There is always anticipation and suspense when MASS MoCA opens another year long exhibition in its vast Building Five. The current installation is Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass by cartoonist, conceptual artist Trenton Doyle Hancock. This time it seems that the generally dead serious curators just want to have fun. It is a show for children of all ages.

n Friday, June 28, at 7 p.m., Earth, Wind & Fire returns to Tanglewood, bringing its U.S. tour to the Koussevitzky Music Shed. Earth, Wind & Fire are a music institution. Over a five-decade history, they have sold out concerts all around the globe, scored eight number one hits, and have sold over 100 million albums worldwide.

Pompano Beach-based Outre Theatre Company presents an uneven production of Geoffrey Nauffts' tearjerker, Next Fall. Outre artistic director Skye Whitcomb stages the production with sensitivity. Cast members sometimes speak too softly to be understood and their productions are sometimes too one-dimensional.

The New Federal Theater and Castillo Theater are presenting Looking for Leroy, a fascinating and enthralling exploration of the work of Leroi Jones aka Amira Baraka. Written with a masterful combination of character detail and theoretical exploration, Larry Muhammad has created a forceful, touching and provocative work.

“The Judas Kiss”, written by playwright Hare, is deftly directed by Boston Court’s co-artistic director Michael Michetti, and, boldly explores Hare’s raison d’etre for his roman a clef story. Act One of the play is set in the Cadogan Hotel in London, in 1895.

The Warhol exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art leads you through the commercial illustrations, personal drawings, paintings, prints, photos, silkscreens, films, videos, music production, his Factory years and more. The last galleries show his giant Mao painting, works in collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the 35-foot mural titled Camouflage Last Supper 1986, a rendition of the Last Supper under camouflage print.

Baruch Performing Arts Center presented a Thoreau song cycle by Gregory Spears and Virginia Woolf's Diaries by Dominic Argento. Spears, a phenom among contemporary composers, loves Henry David Thoreau, but found his poetry less than thrilling. Diving into his prose, he decided to take up the more difficult challenge of setting prose to music.

In Lauren Yee’s tense and scintillating comedy/drama, Cambodian Rock Band, lead character Chum had escaped Cambodia during the height of the atrocities and resettled in Massachusetts. It is produced by Oregon Shakespeare Festival and plays in repertory through October 27, 2019.

True West, Roundabout Theatre’s staging of the Sam Shepard play, stars two fine actors—Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano. It’s a play that descends from brotherly rivalry to rage and chaos, amidst a dozen toasters and piles of toast. And then Mom arrives home from vacation to her little tract house east of LA and her sons turn into little boys—briefly.

Ashes is touring the world and landed at the adventuresome theater HERE in New York. Billed as a puppet show, yet so much more, Ashes tells the tale of a pyromaniac in 1970s Norway as the story is being woven by Gaute Helvoli. In his novel Before I Burn, the author strives to tell the story of arson in his own town at the time he was a very young child. Parallels between his story, typed on a scrim and intermittently woven into Dag, the arson's story, are Biblical in dimension. Fathers and sons are the subject.

In the opera canon, The Barber of Seville is one of relatively few that can ease many unfamiliar with opera into enjoying it.

Jacob’s Pillow announces that internationally sought-after Colombian-Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa is the recipient of the 2019 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award.

Sean O’Casey, considered one of Ireland’s finest playwrights, was born in the Dublin slums and was involved in the Irish Nationalist cause for years. His Dublin trilogy focuses on the Irish wars and their impact on the Irish people. Irish Repertory, New York’s distinguished Irish theater company, is in the midst of its O’Casey Cycle, three plays by Sean O’Casey set during the Irish war for independence and the civil war that followed.

Theatre of Voices returned to Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall to perform the music of Arvo Pärt alongside the New York premiere of visual poems accompanied by a picture poem by Phie Ambo. No Mickey Mousing was intended. Instead the pictures were suggested by changing seasons, and a farm in Denmark. Both Pärt and David Lang were beautiful, deep meditations on nature, man's the the world's.

The 2019 Popular Artist Series includes performances by Brian Wilson (6/16), Richard Thompson (6/21), Earth, Wind & Fire (6/28), Josh Groban (7/2), James Taylor and his All-Star Band (7/3 & 4), Train and the Goo Goo Dolls (8/5), Gladys Knight and The Spinners (8/28), Squeeze—The Squeeze Songbook Tour (8/29), Pat Benatar & Neil Giraldo and Melissa Etheridge (8/30), Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals and Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue (8/31), and Reba McEntire (9/1). American Public Media’s Live From Here with Chris Thile also returns on June 15, opening the 2019 season.

Aaron Sorkin received permission from author Harper Lee before she died in 2016. However, when Tonja Carter whom Lee had named as her personal representative, learned of some of the changes lawsuits ensued. Eventually the matter was settled.

Little Lord transforms the Fourth Street Theater of New York Theater Workshop into a one room schoolhouse. We the audience get to face the demons of our early education where "Run Dick Run" at the very least bored us to tears. Based on the educational theories of William McGuffey, who after roaming the midwest as an itinerant teacher, created elementary readers for grades one to six, McGuffey's texts were used throughout the US for a hundred years.

Michael Perlman's From White Plains examines the effects of bullying decades after one's school days. Cast members largely shine in a South Florida regional production of this comedic drama. The play's characters are unable to escape the past in From White Plains. The set's centerpiece, which resembles a prison cell's gate, symbolizes this.

The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival will offer a round trip charter bus for New York patrons. The 2019 Festival program (Sept. 26 – 29) will feature plays by Tennessee Williams and the provocative Japanese author Yukio Mishima.

Lyric Stage Company of Boston announces its 45th season. The program of seven plays starts with a yet to be announced award winning musical from August 30 to October 6. The suspense is brutal.

In a co-production with National Theatre and Neal Street Productions, the Park Avenue Armory is presenting a multi-generational story of the Bavarian family Lehman in America. Captivated by Ben Powers' Biblical translation of Stefano Massini's The Lehman Trilogy, director Sam Mendes has worked with three brilliant actors to create a cast of hundreds. It is a testimony to the talents of Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles that we believe one man can be a young woman, a child, and an aging patriarch if not all at once, certainly standing next to each other.

Maestra Nichole Paiement conducts the chamber orchestra to its polished sound with energy and precision, finding a visual and aural expressiveness in the combining of the instruments, parallel to that of Georgia O’Keeffe combining her paints. Laura Kaminsky honors this great artist with her world premiere opera Today It Rains, commissioned and presented by Opera Parallèle.

With the passing of Arthur Polonsky (June 6, 1925 - April 4, 2019) the last link to the greatest generation of Boston artists has been broken. They are known and somewhat misrepresented as The Boston Expressionists.

Mark Dover and Jeremy Ajari Jordan worked Debussy, Schubert and angst into a wild evening of jazz. Jeremy Gill has a quiet about his work from which he builds and to which he then retreats. There is something satisfying in this bracket, in which we share in the rougher emotions of the interior.

Marc Blitzstein was a critic of the music and politics of his time. Often expressing his dissatisfaction with the “privileged society” he felt dominated the creative impulses of his colleagues. As he wrote in 1936, “the unconscious (sometimes not so unconscious) prostitution of composers in today’s world is one of the sorry sights,” warning that “music in society, with us these many years, is dying of acute anachronism; and that a fresh idea, overwhelming in its implications and promise, is taking hold.” Prostitution, the exchange of one’s body for payment, became an important symbol for Blitzstein during the interwar period. It was a brash allegory for capitalism’s influence over (and failure of) the working class throughout the Great Depression.