Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary Film at the 2021 Berkshire International Film Festival (BIFF) and the first feature-length film project in the Company’s 44-year history, Speak What We Feel follows hundreds of students from 10 high schools across Berkshire, Hampden, and Columbia counties as they prepare to stage a full production of a Shakespeare play under the guidance of Shakespeare & Company education artists.

Steve Nelson was the foremost producer/promoter of concerts by The Velvet Underground in the period 1967-1970. He managed the legendary rock club The Boston Tea Party and produced shows in western Mass. at his club The Woodrose Ballroom and at the Paramount Theater in Springfield. He also designed several of the posters promoting those shows. He was an Archival Consultant to the Haynes film and provided visual materials for it.

Andrew Ousley has just the right touch as he presens music from all time and places in surprising venues across the city of New York.  Earlier concerts at the Greenwood cemetery in Brooklyn took place in catacombs. For the performance of Gabriel Faure’s Requiem by Cantori, Ousley moved outside. The audience sits among the dead, consoled by a requiem at peace.

Playwright Michael Gene Sullivan fills the house with laughter in addition to thoughtfulness and social reflection.  In his affecting premiere “The Great Khan,” an otherwise unassuming, middle-class, black teenage boy, Jayden, has saved a black teenage girl, Ant (full name - Antoinette), from a gang of boys. 

Kingdom is an entirely LGBTQ African American story, sensitively told, and illustrates through the characters’ varied life experiences how Black gay culture is different from White gay culture. The lyrical script keeps the symbolism of the Magic Kingdom as a meaningful background theme, until the very end.

The world premiere of M. Butterfly, the opera, will take place on July 30,2021 at the Santa Fe Opera. We got a taste of its music, its story and the sound of the delicious man/girl Song. Kangmin Justin Kim is a countertenor with special tremulos and vibratos which suggest the feminine voice.  Many layers weave through the new telling to the tale made famous in its first iteration as a Tony and Pulitzer-finalist play by David Henry  Hwang. He is the librettist for the new work by composer, Huang Ruo.  

On his vibrant and spirited third recording for Mack Avenue Records, Havana-based pianist and composer Harold López-Nussa sets out to capture that stirring sensation with an exhilarating marriage of jazz and Cuban pop music. On a global tour there are dates for Florence (near Northampton), Boston and NY.

On the occasion of the 55th anniversary of the Black Panther Party's founding, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), has launched "Black Power in Print," an online project in tandem with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Comprising recently digitized materials and new interviews between artists and scholars, the archive highlights the Black Power movement’s legacy in visual culture and its resonance today.

As the leaves began falling to the ground, Chef was inspired to create ramen: only available for takeout! Why do ramen? It's sustainable, comforting, and delicious. 

My life is mostly solitary. This is by choice.  When I returned from my first year in China to visit my daughters, I found living in society once again to be noisy.  The temple where I lived is isolated in the Wudang mountains 30 kilometers from the nearest city, Shiyan.  The temple complex sits atop the mountain, and life is very quiet, simple, and hard.

Known for her impassioned ballads and exciting up-tunes, vocalist Dawning Holmes was first heard in the Berkshires during the 2017 tribute to Buddy Rich. She returned the following year to perform with her husband Jeff Holmes' big band at the Berkshire Gateway Jazz Weekend in Lee.

The play by Lloyd Suh is based on Afong May, who came to the US in 1834 to “perform” for curious Americans telling them about Chinese life. May was purported to be the first Chinese Woman to set foot on American soil.

After seven seasons of woke programming Mandy Greenfield has resigned as artistic director of Williamstown Theatre Festival. There was a tech crew walkout last summer over brutal conditions during hazardous and stressful outdoor productions. During a production of Row in a reflecting pool at Clark Art Institute there were days of delays due to rain and thunder storms . Problems were widely reported in the media. Former artistic director, Jenny Gersten, has rejoined WTF as interim artistic director.

Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl is the new production now being staged by the Artistic Home at the Den Theatre. It’s the ancient story of the wife who dies and the husband who tries to bring her back to the world of the living, but Ruhl tells this version from the viewpoint of Eurydice. She has written a funny, contemporized version of this love story, set somewhere nearby and perhaps in some current time.

In 1995 Julianne Boyd co-founded Barrington Stage company producing sparsely attended but critically well received shows in a high school auditorium in Sheffield. In 2005 the company purchased and renovated a formed vaudeville house in Pittsfield. Coping with Covid-19 Boyd mounted a successful 2021 season. With the company is good shape, citing age, she is passing the reins to new leadership. In December she turns 77. She will stay on through the search and transition for a new artistic director.

The poet and Columbia University professor, Bill Wadsworth is a neighbor and friend. He has been on the road for the past month. I sent an e mail inquiring when next we might enjoy another witty and insightful literary luncheon. His response comprised a critique of my current MFA book. This ‘review’ is posted with his permission.

The Atlantic Council has partnered with professional theater companies, veterans service organizations, and corporate sponsors to bring staged readings of War Words. This Pulitzer Prize-nominated play depicts stories of men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The production is traveling to different cities.

Iphigenia, an opera is a cross generational collaboration between 88-year-old jazz legend, Wayne Shorter and the much younger and widely acclaimed performer/ composer esperanza spalding. It was an eight year project that was particularly intensive this past year. After a residence it was presented as "an open rehearsal and work in progress" at MASS MoCA over two nights. It's debut will occur in Boston at ArtsEmerson on November 12 and 13. It will travel from there.

The past stalks a candidate for Congress in the gripping political drama, "Warrior Class." The riveting production runs through Nov. 21 at Boca Stage in Boca Raton, Fla. Boca Stage, a professional theater company, is the new name for the former Primal Forces.

“Vermont Blown Away” will take the form of a friendly competition among teams of glass artists. Items from BMAC’s Study Collection of Ancient Objects will be selected to inspire three-person teams to create new glass sculptures. Teams will have 15 minutes to design a piece and one hour to complete it. These glass pieces will be auctioned off at a later date to raise money for the Vermont Glass Guild’s education fund.

Although Sondheim’s music and themes often have sharp edges, “A Little Night Music,” which is based on Ingmar Bergman’s film “Smiles of a Summer Night,” is written predominately in waltz time and is highly melodic.

It is fitting to see this piece in Connecticut; after all in 1991 it was Mark Lamos, the artistic director at Hartford Stage who worked with composer/lyricist William Finn and co-book writer James Lapine to combine Finn’s two short musicals –In Trousers and March of the Falsettos into one more cohesive piece.

Theatre for a New Audience is presenting GNIT, an update of Hendrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. The new version by Will Eno is daring in its exposition of many characters reaction to the her and their plight.

I saw college productions—and I read Hamlet in a memorable Shakespeare course at one of my alma maters, Harvard on the Rocks—the two-year University of Illinois in Chicago at Navy Pier. (Later it became a four-year university and moved to its current campus.) The first Hamlet production that I remember vividly was during the 1963 opening season of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

Commissioned by Opera Parallèle as part of their Hands-On-Opera program, a series of operas for youth, “Harriet’s Spirit,” is performed appropriately at the Bayview Opera House, which operates as the hub of the San Francisco African American Arts and Culture District.  The production energizes and provides a beacon of hope for the communities that its story represents.