota!

Country music icon Dolly Parton makes her Tanglewood debut with a season-opening performance Friday, June 17, at 7 p.m. in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, joining the Tanglewood 2016 Popular Artist line-up. Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops Swing Orchestra will also perform in the Shed on Saturday, September 3, at 8 p.m.

“Disney’s The Little Mermaid” is one of the most ambitious productions Theatre 29 has tackled. And they have succeeded admirably. The California production continues through April 9.

“Endangered Species” written and directed by Tony Padilla stars Bonnie Gilgallon as Tina, a suburban Chicago housewife married to David a successful businessman played by Alan Berry. The couple married over twenty years are in New York on a holiday where they plan to relax and recharge their romantic batteries.

In “Sex with Strangers, the plot revolves around Olivia (Rebecca Pidgeon), an intelligent, mid-career, one-book novelist who is having second thoughts about her ability is a writer, and Ethan (Stephen Louis Grush), a wildly successful, young, hyper-energetic stud/blogger with an ego to match, who meet in a mutual friend’s borrowed cabin on a snowy winter night in Michigan.

Tom Gore, from Sonoma, California, learned about farming from his father. He took farming seriously, planted grapes and has become an authority on grape maturation.

In the 1970s, co-founder of Caymus Vineyards, Charles Wagner, Sr., would mix white wines at the dinner table to create a blend that would pair with food. He used this concept to create Conundrum, a wine that was always different. I plan to serve it for the nine guests at our Easter dinner.

The Metropolitan Opera’s performance of Madama Butterfly is a timeless classic with the ultimate tragic heroine. When coupled with dramatic direction by Anthony Minghella (Oscar winner for The English Patient) and modern, other worldly staging as this production is, the audience is spellbound for the full three + hours and more than a few could not hold back tears at the heart-wrenching end.

Lucy Prebble selects topics of heightened interest and then makes of them marvelous plays. Enron on the collapse of a fake US energy company is now followed by an exploration of drug trials and what they tell us about human beings.

An exhibition by Susan Schwalb features abstract, linear compositions of mixed metalpoint on colored surfaces, many of which investigate absence or the void as a constructive element The exhibition at Garvey/ Simon Gallery in New York will run from April 28 – June 4, 2016

Blood Wedding was part of Federico Garcia Lorca’s plan for a “trilogy of the Spanish earth”—unfinished when he was killed in 1936. Most critics include Yerma and The House of Bernada Alba in the “rural trilogy” but Lorca did not include the latter. The decision to set this production in the more-realistic Depression-era U.S. diminishes the mythic nature of Lorca’s story.

Paul Appleby has rocketed to the top of the music world. This modest, charming man has a voice for the ages and communicates in many languages with an easy skill. At Zankel Hall in New York he sang about the infinite varieties of love as expressed by Schumann, Wolf, Berlioz and Villa Lobos. Matthew Aucoin's Merrill Songs were premiered. This irresistible master tenor speaks to the heart.

Dak’Art 2016 is inspired by the theme “The City in the Blue (La Cité dans le jour bleu)” and will be curated by Simon Njami who was also named as the fair’s new artistic director. As inspiration from the theme, Njami selected the extract of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s poem: “Your voice cries out for the Republic - let us raise up that city in a blue daylight: Of equality for brotherly peoples. So we sing in our hearts. “We are here, Guélowar!”