The playwright’s contribution to the Joan of Arc literature is that her mother, Isabelle Arc, becomes the voice and the central character. Thus, while Joan’s actions are of historic significance and drive the narrative, Isabelle dominates the stage time. The play centers on family relationships, especially between mother and daughter.

What makes many of Churchill’s works distinctive and what helps in understanding them is her frequent non-traditional approaches to time representation and to casting.

Even if you say bah humbug to holiday shows you might want to check out this one on Broadway.

The premise of Groundhog Day is that Pittsburgh TV meteorologist Phil Connors is assigned to cover the annual event against his wishes.

Particularly during holiday season, we as social beings, crave the company of friends and familty. Between now and New Year there are many gatherings. It is a time of celebration and excess. This season of ritual tends to play out or wind down into winter hibertaion. My neighbor and friend the North Adams monk, Michael McGrath, discusses the alternative approach of embracing solitude.

What makes Newsies really jump is the dancing with the accompanying choruses like “Carrying the banner” about the independent but challenging life of selling papers on the streets, and “Seize the day” about striking to get their due.

On Site Opera revived what one hopes will become an annual production of Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. In choosing settings for familiar and unfamiliar operas, On Site adds an intriguing dimension to the form. With Amahl, the location in the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen returns the opera to its original meaning.

The Ryan Lee Gallery in New York City announces the passing of May Stevens. The artist was born in Quincy, Massachusetts and educated at Mass College of Art. Her work was shown and collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Entering the drill hall at the Armory, we are greeted first by sounds of birds flitting through the tall, pine trees in a forest stage left and right. Branches are laden with snow. The platform of a train station fills the front of the station. The scent of the plywood from which the big blocks of the moving stage are built, also wafts through the hall. The station master’s home is above the tracks. His wife often sits in the window, observing the action below. Express trains roar by, their lights glancing off the ceilings and the other block structures on a shiny floor, whose surface reflects. We are taken in.

Internationally acclaimed Director/Choreographer Matthew Bourne returned to Los Angeles on December 5th with a reinvigorated and a brilliantly reimagined production of his most celebrated work that originally burst onto London’s Saddler Well’s stage in 1995; taking the world of ballet by storm.

Can there be too much of a good thing? Barrington Stage Company is known for staging classical musicals. But now Ain't Misbehavin has been added to South Pacific. This seems more about the bottomline than balanced programming. The Assembled Parties by Richard Greenberg is the third high season production on the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage. Anna in the Tropics, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Nilo Cruz, will highlight the St. Germain Stage.

The Crypt Session as imagined and realized by Death of Classical point the way to music’s lifefulness going forward. New, young audiences wait for months to get a ticket to one of these events. Tickets sell out moments after events like this Salon Séance are announced. Andrew Ousley, whose creation Crypt Sessions and The Catacombs assures us that more events in new locations are coming. A cave is promised in the future.

I’m looking forward to seeing the next iteration of The Plot as Eno continues to develop and refine this work.

Lucas Hnath is a master storyteller, weaving threads from seemingly odd places into a seamless whole, which always intrigues. Playwrights Horizons has mounted his The Thin Place, in which shifting forms ask deep questions. Some suggested answers are novel.

Despite some elements that don’t hold as well as one would like, this play offers worthy ideas, and the production exceeds expectations.

Representative works from the Rubell Family collection are on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. This is the 10th anniversary presentation of 30 Americans which has travelled the country, but have been seen only once before in the eastern United States. The Barnes presentation is striking. The art even more so.

Leon Botstein, the polymath conductor, has taken on a delightful series, Sight & Sound, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With The Now Orchestra (TON) he offers a musical program which is related to a current exhibit at the Museum.

Clare Barron’s play is about a crew of 13-year-old girls (and a token boy) from Liverpool, Ohio, who are competing in regional dance contests that could culminate in a trip to YAY! Tampa Bay, Florida!!!! YAAAAAYYYY!

The documentary filmmaker, David Sutherland, describes his approach as making portraits. The issues derive from the persona of his subjects which range from farmers, to teenagers coming of age in Appalachia, a battered Native American mother, to the artists Jack Levine and Paul Camus. In the past 20 years he has created 21 hours of film for long form documentaries featured on Frontline for PBS. His three-part series “The Farmer’s Wife” was a PBS hit with 18 million viewers.

American Son is a gripping tragedy about race in America today. Chistopher Demos-Brown's piece is a multi-faceted play in which marital, paternal and racial conflicts collide. A quartet of actors present impressively natural performances. American Son runs through Jan. 26 in Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center.

Blood Moon is a chamber opera created with consummate sensitivity and skill by a team of artists, including the composer, a passionate appreciator of Noh theater, and the prize-winning playwright, Ellen McLaughlin. One of McLaughlin’s specialties is the adaptation of classic dramas for our time. The composer also likes to jump off from the past, and react to a work created many moons ago in the present now.

Danielle Birrittella, the co-creator of Magadalene, has a rich, inventive lyrical delivery of the poet Marie Howe's words. She dares to explore the divide between feminine and erotic in Magdalene, a work having its world premiere at HERE in New York.

Noura constitutes playwright Heather Raffo’s admirable contribution to the confrontation between assimilation and tradition faced by foreign born in American life. The title character and her husband immigrated to the U.S. eight years before the time of the play.

The Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF), the third-largest film festival in America, began in 1989 as the dream of then Hollywood celebrity turned politician and former Mayor Sonny Bono, who had a dream of making his city a focal point for the motion picture industry by launching an annual film festival.

This year another Dutch film is in the Oscar hunt. It is a powerful, psychological, provocative thriller called “Instinct”. It’s set in a prison where a newly arrived, experienced psychologist Nicoline, (rivetingly played by Carice van Houten) is assigned to the case file of serial sex offender Idris (a clever psychopath scarily portrayed by Marwan Kenzari).