Spread over 52,000 acres on high plateaus (7,000 to 8,500 feet), Mesa Verde National Park offers a spectacular look into the lives of the Ancestral Puebloans who built their homes there from around 650 until about 1300 AD.

A new group of wine drinkers prefer their Zinfandel aged in bourbon barrels. It's the small nuances of charred vanilla on the palate that makes the difference. To achieve that consistantly, makes me want to jump on the bandwagon.

Dominique Morisseau’s scintillating Detroit ’67 encapsulates that tragic time through a lens that never leaves the basement of a black ghetto home over several days that July. Set near the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount, this intersection would become the epicenter of death and destruction in Detroit.

Since the early 1800's, the Baur family from near Colmar, in France's Alsacian region, has owned several plots of land in this rich, limestone and clay soil area, known for Gewurztraminer (white wine). The family started bottling the wine in 1950 and now thrives with great grandson, Arnaud running the operation.

Birmingham passed an Ordinance in May of 1951 which prohibited blacks and whites from playing games together, among other injunctions. Boys will be boys. Often in the South they are allowed to play together until they reach puberty. An empty lot with two baskets was too tempting for six boys, three black and three white, to resist. The consequences are tragic.

Dostoyeksky’s Crime and Punishment is a thriller, a slow-paced intellectualized thriller. If you haven’t read the novel since college days, Chris Hannan’s 2013 adaptation—on stage at Shattered Globe Theatre—will sneak up on you.

The producers of Pretty Woman probably thought they had a sure fire hit. After all, the 1990 movie made Julia Roberts a major star and Richard Gere more of a star. It combines familiar elements: the hooker with a heart of gold, a Cinderella story, and the redemption of a man consumed by greed (think Scrooge).

From November 14-18, Boston Lyric Opera will bring Arnold Schoenberg back east with the world-premiere production of Tod Machover’s “Schoenberg in Hollywood.” Machover has been hailed for his compositions and also for creating new technologies that allow the boundaries of music to be taken beyond even the atonal heights Schoenberg attained.

The Fresh Grass Festival,which takes place in a wide array of venues at Mass MoCA, in North Adams,Massachusetts, offers bluegrass music that is both traditional and cutting edge. There are four stages, three outdoors and one indoors that cater to the musicians and the family friendly audience. Workshops abound in the galleries with members of the bluegrass community sharing knowledge with their fans.

Satellite Collective is an adventurous group of artists from every medium who combine dance, art, music and theater into a unified work. Echo and Narcissus is a full-length collaborative event at BAM Fisher.

The largest work of art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is the museum itself, which serves as an anchor for the examination of architecture as art. The design of pods floating over a pond is the creation of Moshe Safdie.

Joe Ketner had been the Lois and Henry Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice and Distinguished Curator-in-Residence at Emerson since 2008. In this dual role, he worked tirelessly both to give his students a sense of the social dynamism that art enables, as well as cement Emerson’s place as a source of that dynamism through its galleries and public art installations.

The True by Sharr White premiers at The Pershing Square Signature Center. Edie Falco headlines the show. She is a tough talking Albany political figure in 1977, the year that Danny O’Connell, for over half a century the head of the Albany Democratic machine, died.

Remembering the Unforgettable Nat King Cole. New to the professional stage, Actor/Writer Verlon Brown brings the life of an extraordinary man to Theater for the New City, under the seasoned direction of Rome Neal.

Entertaining musical features electric dancing, singing and stunning visuals 35MM: A Musical Exhibition fuses photography and musical theater. Measure for Measure Theatre Company in South Florida, for the most part, scores a hit with their Ryan Scott Oliver/Matthew Murphy show

Anthony Roth Costanzo has a manly strength and a feminine range, giving surreal power to the voice. Costanzo not only sports this range but is committed to bringing its beauty to an audience unfamiliar with the pleasures of classical music. His alliance with Opera Philadelphia and headline position at the second annual O 18 Festival in Philadelphia is represented in a program at the Barnes Museum.

Rumors that Gaetano Donizetti was of Scotch origin swirled over the Italian countryside when his opera Lucia di Lammermoor was first produced. They were untrue. Now Laurent Pelly gives us a grim, grey countryside to match the mood of the opera's heroine. Brenda Rae triumphs in the role at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.

Pirandello is best known for his 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author, but he wrote a huge volume of novels and short stories, as well as 20 major plays. Trap Door’s production of Naked is engrossing and sometimes confusing, but Martinovich’s direction is smooth.

Ne Quittez Pas is writ large on a marquee in a hot neighborhood of Philadelphia. Hold on, it says. Don’t leave. Stay on the line. This is a phrase used repeatedly in the old French telephone service, a main character in the opera to unfold inside the club, Theater of the Living Arts, a disco/nightclub near the harbor.

In 1978, at Boston's Atlantic Gallery, Jay Jaroslav displayed large, photo realist facsimiles of appropriated birth certificates. The certificates of infants roughly the artist's age had died within a week of birth. He used them to obtain social security, passports and driver's licenses to create 31 purloined identities. The current exhibition at Trident Gallery, his first solo in three decades, further explores documents and process as conceptual art.

Most folks have no idea of Detroit’s winemaking history. In 1702, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac wrote about the vineyards he planted along the Detroit River (some of the first in North America). Prior to Prohibition, Kownacki notes, several Michigan wineries existed. One of these became known as St. Julian Wine Company, which today produces more than 50 different kinds of wine.

We can count the ways the JACK delights in The Catacombs of the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Depth, breath and height, as far as the strings can reach, up and down. The Catacombs, wrapped in a mysterious yellow light ebbing to darkness added to this moving presentation.

The avant-garde master and Nobel Prize winner, Luigi Pirandello, was a prolific writer including some 40 plays. Other than the iconic Six Characters in Search of an Author they are rarely produced today. Notably Berkshire Theatre Group is presenting a new translation of the 1922 melodrama (his term) Naked.

The 850 seat, Art Deco, Cabot Theatre in Beverly, Mass. has been beautifully renovated. It is proving to be a perfect setting for jazz concerts. Recently we enjoyed an evening with jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. It was a compelling retrospetive of The Atlantic Years.

A quartet of performers in musical tribute find the emotion in songs Frank Sinatra made popular. MNM Theatre Company in West Palm Beach stages a lavish production that will leave you reminiscing. The male cast members offer no impersonations of Ol' Blue Eyes and don't sound like him. However, they, and their female partners, capture the legend's essence.