Tony Award-winning Broadway actor Jefferson Mays plays more than 50 characters in an online streaming version of A Christmas Carol. This production is a filmed version of Geffen Playhouse's 2018 production. Streaming continues thru early January.

Virtual theater has come in many forms during the last eight pandemic months. Our most recent theater review was actor/clown Bill Irwin’s new version of his bravura performance of On Beckett adapted for livestreaming by Irish Repertory Theatre. In this article, we look at how virtual theater is faring in Chicago and beyond.

For the first time in its 44-year history, American Conservatory Theater’s holiday tradition, A Christmas Carol, comes to life as a radio play.

Faced with a spike in new cases of the coronavirus Mayor Marty Walsh has taken action to flatten the curve. Starting tomorrow categories of businesses and cultural institutions will be closed for the next three weeks. Even with vaccines it is too early to say if there will be business as usual for the arts this summer in the Berkshires.

Brandeis University has named Gannit Ankori as the Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator of the Rose Art Museum, effective January 1, 2021. Ankori, a professor of art history and theory in the departments of Fine Arts and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, has been serving as interim director at the Rose since July 2020.

Seasons Greetings and an appeal from Hancock Shaker Village.

The late Kahlil Gibran created a sculpture for a mini-park in his South End neighborhood. It has been decorated for the holidays with a festive, bright red bow and flowers.

Holiday greetings from Allyn Burrows the artistic director of Shakespeare & Company. With hope for a New Year and a lively summer season.

David Bowie's Lazarus. As luck will have it, the London Production, filmed in 2017, is available for streaming from January 8 - January 10.

Home alone for the holidays. Decorating and cooking for two.

Socially-distanced, mask-clad audience members are taking in 'Seven Deadly Sins,' a production of short plays in Miami Beach. Miami New Drama is staging 'Seven Deadly Sins' live and in person, with COVID safety protocols. 'Seven Deadly Sins' runs through Jan. 17 on Miami Beach's Lincoln Road, an outdoor shopping and dining promenade.

Recently I had a chance to revisit the most spectacular theater experience I’ve ever had. It took place on a weekend in February 2007. Over the course of two days, I experienced all nine hours of The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard’s trilogy on 19th century Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries.

Writing to his 'possums" New York critic Fast Eddy was gobsmacked by the PBS documentary of author Louisa May Alcott. "This beautifully acted documentary (Elizabeth Marvel Plays The Mature Louisa) brings back Louisa, her times, her family and her good friends - both gods in my pantheon -  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)."

Moliere in the Park, with their streaming team Andy Carluccio and Liminal Entertainment Technologies, LLC are presenting Christina Anderson’s pen/man/ship free through January 4th.  It is a powerful play set on a boat passage that reverses the more familiar journey of black Africans.

Change is going to come some day soon.

Thinking Cap Theatre in Southeast Florida is launching a virtual series in which participants will read plays and then discuss them with artists. The first installment, "Race on the American Stage" kicks off this month. Pulitzer Prize-winning Fairview and the multi Tony-nominated Slave Play are among the featured works.

During the Covid pandemic artists continue to work. Exhibitions, however, have been cancelled. To meet a need Michael McGrath an entrepreneur and designer has created Blue Heron Gallery Online. The Berkshire based site will offer online exhibitions as well as options for a range of services from PDF and print catalogues to promotional and marketing strategies. Visitors to the exhibition have easy access to make "go to cart" purchases. The gallery will launch with an exhibition by Galen Cheney from January 13 through February 12.

Undaunted by the constraints of COVID, the Prototype Festival launched its 7th annual event on January 8th. Modulation opened the week of new, streaming works. While the trailer and prologue look like the Hollywood Hills striped with waving geological lines, the three florescent doorways invite entrance to an interior. The inventive work, made up of 13 parts, is divided into three acts, Isolation, Fear and Identity.

Network for New Music gives us a delightful composer portrait of Pulitzer-prize winner Richard Wernick, a native Bostonian. He has studied at Tanglewood, and with Leonard Bernstein. Can you imagine a "Sunken Synagogue" replacing the Ys' cathedral of Debussy?

Sandy Katz, a theatre critic and travel writer from Charleston, Carolina, busted out with charisma and personality. Dubbed “Traveling Sandy” her bags were always packed for any destination.

Wide Slumber is a taped work presented at the Prototype Festival.  It premiered in Reykjavik in 2014.  Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurdsson adapted a much lauded poem by Canadian a. rawlings. In evocative, erotic and riotous words. rawlings shows us the night zone between sleep and dreams.  Shakespeare dwelt there often – to sleep perchance to dream.  Wide Slumber is a large work.

Make Do is not what many artists are doing in the time of Covid. In the process of coping, they have extended boundaries, created new forms, and looked particularly to visual distribution channels  to show their new work. Chriselle Tidrick is a formidable aerial dancer who has also appeared on stilts at the Metropolitan Opera. Here is the dancer herself on how she came to create "The Limits of Escape."

Theatre Lab, Florida Atlantic University's professional resident theater company, will offer its new play festival online this year. Miami’s Juggerknot Theatre Company and the international-based PopUP Theatrics offer the chance to travel the world from the comfort of your home. "Travel" to places such as Lagos, Mumbai, Portland-Oregon, Beirut, Los Angeles, and Mexico City.

Though not a play about COVID19, it is a true story of a pandemic expert. An interactive deep dive into the profundities of scientific exploration and the harrowing realities of facing your own mortality, The Catastrophist by Lauren Gunderson is a world premiere theatrical experience built of and for this moment in time. 

Boston Lyric Opera has boldly re-adapted Poe’s famous gothic horror story “The Fall of the House of Usher” with music of Philip Glass. It streams on operabox.tv for seven days starting on January 29/