Since its founding in 1981, the Boston Early Music Festival has become one of the leading cultural organizations in Boston, a city not lacking in them. Its biennial festival draws performing groups and audiences from all over the globe. Its focus is on a historically informed Baroque opera - this year it is doing three! All three of Monteverdi's surviving operas in one week. What bliss.

Warhol by the Book at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is on view through August 16, 2015. Creating books was a vital part of Warhol's career’s. It is the first in depth presentation of a relatively unexplored aspect of his work. Taking over the top level galleries of the museum there are 500 works on view featuring some 300 from the Williams collection and many works from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. We spoke about the project with MCMA director, Tina Olsen.

Throughout the five boroughs of New York, Carnegie Hall has presented live music to audiences of every age nd every hue. Community colleges, town halls, libraries and churches have opened their doors to music makers. Catching up at the seaason's end we heard Julia Bullock and Renate Rohling at St. Michael's Church in Manhattan and the Whistling Wolvves in the extraorinarily inviting Weill Music Room in Carnegie's new wing.

Enigmatically, sculptor Patrick Dougherty bends, weaves and flexes saplings into architectural sculptures that dynamically relate to the landscape and built environment. Over the last 30 years, he has created more than 250 works throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. Constructed from saplings collected by area volunteers, "What the Birds Know" provides a wonderful and viscerally accessible counterpoint to the highly finished wood-frame early 18th Century Crowninshield-Bentley House. This is the first time PEM has commissioned an outdoor sculptural installation. And the bar has been set very high.

After a brutal winter on ever level Shakespeare & Company has launched the season with an intense and absorbing two hander The How and the Way by dramatist Sarah Treem. It stages a tense meeting between two brilliant women and scientists. A seething graduate student Rachel (Bridget Sacarino) has just learned the identify of her birth mother Zelda (Rod Randolph) a renowned scholar. By coincidence and one of many impossibilities the women are remarkably alike and even share the same field of evolutionary biology. If you can get beyond that unlikely twist of fate and other absurd literary devices this is an absorbing evening of tense and spellbinding theatre with superb performances by two fine actresses.

Two Natures Talking: Poetry and Visual Arts at Gallery 51 of MCLA in North Adams brings together the paintings of Wilma Rifkin with the poems they inspire by her husband Stephen. The exhibition which has been curated by Julia Morgan-Leamon also pairs the visuals of Ellen Joffe-Halpern and poems by Annie Raskin.

What I Did Last Summer is A.R. Gurney's latest play and a delight. How could it be a dream summer at the beach when Dad is off fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, Mom is lonely, Elsie is trying to lose weight and Charlie is trying to become a man without a model around? Yet it is as directe by Jim Simpson

“Arms and the Man”, crisply directed by Jessica Stone is blessed with cast of talented and seasoned performers who when they find themselves on a stage in a sharply and insightfully written farce/satire, know exactly how to handle their characters and the situations.

The script and production are the same as earlier versions in most every way, with the addition of a few Russian place names and two characters with Russian accents. The playbill doesn't mention the era and geographic setting (or any of the scene locations) that AstonRep has chosen.

Lauren Olitski is known for the vibrant and exciting surfaces and bold colors of her abstract acrylic paintings. In this body of work, her masterful infusion of organic elements (garnet, pumice, and molding paste) into the plastic, inorganic acrylic gels and paints gives her work a rare visceral authenticity.

Making digital art even more accessible, Boston Cyberarts is fostering major public art installations. This is art with virtually no boundaries. Founder George Fifield is the "godfather" of new art forms being computer-generated. Cyberarts is a 21st Century entity bringing new mediums to the masses.

Because of the activity of the 19th century collector William Sturgis Bigelow the Museum of Fine Arts has some 30,000 Japanese prints. He donated 80% of these treasures. Through August 8 the MFA is showing 230 works by the Japanese master Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). The centerpiece is his iconic color woodblock print “Under the Wave off Kanagawa,” “a.k.a. “The Great Wave.” It is from "Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji" which the artist produced while in his 70s. He later added ten more because of the success of the series.

Martin Mugar coined the term Zombie Formalism. That bounder, Walter Robinson, a known grifter and blowhard has claimed it as his own. Here our man Mugar bares his soul and makes a case. This is more heavy lifting in the realm of art criticism. Like how about that lead with Heidegger. Not exactly bedtime reading for most of us.

As blues giant Bessie Smith in HBO's "Bessie" Queen Latifah gives the finest performance of her career. The drama is based on a 1972 book by Chris Albertson. During the 1920s she was the Empress of the Blues but during the great depression which followed in the 1930s, as she compellingly sang, "Nobody knows you when you're down and out."

Last week I saw two masterpieces of 20th century theater by Lillian Hellman, the great playwright and left wing political activist. (I‘m a fan on both counts.) The two shows were extremely different in production values but demonstrated the power of performance.

The book of poetry Shards of a Life by Charles Giuliano will be launched with a reading and book signing at Edith Wharton's The Mount. The free reception will will occur on Friday, June 5 from 5:30 to 7:30. The critical essay "Beyond Gonzo" was written as the introduction for the book by J.M. Robert Henriquez

Robert Askins' play started at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and has not stopped since. It arrived on Broadway in time to receive five Tony nominations this year: three for actors, one for the play and the other for direction. Shows you what aa hand to God can do.

With a striking resemblance to the Civil War General Benjamin Butler the hilarious performance by David Schramm in "Butler" launches the Berkshire season at Barrington Stage Company. Based on actual characters and events the playwright, Richard Strand, stretches the facts to create an evening of outrageous comedy.

Literally Apocalypse Wow, it’s the end of the world as we know it. A flood of biblical proportions leaves the earth with only two people. An always happy one and a mostly despairing one discover their common language is song and dance. Together they chronicle the rise and fall and hopeful rise again of humankind through music. Song and dance run the gamut from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim, and R.E.M. to Queen.

Playwright Michele Lowe started out as a journalist with a degree from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. Her plays have been produced around the U.S. and in other countries. Both Inana and Victoria Musica were finalists for the American Theatre Critics Association/Steinberg New Play Award in 2010, the first time that a playwright was nominated for two plays in one season.

The Taubman Museum of Art occupies a dramatic, 81,000-square-foot geometrically oblique building just across from Roanoke, Virginia’s historic Marketplace Square. Designed by Los Angeles architect Randall Stout and completed in 2008, the museum, with its swooping and soaring metal roof, is a dramatic architectural presence that has established itself as a major force in the life of Roanoke’s thriving arts community.

After less than a decade the land locked ICA on the waterfront has run out of space. There is a desperate plan to expand into two floors of a 17 floor adjacent building which is under construction. It has become ever more obvious that the award winning design by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. is proving to be an utter dysfunctional disaster.

Set in the Ritz-Carlton Boston in the late 1940s, Light Up the Sky is a backstage comedy about the eccentric, colorful artists and producers involved in breathing life into a Broadway-bound play. Here we witness that frightening moment of anticipation and terror just before an audience sees the opening performance. We view the grand, charismatic leading lady, the hopeful young playwright, the high-strung director, the boorish producer and his comical wife along with a monster mother in this affectionate, hilarious and even a bit corny look at what used to be referred to as the "legitimate" theatre. With a wonderful cast, it is an entertaining way to spend some time smiling in the dark.

Meeting for Happy Hour we discussed the strong, star studded first season for Mandy Greenfield the artistic director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival. We explored an overview of the elements that must mesh under the pressure of a tight festival format to result in richly compelling theatre.

A major piece of public art was floated above the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Downtown Boston. The scale, complexity and the fact that it was even done at all makes a clear statement that Boston has joined the 21st Century. The artwork by artist Janet Echelman is a strong indication that the sky is now literally the limit.