The Williams Inn

SO-IL architects selected to design the first stand-alone building for the Williams College Museum of Art. New facility for teaching, collections, exhibitions and programs will transform the museum’s engagement with the campus, the Williamstown community and the Berkshires cultural region.

Participating cultural organizations include Barrington Stage Company, Berkshire Botanical Garden, Berkshire International Film Festival, Berkshire Theatre Group, Community Access to the Arts, The Clark, Hancock Shaker Village, Jacob’s Pillow, Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, MASS MoCA, The Mount, Norman Rockwell Museum, Shakespeare & Company, The Trustees and Williamstown Theatre Festival. 

In 1969 Howie and Dale Levitz moved to the Berkshires when he became head of the photography department at Williams College. After seven years they opened a photo store which had a smaller iteration on Holden Street in North Adams. He was the piano man with a vast command of songs. Howie loved to entertain with tales, anecdotes and jokes. He passed away over the Memorial Day weekend.

In May the world's foremost architect, Frank Gehry, signed on to design The Extreme Model Railroad and Contemporary Architecture Museum in North Adams. It is one of 11 projects being developed by visionary museum director Thomas Krens. There is a daunting sticker price of some $300 miliion for construction anticipated to start as early as June, 2018.

While director of the Williams College Museum of Art Tom Krens initiated plans for Mass MoCA. When he left for a 20 year career at the Guggenheim Museum in New York that project moved forward under Joe Thompson. Now Krens, a Williams graduate and Williamstown home owner, is proposing to create a for profit museum on leased land fronting the high traffic corridor between MoCA, Williams College and the newly expanded and renovated Clark Art Institute.

During the recent Williamstown Film Festival Diane Pearlman and Berkshire Film & Media Collaborative hosted a lunch at the Williams Inn. It featured independent film star, Lilli Taylor, and her husband, Nick Flynn, a poet, essayist and author of three books of memoirs. Williams College professor, Jim Shepard, led the dialogue.

Over the Fourth of July weekend Renée Fleming was the featured soloist for the opening night performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer season in Tanglewood. On July 16, for the first time in her career, Fleming will appear in a play Living on Love at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Depending upon its success at WTF the production may be bound for Broadway.

Jessica Stone made her debut as a director when through a hunch her mentor and friend, Nicholas Martin, tapped her for an all male production of Sondheim's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." That first effort was a smash hit for Williamstown Theatre Festival. It was followed by "Last of the Red Hot Lovers." She returns to the main stage this season directing "June Moon." Poignantly she discussed WTF as a family and the legacy of Martin.

The Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF) season is in high gear. We attended the first WTF press conference to cover the next two productions of 'Pygmalion' by George Bernard Shaw and Johnny Baseball, the Boston Red Sox story, now a musical. It turned out to be a lively event!

If shows are not instant hits in regional theaters they rarely get a second chance. It is especially difficult to develop musicals. Johnny Baseball, a musical about the Boston Red Sox and the Curse of the Bambino, opened at American Repertory Theatre in June, 2010. The idea started in 2003 and development, with six new songs and other changes continues. It opens on July 24 at Williamstown Theatre Festival. During a recent press conference we asked about love/ hate relationships which resulted in Globe critic Louise Kennedy losing her job in reaction to her Johnny Baseball review.

Robert Sean Leonard appeared as Dr. Wilson the best friend of the curmudgeon Hugh Laurie's Dr. House from 2004 to 2012. They shot 175 episodes of the TV series House. That left Leonard the financial freedom to pick and choose roles in theatre. From July 17 to 27 he stars at Williamstown Theatre Festival as Professor Henry Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion directed by Nicholas Martin. The production, with changes, originated at the Old Globe in San Diego.

During a remarkably rich and enduring career Tyne Daly has been known for playing strong women from a cop in TV's seminal Cagney and Lacey to a Tony Award winning Mama Rose in the great musical Gypsy. Revealing her discipline and versatility she is appearing in the witty Oscar Wilde comedy The Importance of Being Earnest at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

On Thursday, June 28 the Williamstown Theatre Festival launches its season with the opening night of two shows. Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" directed by David Hyde Pierce with Tyne Daly is on the Main Stage. The more intimate Nikos Stage will feature the world premiere of The Deep Blue directed by Bob Balaban with Becky Ann Baker and a return to Williamstown after a long absence of a perennial favorite, Blythe Danner. Yesterday WTF artistic director Jenny Gersten hosted a meet an greet with the directors and their stars.

If you missed their now legendary gig at Mass MoCA in January there is another opportunity for the senior set to cheer on the antique rockers Jane and Jeff Hudson in a rave-up at the Williams Inn on April 21. Don't miss this vintage, synth/ pop rock, dance music.

Jessica Stone met her husband, actor Christopher Fitzgerald, some years ago, at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Last summer she made her debut as a director with the smash hit of Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Last night she was back in Williamstown for a reading of Neil Simon's Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Yesterday we caught up with her in the lobby of the Williams Inn.

Steve Lawson, the artistic director of the Williamstown Film Festival has created a remarkable program for its 12th season. In addition to a program of shorts and three feature films the highlight of the first of two weekends was a packed house at Mass MoCA for a tribute to Billy Wilder with a dialogue between actor Alec Baldwin and Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne.

For 2009's Williamstown Film Festival the emphasis is on movies and film making, not what the starlets are wearing on the red carpet. Film makers and film lovers love the Berkshire's version of a film festival since the emphasis is on craft and content, not gossip and glamour.

When Mass MoCA opened a decade ago artists migrated to North Adams attracted by large, cheap loft spaces. For the second season that growing arts community is trying to revitalize the business district through a city wide project known as DownStreet. Artists hope that their commitment and sweat equity will start to pay off.

The turkeys in our backyard are lean and tough compared to the piles of butterballs at the Big Y. A time to reflect on the meaning of Thanksgiving.

The Thanksgiving Buffet at the Williams Inn in Williamstown, Mass. was so wonderful that we returned for the Easter Brunch.

Celebrating our first Thanksgiving as full time residents of the Berkshires. Thoughts on those deer and wild turkeys who wander through our back yard.