Articles
by Jack Brown | Jan 18, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns
In the last decade, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has cast a long shadow over the rest of the filmmaking world. Beginning with the surprisingly wide-reaching hit that was 2008’s Iron Man, the series of interconnected films — now up to twenty titles and about as...
by Jack Brown | Jan 18, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns
Some years back, one of my many day jobs had me working a small newsstand. Mostly, it meant selling local papers and coffee, and, once a month or so, packing up all the glossier magazines that hadn’t sold during the previous weeks. Those days were like spending hours...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 17, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stagestruck
Allyn Burrows, Shakespeare & Company’s artistic director, calls it “a great way to get out in the middle of winter … a great opportunity for the audience to let their imaginations just run wild.” It’s the theater’s annual Studio Festival, a weekend of...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 13, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Barely two weeks into the new year and already my theatergoing calendar is crowded with upcoming shows. From an operatic Sweeney Todd to a historical fantasy to a “pseudo-historical psycho-romance,” to pick three for this month, 2019 is off to a promising start. The...
by Jack Brown | Jan 11, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns
One of the best things about The New Yorker magazine — other than the cartoons, of course — has always been the attention it pays to the oddball stories of the city. For this writer’s money, it will always be Joseph Mitchell who set the bar; have a look at his...
by Advocate Staff | Jan 11, 2019 | Articles, Music, Valley Advocate Sessions
Moving Day is a an indie rock duo in the spirit of 1960s pop music. Check out the band’s Valley Advocate Sessions performance in the video below. Interview with Moving Day:
by Monte Belmonte | Jan 8, 2019 | Articles, Columns, Monte Belmonte Wines
Liz: “We’re really a nation of innovators and I think it shows in our wine industry.” Monte: “Plus, you’ve got penguins, right?” Liz: “Right.” Monte: “New Zealand is one of the top places people looked up as to how to move there after the election of Trump. It it hard...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Jan 8, 2019 | Articles, Columns, The V-Spot, Uncategorized
Dear Yana, How do I stay chill when I’m interested in somebody new? Getting too excited (read: obsessed) with new people is no good for any of my relationships, regardless of how well the new connection is going. I’m a polyamorous person with a wonderful,...
by Jennifer Levesque | Jan 7, 2019 | Articles, Columns, Music, Valley Show Girl
The gift that keeps on giving is always the gift of music. You can go all out and get someone you love a new record player with a handful of vinyl for them to christen the needle with. You can pick up a CD or even a cassette, and you can purchase the album online to...
by Advocate Staff | Jan 4, 2019 | Articles, Music, Valley Advocate Sessions
Uncle Brothers is a a progressive jazz metal band with electric trumpets and heavy distorted guitar riffs. Check out the band’s Advocate Sessions performance in the video below. Interview with Uncle Brothers:
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 30, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Six theater companies form a kind of chain across the southern and western Berkshires. From the closest to the Valley to the farthest, they are the hilltowns’ Chester Theatre Company, then westward (passing dance mecca Jacob’s Pillow) to Shakespeare & Company in...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 28, 2018 | Articles, Music, Valley Advocate Sessions
Scott Meyers is a mellow folk singer-songwriter with heart and soul. Check out his Advocate Sessions performance in the video below. Interview with Scott Meyers:
by Jack Brown | Dec 24, 2018 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns
When it comes to our popular heroes, few if any can match the long and varied history of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous “consulting detective” made his debut in the 1887 tale A Study in Scarlet, and from the get go Holmes changed the detective game...
by Jack Brown | Dec 24, 2018 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns
Eighteen years ago, Mark Hogancamp lost his life. That is not the same thing as saying that Mark Hogancamp died, because he didn’t. But when the Navy veteran was beaten so badly in a 5-on-1 attack outside a bar that he ended up in a nine-day coma, large parts of his...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Dec 24, 2018 | Articles, Columns, The V-Spot
Hi Yana I’ve got some sex stuff on my mind, mostly about BDSM/kink. I’m a kinskter just getting my footing in the local (Western Mass) scene and was wondering what sorts of resources other than FetLife are available. I also wanted to ask about ropes, and...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 21, 2018 | Articles, Music, Valley Advocate Sessions
Dirty Words is a project that combines soulful poetry with introspective jazz presented by singer-songwriter Cait Simpson (The Greys). Simpson created a special version of her poetry-driven performance for Valley Advocate Sessions, which you can watch in the video...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 19, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
I attended over 30 theater productions in the Valley this year, but that wasn’t half of what was on stage. What struck me most was the variety of fare – from the breadth of established companies’ seasons, to the ethnic and gender diversity on campus stages, to...
by Hunter Styles | Dec 15, 2018 | Articles, Columns, The Beerhunter
The artisanal food scene is exploding here in the Valley, and that includes a wealth of locally-crafted libations from the newest crop of area breweries and vineyards. It’s likely you know someone who wants to know more about brewing and wine making, and the perfect...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 14, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
What is there to say that you don’t already know about Hamilton, the game-changing musical that costs a bank loan to see on Broadway and is now on tour, where this month it’s at the Bushnell in Hartford for only an ATM max-out? Playing through Dec. 30 (by far the...
by Jack Brown | Dec 10, 2018 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns
If you’re anything like me, your schedule is a mess this month. End-of-year holidays, school vacations, shifted work schedules and last-minute shopping excursions: it all combines to make December the month where our regular calendars get thrown out the window. So it...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 2, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Harrison David Rivers specifies that his play When Last We Flew takes place in “a small town in Kansas (NOT Kansas City).” He also specifies that all eight characters are people of color. And that two of them are gay. As it opens, we find 17-year-old Paul in the...
by Advocate Staff | Nov 30, 2018 | Articles, Music, Valley Advocate Sessions
Josh Pearson plays country, blues, and folk music with a dose of wry songwriting wit. Check out his complete Valley Advocate Sessions performance in the video below. Interview with Josh Pearson:
by Advocate Staff | Nov 28, 2018 | Articles, Music, Valley Advocate Sessions
Michael Graffius is a performer who plays sweet melancholy folk mixed with poetic indie and punk lyricism. Check out his Advocate Sessions performance in the video below. Interview with Michael Graffius:
by Jack Brown | Nov 27, 2018 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns
It’s almost the holiday season once again, which means that in a few short weeks many of us will be revisiting Pottersville, the what-if town that will come to pass if George Bailey decides to end his heroic existence in It’s a Wonderful Life. Filled with seedy bars,...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 26, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In a program note for his play The War and Walt Whipple, now running at the Majestic Theater, author/director Danny Eaton describes the play’s page-to-stage gestation. First, “a few friends” saw a draft and offered comments, leading to a staged reading with audience...
by Hunter Styles | Nov 21, 2018 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The Beerhunter
As a kid, I would sometimes wander the aisles of Don Gleason’s Camping Supply on Pearl Street in Northampton and daydream about living off the grid. In unchaperoned moments I’d climb in the tents, test flashlights, browse survival kits, and plan my inevitable,...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 19, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Every couple of years, Danny Eaton premieres a new play of his at the Majestic Theater, which he founded and leads. They range through topics dear to him, often touching on military service and veterans (he’s one himself) and all of them, in one way or another,...
by Advocate Staff | Nov 16, 2018 | Articles, Music, Valley Advocate Sessions
Sunny D & The Tangy Originals is the solo project of guitarist Tom Del Negro (Lexi Weege & The Wondertwins). Sunny D performs electrified virtuoso looped guitar compositions, blending pre-recorded sounds with intricate soloing. Interview with Sunny...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 9, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
I’ll get right to the point. The King Lear I saw last weekend courtesy of NT Live is the most thoughtfully conceived, perceptively acted and richly achieved production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy I’ve ever seen. It stars Ian McKellen, and that in itself more...
by Advocate Staff | Nov 8, 2018 | Articles, Music, Valley Advocate Sessions
Lexi Weege & The Wondertwins perform hot jazz music with close vocal harmonies with blues roots. Check out the band’s full Valley Advocate Sessions performance in the video below. Interview with Lexi Weege & The Wondertwins:
by Will Meyer | Nov 8, 2018 | Articles, Basemental, Columns, Music
There are two reasons I like music. The first is that euphoric feeling you get when you see an amazing band (especially for the first time); the second is I like musicians and their stories. I enjoy compulsively consuming them. Gotta scrape the bottom of the Wikipedia...
by Chris Goudreau | Oct 11, 2018 | Articles, Bizarro Briefs, News
An opera about locusts in the Rocky Mountains? You bet. Locust: The Opera premiered on Sept. 28 at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming. The piece tells the tale of the lost Rocky Mountain locust through arias and recitatives. Locusts disappeared in...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Nov 8, 2018 | Articles, Columns, The V-Spot
Hi Yana! I’ve been in a non-monogamous relationship for over three years. Last year, one of my partners and I broke up in dramatic fashion. I partially blame my primary partner for this, because although he said he was okay being in a non-monogamous...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 8, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two productions in the Valley this weekend and next share Latin American roots, and couldn’t be more dissimilar. One is a colorful musical celebrating a New York barrio, the other a surreal movement-theater piece celebrating two surrealists. The sensational success of...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 5, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Three plays in the Valley this weekend and next tackle provocative questions of art and identity. A woman musician is deprived of a career because of her gender. Two writers tangle in a carnal mix of sex and ambition. And an actor looks at the black experience via...
by Advocate Staff | Nov 3, 2018 | Articles, Music, Valley Advocate Sessions
Chris James is a folk/pop singer-songwriter with a sweet tenor voice matched by remarkable falsetto. Check out his full Advocate Sessions performance in the video below. Interview with Chris James:
by Chris Goudreau | Oct 9, 2018 | Articles, Bizarro Briefs, News
A hotel in Japan has a very weird and niche schtick, and that’s saying a lot considering Japan is known for many things wonderfully weird. This hotel has a reception desk manned by robot dinosaurs. Whether you speak Japanese, English, Chinese or Korean, the pair of...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 9, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
A demon barber, a cockroach killer, a charitable speller, a balletic frog. This month, up and down the Valley, indoors and out, intimate and expansive, there’s a seasonal bounty of performances to choose from. The Royal Frog Ballet is an “amoeba of...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 30, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
An instant evening of theater cooked up in a single day; a 19th-century musical with 21st-century themes; a multi-disciplinary evocation of “what is left when memory is gone.” This weekend in the Valley, there’s a diverse trio of shows to choose from – or see...
by Advocate Staff | Oct 5, 2018 | Advocate Sessions, Articles, Music
Scott Cadwallader is a folk/country singer-songwriter from Northampton and host of the weekly Thursday Yellow Sofa open mic at the Thirsty Mind. Cadwallader is a prolific songwriter, who has published dozens of his own original songs on YouTube. Check out his Advocate...
by Advocate Staff | Oct 29, 2018 | Articles, Valley Advocate Sessions
Mad Habits is a jazz-tinged progressive folk trio from Holyoke with vocal harmonies and strings. Check out the band’s complete Valley Advocate Sessions performance in the video below. Interview with Mad Habits:
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 5, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In the past, Life in the (413), New Century Theatre’s live-on-stage roast of all things Valley, was aimed at boosting its upcoming summer program. The sixth iteration, at the Academy of Music on Sunday, is aimed at reviving the company after its sudden collapse a year...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 26, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In Shakespeare’s time, actors wore their own clothes with token costume pieces, they performed on a bare platform, and they were all male. Those facts are the springboard of Elizabeth Williamson’s vision for her production of Henry V, which plays at Hartford Stage...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 3, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
A desperate young woman, Ersilia Drei, has attempted suicide. From her hospital bed, she spins a heartrending, headline-grabbing story for an opportunistic reporter. His article draws a circle of interested parties into her twisting orbit: The novelist who sees in her...
by Jack Brown | Oct 26, 2018 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns
Few people could command a stage the way Freddie Mercury did. Frontman for legendary rock band Queen as well as a solo artist, Mercury always seemed bigger than his own body; his energy, his sexuality, and above all his voice — that incredible, glass-clear, voice,...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 28, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Stage, Stagestruck
The live-capture stage-to-screen season at the Amherst Cinema has begun, with a lineup of adaptations of world classics from the London stage – a dance-happy movie musical, a steamy exploration of transgressive desire, a surreal whodunnit, a Gothic horror story – plus...
by Will Meyer | Oct 26, 2018 | Articles, Basemental, Columns, Music
Self described “weak hardcore” band Landowner leaves few stones unturned in skewering today’s tattered state of affairs on their August album Blatant. Everything from consumerism and television to insecure men and elite self-congratulation gets a scathing treatment by...
by Jack Brown | Sep 28, 2018 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns
In the world of filmmaking, the French New Wave is the Dylan-goes-electric moment. Rejecting the period dramas that had theretofore dominated screens, the group of European filmmakers who led the new artistic charge instead found inspiration in the modern world, and...
by Jack Brown | Oct 24, 2018 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns
If you’re familiar with the name Dario Argento, it’s most likely through his stylishly supernatural horror film Suspiria. That 1977 film, about an American ballet student who gets caught up in an otherworldly conspiracy at a German dance academy, was like a...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 24, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
“What am I bid for this fine specimen of white manhood?” The swaggering black auctioneer scans the audience of prospective buyers, who quickly bid the price up, until the white man on the auction block goes to the jubilant winner for a fat five-figure sum. This...
by Advocate Staff | Sep 28, 2018 | Articles, Music
Local singer-songwriter Anjali Rose Kumar performs a melange of indie folk-tinged looped vocals and guitar with a world music perspective. Interview with Anjali Rose:
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 22, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Barack Obama and Ann Richards both sprang to national prominence with sensational speeches at a Democratic National Convention. Richards’ came in 1988, and she used the opportunity to pitch her unique brand of tough-minded common-sense liberalism and kick sand on the...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 26, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Even before the houselights dim, The Play That Goes Wrong is going wrong. On the uncurtained stage, a techie is still working on the floorboards and the stage manager is frantically trying to secure a part of the set. She recruits an audience member to help out while...
by Advocate Staff | Oct 19, 2018 | Articles, Music, Valley Advocate Sessions
John-Michael Field performs spiritually themed folk with a dose of humor. Check out his full Advocate Sessions performance in the video below. Interview with John-Michael Field:
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 26, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Playwright Taylor Mac has described Hir as “a kitchen-sink drama.” Which is fair, as long as you understand that the sink in question is full of filthy dishes and fresh vomit. The genre- and gender-bending play, at Shakespeare & Company through October 7, begins...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 17, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two moonlit pieces of music theater hit Valley stages this weekend. The Smith College Theatre Department premieres Moonlight on the Miskatonic, a musical based on the creepy tales of H. P. Lovecraft. And Pilgrim Theatre revives Moon Over Dark Street, a cabaret of...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 24, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
This weekend and next, two theater companies demonstrate, once again, the breadth and variety of Valley stages. In Greenfield, Silverthorne Theater Company opens a two-week run of “six unruly comedies” by America’s cheekiest stage satirist, Christopher Durang. In...
by Advocate Staff | Sep 21, 2018 | Articles, Music, Valley Advocate Sessions
Eva Cappelli is a local songwriting queen who plays everything from blues and country to jazz and rock. Check out her Advocate Sessions performance in the video below. Interview with Eva Cappelli:
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 20, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Stage, Stagestruck
Before a play hits the stage, it goes through several other stages. The first is the opposite of public performance – the writing, solo and in private. Then, for the members of the Northampton Playwrights Lab, it’s shared with a small circle of fellow dramatists, who...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 19, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Walk down Main Street in any small American town and look around. There are the unassuming shopfronts and placid homes, holding private, ordinary lives. But behind the doors lie extraordinary secrets and dreams. Three plays this weekend in our not-so-ordinary Valley...
