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  • Amahl and the Night Visitors

    Gian Carlo Menotti's Christmas Spirit for Today

    By: Susan Hall - Dec 10th, 2019

    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.

  • May Stevens at 95

    Artist Was Born in Quincy Massachusetts

    By: Ryan Lee - Dec 11th, 2019

    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.

  • Judgment Day at Park Avenue Armory

    Richard Jones and Christopher Shinn Disturb and Thrill

    By: Susan Hall - Dec 13th, 2019

    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.

  • Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake

    At the Ahmanson Theatre

    By: Jack Lyons - Dec 14th, 2019

    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.

  • Second Mainstage Musical for Barrington Stage Company

    Ain’t Misbehavin’ Joins South Pacific

    By: Barrington Stage - Dec 17th, 2019

    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.

  • Seance with Benjamin Britten

    The Crypt Conjures Brittain

    By: Susan Hall - Dec 14th, 2019

    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.

  • The Plot at Yale Rep

    Will Eno's World Premiere

    By: Karen Isaacs - Dec 19th, 2019

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

  • The Thin Place by Lucas Hnath

    Playwrights Horizons Holds a Seance, Sort Of

    By: Susan Hall - Dec 21st, 2019

    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.

  • Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom

    At Ashby Stage in Berkley

    By: Victor Cordell - Dec 24th, 2019

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

  • 30 Americans at the Barnes Foundation

    Not Incidentally Black Artists

    By: Susan Hall - Dec 24th, 2019

    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.

  • TON presents Honegger with Felix Valloton

    Sight and Sound at Metropolitan Museum

    By: Susan Hall - Dec 25th, 2019

    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.

  • Dance Nation at Steppenwolf Theatre

    Adults Playing Teens

    By: Nancy Bishop - Dec 30th, 2019

    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!

  • Frontline Filmmaker David Sutherland

    18 Million Viewers for The Farmer’s Wife

    By: Charles Giuliano - Jan 09th, 2020

    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

    Riveting Drama by Christopher Demos-Brown in Miami

    By: Aaron Krause - Jan 13th, 2020

    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.

  • Garrett Fisher's Blood Moon in World Premiere

    Prototype Presents a Moving Contemporary Noh drama

    By: Susan Hall - Jan 13th, 2020

    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.

  • Hot Magadalene at HERE

    Danielle Birrittella Sings Richly of Love and Lust

    By: Susan Hall - Jan 15th, 2020

    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 by Heather Raffo

    Produced by Marin Theatre Company

    By: Victor Cordell - Jan 17th, 2020

    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.

  • An Almost Ordinary Summer

    Launches Palm Springs International Film Festival

    By: Jack Lyons - Jan 17th, 2020

    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.

  • Dutch Thriller Instinct

    At Palm Springs International Film Festival

    By: Jack Lyons - Jan 17th, 2020

    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).

  • Ellen West by Ricky Ian Gordon

    Jennifer Zetlan is a Force of Nature

    By: Susan Hall - Jan 17th, 2020

    Jennifer Zetlan gets a full opportunity to display her extreme force of nature in voice and acting in Ricky Ian Gordon’s Ellen West. The work premiered at Opera Saratoga last summer. Cast changes have been made. The distinguished Nathan Gunn takes on multiple roles. He is featured as the doctor, based on Ludwig Binswanger who wrote the classic case study of his patient whose pseudonym was Ellen West.

  • London Assurance by Dion Boucicault

    At Irish Rep Off Broadway

    By: Edward Rubin - Jan 21st, 2020

    First produced in Convent Garden in 1841, when Boucicault was 21, London Assurance, is a farcical comedy of manners, this time directed by Charlotte Moore. It is the cleverest and most enjoyable play to open this year.

  • Ordinary Americans

    World Premiere Co-Production Of Dramedy in South Florida

    By: Aaron Krause - Jan 20th, 2020

    Ordinary Americans is a timely and relatable play about an early television sitcom which aired during the McCarthy era. Joseph McDonough's piece is world premiering in a strong co-production by GableStage and Palm Beach Dramaworks. The comedy-drama continues through Feb. 16 at GableStage, following a run at Dramaworks.

  • Julian Wachner's Rev 23 at Prototype

    Biblical Opera is Fun

    By: Susan Hall - Jan 21st, 2020

    We are immediately struck by the lime color of the Rev 23 set: the walls, lights, desks in a school room in hell where God’s lessons are being taught, or unlearned. Clever James Darrah captures both the weight of Rev 23 and its surprising hopefulness in his production. Responding to an exuberant score by Julian Wachner, the Furies dance together across the classroom, lofting comments, instructions and denigrating the ideas of Lucifer. This is his world.

  • Sheepdog By Kevin Artigue

    By Shattered Globe Theatre

    By: Nancy Bishop - Jan 25th, 2020

    Sheepdog, by Kevin Artigue, Shattered Globe Theatre’s new production, crisply directed by Wardell Julius Clark, will have you holding your breath as details of the incident spool out over 90 minutes.

  • Gerry Bergstein: Body Politic

    A Monumental Leap at Gallery Naga

    By: Naga - Jan 25th, 2020

    Gerry Bergstein is on the short list of leading Boston artists of his generation. Taking a leap on every level his monumental paintings will be show during February with a bonus day at Gallery Naga. Hood Museum director, John Stomberg, will provide an overview on the theme of Body Politic.

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