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Bread and books. Two more essentials. Shakespeare and Co. will always be dear to my heart. The first real bookstore to sell my book of poetry. And to host a reading I gave there. George Whitman, the founder, was a dedicated and friendly guy. I remember him as being serious about what he was doing. Creating a place for writers and artists to hang out and do what they do.

The absurdist and experimental South Florida professional theater company, LakeHouseRanchDotPNG, is giving the absurdist play, "Art Duty" a fine world premiere production. The production runs one more weekend at Main Street Players' intimate black box space in Miami Lakes. The play reflects the zeitgeist.

Tenor Pene Pate gave his first concert in New York at the Park Aveneue Armory. He has a superb voice, impeccable, warm deilvery and a special generosity, charcteeristic of his Samoan heritage.

Korean-Canadian immigrant Appa Kim owns a mini-mart in Toronto. He faces challenges in the two areas of greatest importance to him, his family and his business. Those interests intersect as the store sustains the family; as he has no succession plan because his children aren't interested in running the business; and because he has a good offer to sell the store. But isn't it funny how conditions change?

It’s shoulder season for the arts. With deft serendipity Alan Paul, artistic director of Barrington Stage has maxed on bucolic euphoria by going local with The Weekend: A Stockbridge Story by Ben Diskant. It is being given a world premiere directed by Paul.  

Jonas and Betsy have been a part of my life - and the life of my extended family - since they moved to the Berkshires when I was a kid. Jonas and my father Peter were great friends and engaged in some epic cross-country aerial adventures over the years. I worked for Jonas - and with him - on myriad projects over the years - we were in touch just a few days ago about making some updates to his website, which I’ve managed since the web began back in the early 2000s.

If you listened carefully to a panel discussion at the Guggenheim Museum a few weeks before the opera by Mason Bates, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, opened, you could hear the problems staging this work was going to face at the Metropolitan Opera.

A couple of days ago my friend Jonas Dovydenas was killed in a collision while visiting his native Lithuania. He was a renowned photographer and philanthropist. For a number of years he was on the board of The Mount with two as chairman. In 2010 he flew in for lunch. We met at the North Adams airport. But he forgot the book, a work in progress, that he wanted to show me. It was back in Pittsfield. We flew back, seven minutes each way, for a truly memorable experience.

Berkshire artists and patrons Jonas and Betsy Dovydenas visited his native Lithuania a couple of times each year. He was on hand to present an annual prize for Best Lithuanian Novel which he funded. On September 23 they were involved in an accident. He was killed and she was injured. We interacted with them recently during a performance at Shakespeare & Company. As a settlement with the cult Bible Speaks, for a time, they owned the campus of the former Lenox School for Boys which is now the campus of Shakespeare & Company. In 2014 I interviewed him about his photography exhibition at the Lenox Library.

New South Florida theater company Bridge Across the Pond has teamed up with Barclay Performing Arts, and The Find Your Voice Foundation to stage Arthur Miller's "The Price." The production will take place in an intimate venue in Boca Raton, Fla.

Dating to just a few years after his return from Paris, The Diver is perhaps something of a transitional work for Arthur Polonsky, presenting a stark and puzzling juxtaposition of figural elements. At the most direct and literal level, the painting simply depicts the titular diver leaping off a dock, with a distant bridge standing before far-off factories.The work is on view at Childs Gallery, 168 Newbury Street, Boston.

Theatre Lab, Florida Atlantic University's professional resident theater company, presents the world premiere production of "Heebie Jeebies: Tales from the Midnight Campfire."

The carte orange was a subway pass with your picture on it. You renewed it once a month, and it allowed you to travel wherever and as often as you wanted on the metro and buses of Paris. The pass was second class, unless you splurged. In those days the metro had first class carriages too.

Joseph de Rocher faces execution for the grisly murders of young lovers. Though unrepentant, he requests and receives spiritual counseling from Sister Helen Prejean. The opera based on the true story scintillates on all dimensions.

Jacob’s Pillow  announces the presentation of its first-ever fully-produced fall program on campus featuring a special weekend run of Caleb Teicher & Nic Gareiss, an evening-length duo concert performed by the acclaimed dancers and creative partners. 

He cited Edwin Dickinson as his mentor, admiring Dickinson’s painterly restraint, his sensitivity, and the way he taught teaching through seeing and doing. For his whole life, he invoked Dickinson as his most important influence. He used to say that he started painting simply because he was interested in the world, and it seemed to him that painting could be a way that he could learn about it.

In her review of Forum Gallery’s 1968 exhibition, Rosalind Browne wrote for ArtNews, “Gregory Gillespie, a formidable young virtuoso who has lived in Rome on grants for the past four years, loads twentieth-century pornography, trompe l’oeil and discreet plaster montage into a highly enameled, explosive sixteenth-century Flemish package. The setting is Roman, the aura is Bosch, the concept is literary.”

Poets of Patchin Place features the première of settings of Barnes’ poetry by William Kentner Anderson. Also on the program: Victoria Bond: “Leopold Bloom’s Homecoming” from Ulysses by James Joyce. Nehemiah Luckett: “Oceans Always Lead to Some Great Good Place,” inspired by James Baldwin’s Another Country and commissioned by The Village Trip for Baldwin’s centennial,

Celebrated for creating diverse, timely and relevant opera, White Snake Projects (WSP) returns to Boston’s Strand Theatre, September 26-28, 2025, for the world premiere of White Raven, Black Dove, in a season dedicated to addressing the climate crisis through art. Composed by Jacinth Greywoode and Andrew Lynch, and written by librettist Cerise Lim Jacob, White Raven, Blake Dove is an original work of science fiction fantasy exploring two issues consuming America today – race and climate change.

A small-scale grand opera, Cosi revolves around a bet that two sisters will be unfaithful to their fiances within 24 hours. To tempt the women, the men are required to dress like Albanians, with each man pursuing the other's beloved. Cosi is full of beautiful, if unmemorable music, but the comic chops of the singers are what makes the opera most appealing.

Latiné Theater Lab has mounted its second ever production, a world premiere of a Science Fiction comedy titled Last of the Red Hot Robots. A social media influencer learns from a DNA test that she is among the 40 percent of individuals who can smell asparagus in their urine. An otherworldly being tells two zoo-goers that ants, not humans, are among Earth’s dominant species.

The Carbonell Awards, which represent the best of South Florida theater, has announced nominees for the past year. The ceremony will take place at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 17 at Florida Atlantic University's University Theatre in Boca Raton. For the first time in a while, the ceremony will take place in Palm Beach County. The Carbonells cover Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Countiess.

“With this exhibition we are pleased to feature an exceptional artist of our time and powerful works that speak to Martin Puryear's creativity and exceptional craftsmanship, and the lifelong learning that has fueled his practice,” said Pierre Terjanian, the MFA’s Ann and Graham Gund Director. “The sculptures included in this survey extend a compelling invitation to engage with themes of culture, identity, and history. We are grateful to our colleagues at the Cleveland Museum of Art for their partnership in making this project possible.”

The playwright deftly envelopes the essence of Sholem Asch's "God of Vengeance" into a dramatic wrapper of the history detailing Asch's unending challenges from his community and from authorities concerning the play's alleged obscenity.

During the era of Colonialism African nations were ruled by Europeans. This occupation resulted in the looting of some 90% of traditional African art and culture. In recent years German museums have returned tons of Benin Bronzes to NIgeria. The Museum of Fine Arts was pressured to return 34 works loaned to them as eventual gifts by collector Robert Owen Lehman. In a complex negotiation he nullified the agreement but the museum has retained and displayed five works. Noah Smalls of Williams College Art Museum helped to organize “Toward an Inclusive Framework: (Re)Building Black Art Histories in Academe, the Art Market, and Beyond,” for the 2025 College Art Association Conference. With Robert Henriquez we met for lunch to discuss these issues.