Arts
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 23, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
After the spring, summer, fall and winter of our discontent — not to mention fear, frustration and isolation — this year area theaters tentatively, and often inventively, stepped onstage again. Some initially performed outdoors, some played inside/outside under tents,...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 15, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two shows based on classic holiday movies are brightening area stages this season. In Pittsfield, Berkshire Theatre Group offers the stage adaptation of the 1954 blockbuster White Christmas, and Hartford Stage Company has moved It’s a Wonderful Life into an old-time...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 6, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Tidings of comfort and joy, along with a couple of seasonal satires, are filling the area’s theaters. This month, I count at least three Christmas Carols and a Nutcracker, along with original takes on evergreen Hollywood movies and more family-friendly events. God...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 28, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
The “holiday season” has officially begun, and theaters in the area are unwrapping their holiday goodies. But the December show I’m most looking forward to has nothing to do with the season. It’s Bright Half Life, at Silverthorne Theater Company. Tanya Barfield’s...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 15, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
I didn’t much like the movie version of Cabaret. Because it was a vehicle for Liza Minelli, it deleted subsidiary characters and storylines not involving her, to the detriment of the stage musical’s ensemble character as well as its source material. I’m happy to...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 5, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two comedies now playing in the Valley turn on mix-ups and plot twists. Don’t Dress for Dinner is a sex farce set in the French countryside. The Pirates of Penzance is an operetta set in the hometown of “Arrr!” I’ll admit to approaching the Majestic Theater’s current...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 2, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Hartford Stage scheduled Ah, Wilderness! for its spring 2020 season, then rescheduled it for that fall when Covid struck, then pushed it back a full year when the pandemic persisted. Now, Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy is opening the 2021-22 season. Way back in BC...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 29, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Vitek Kruta was born in what is now the Czech Republic, trained in visual arts, including theatrical and architectural design, and worked for 10 years in Germany “restoring old castles and churches.” After moving to the States, he told me recently, “I rarely had the...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 22, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
When I was doing research for my book A World of Ideas, I learned that the mid-century European movement known as Theater of the Absurd had an interesting lineage. Some early Church Fathers held that the key Christian belief, that God became mortal in order to suffer...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 19, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
A Halloween basket of goodies in the area this weekend and next – from ghost stories imagined and real, to plays witchy and weird, plus a one-night Happening. (Most venues require proof of Covid vaccination and have distanced seating; contact them for confirmation or...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 14, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
WAM Theatre’s press kit includes advice on how to approach reporting on their production of Kamloopa. A statement by the playwright, Kim Senklip Harvey, a member of the Syilx and Tsilhqot’in Nation centered in British Columbia, outlines “Protocols for entering the...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 9, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Mrs. Joe Bradshaw – née Shirley Valentine – is talking to the wall in her working-class Liverpool kitchen. She’s bored, lonely, dissatisfied and unfulfilled. Her kids are grown and gone, and her husband – well, she might as well be talking to the wall. So she chats...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 2, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Once upon a time, I was a songwriter. This summer, one of those songs has been jingling in my head. The first line, stolen from King Lear, is “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks!” and the chorus begins, “Rain tomorrow, rain today…” That’s what this theater season has...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 23, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Every year, in my annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod, I make sure to catch whatever is playing at Harbor Stage Company in Wellfleet, which describes itself as “a theater by the sea that’s right on the edge” and lives up to that billing. This year’s reduced schedule...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 22, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Here’s my second e-postcard from Cape Cod, following yesterday’s report on WHAT theater’s Nat Turner in Jerusalem. Up the Cape now, to Provincetown, where the play Tennessee Williams wrote in that town is being revived. Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie in 1943, when...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 20, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Every summer I spend a week on Cape Cod, enjoying the beach and, of course, the theater. This year I saw four shows at three Outer Cape theaters, two of which I haven’t visited in a while. The Provincetown Theater is reviving a classic that was written there; in...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 10, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
It’s August, and the summer theater season is winding down. No, wait. It’s not. Five Berkshire stages are running to the end of the month, and in the Valley, no fewer than six live-in-person productions will be vying for our attention this weekend alone. Here’s a...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 4, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Going in, I knew next to nothing about the material in last week’s mainstage show at Jacob’s Pillow, Life Encounters, Archie Burnett’s personal history of house dance. But I was surprised to see that I knew one of the dancers. Not personally, unfortunately, but I’ve...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 3, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Serge has just purchased an ultra-abstract painting for an outrageous sum and is excited to show it off to his good friend Marc – who looks it over and offers his assessment: “You paid two hundred grand for this shit?” You see, it’s a large white canvas – all white,...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 24, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
My partner is a literature professor, specializing in women writers. She has noted a principle in both scholarship and fiction that she calls the Noah’s Ark Approach: If you want to get attention for your female subject, pair her with a famous man (think Girl with a...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 20, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck, Uncategorized
I had a theater-going “double feature” planned for last weekend – two outdoor shows in a row with adventurous Berkshire-based companies. But those plans were disturbed by two irresistible forces: Nature and Actors’ Equity Association. At Shakespeare & Company in...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 12, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Shakespeare & Company’s King Lear, the first show to open on its Lenox campus in a year and a half, marks another return of live theater after the long intermission. It’s also the inaugural production in the troupe’s new outdoor amphitheater, a handsome addition...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 7, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
2020 was devastating for performing arts across the region and the world, perhaps none more so than for Jacob’s Pillow, the 79-year-old dance mecca in the Berkshires. Not only did the pandemic kill last year’s entire season, but in November the Doris Duke Theatre, the...
by Advocate Staff | Jul 1, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Sometimes in the course of the past year I despaired of ever again hearing that mantra of curtain speeches in the cyber-era: “Please silence your cellphones.” But in late June it happened, as three western Mass companies greeted live audiences with live performances,...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 26, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Last week, Barrington Stage Company’s Julianne Boyd greeted the audience for her troupe’s opening production, staged in a socially distanced tent at the edge of Pittsfield, with these long-awaited words: “I want to welcome you to live theater.” This week, introducing...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 19, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Sometimes in the course of the past year I despaired of ever again hearing that mantra of curtain speeches in the cyber-era: “Please silence your cell phones” – or of hearing the words spoken by Julianne Boyd on Barrington Stage Company’s opening night: “I want to...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 11, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Down a pebbled path flanked by tall grasses in an orchard hung with ripening fruit, we come to an archway fashioned of bent branches: The Portal. There, our Guides invite us to hang a slip of paper on which we’ve written something we wish to leave behind, after the...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 2, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
The Year of Covid shut down live theater and just about every other in-person interaction, in the arts as elsewhere. In their place: the Year of Zoom. In the circumstances, Zoom was a blessing – a marvel of the age, allowing face-to-face contact and online...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 30, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Newsletter, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Sheryl Stoodley is standing in the middle of the Workroom, the performance space in the Northampton Community Arts Trust building curated by A.P.E.@Hawley. In time, it will become a fully equipped studio theater, but for now it’s an enormous unfinished cube, more like...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 24, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Imagine, if you will, that you suddenly find yourself in a weird netherworld, suspended between the life you knew and an uncertain future. You’re stuck in a confined space that is both familiar and strange; you’re communicating with others via a small glass window,...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 17, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
The election of Kamala Harris as the first woman Vice President of the United States, not to mention the first African American and the first of South Asian descent, is certainly cause for celebration – as well as thoughts of “It’s about time.” But those “firsts”...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 12, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
The publicity teaser asks, “Why Julius Caesar now?” And why, for that matter, put an all-female cast into Shakespeare’s most male-centered tragedy? The short answer to the second question is that the show comes from Smith College, and the longer one embraces the first...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 23, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
A year ago this week, I filed my review of a new play, The Pitch, which had just opened at the Majestic Theater in West Springfield. Two weeks later, Covid-19 closed the production (the run will resume once the theater is able to reopen its doors). The following week,...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 16, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
One of the most adventurous endeavors in the past Year of Zoom has been Stagehand, a live immersive piece from Eggtooth Productions first seen last fall. Another iteration launches this weekend and next, with a new framing concept and novel ticketing options. As...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 17, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
There’s an old story from the early days of television, when the flickering screen was competing for audiences with radio drama. A young boy, asked which he preferred, radio or TV, answered without hesitation, “Radio. Because the pictures are better.” I was reminded...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 9, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
MIFA, the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts, is a Holyoke-based venture that’s working to restore the city’s venerable Victory Theatre as a regional performance venue while also forging partnerships with the Latinx community. MIFA and the...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 2, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Does theater, by definition, require an audience’s physical presence in a shared space with live actors? Is viewing the video record of a live performance different in a fundamental way from being there? What are we to make of the new online performances in this time...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 19, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
“Thanksgiving is such a lovely holiday. Do we have to talk about genocide during this beautiful American holiday?” That’s the kind of pushback often directed at reassessments that put “the first Thanksgiving” in its true historical context, says Talya Kingston. She’s...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 28, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
It’s the time of year for werewolves and witches, costumes and candy – and, in this especially bloodcurdling season, tricks and Trump – so this weekend, area theaters are offering an autumn harvest of howls and horror. Here’s a rundown (alliteration-free). From UMass...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 22, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
As you approach the theater, you find a note pinned to the stage door. It’s from the director, who says he’s been delayed and you’re to check in with the cast and make sure everything is ready for rehearsal. Then you open the door, and step back in time. You’re in...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 14, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
It wasn’t planned this way, but the timing couldn’t be more apt. Just as the U.S. Senate is poised to confirm a “pro-life” justice to the Supreme Court, where abortion rights hang in the balance, WAM Theatre is poised to launch a play about Roe v. Wade. Lisa Loomer’s...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 8, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Last March, when the theaters shut down and the proverbial ghost lights went on, we thought we might be back onstage by now. I, for one, thought the play I was scheduled to direct would be opening this weekend. But as the spring scramble of online make-do’s turned...
by Brenda Nelson | Oct 8, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music
The COVID-19 crisis and need to avoid crowds have canceled many planned events in the area, but alternatives are being arranged for online viewing, and in some cases, participation. Our online calendar has listings from organizations across the country hosting virtual...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 11, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In the usual summer theater season, I’ll see dozens of plays and put hundreds of miles on the odometer. But in this most unusual summer, the car stayed mostly in the driveway and I stayed mostly in the house. I did get to over two dozen shows – or rather, they were...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 7, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
August 13 update: Just as this piece was about to be filed last week, Barrington Stage Company and Berkshire Theatre Group, the first-in-the-country theaters to reopen with live performances, received another blow to their well-laid plans. Following on from the...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 4, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In a former life I was a musician – a singer-songwriter in the ’70s mold. One of my most memorable gigs was a drive-in concert, opening for James Taylor’s sister Kate and her band. It took place/was held in a large field in suburban New Jersey, where a raised stage...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 4, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
While most theaters in our area remain closed, some for the rest of the year – and some at risk of closing for good – others are looking past Zoom and toward Stage 3 of Massachusetts’ phased reopening, beginning next week, for ways to offer in-person performances. As...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 23, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
“A nasty side effect of the pandemic is that performing artists, like so many others, are suddenly in the position of rethinking our careers,” Kyle Boatwright told me the other day. “We still don’t know when we’ll see a stage again, and we’ve been cornered into making...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 16, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck, Uncategorized
Phase Two of Massachusetts’ staged reopening started this week, lifting some restrictions on public activities such as dining, swimming and hairdressing (really??) but not on live performance. That no-no doesn’t lift till Phase Four, which won’t come along till late...
by Chris Rohmann | May 11, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
“I’ve never missed uncomfortable theatre seats (and airplane seats, for that matter) more in my life,” Angela Combest wrote me recently. She’s the publicist for Chester Theatre Company, which, like almost every other theater in the region, has canceled its summer...
by Steve Pfarrer | Apr 30, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, News
Kris Delmhorst, holding an acoustic guitar in her lap, wore a hopeful smile as she sat recently in a room in her Shelburne Falls home and stared into a video camera. “I’m here,” she said. “Are you here? I think we’re here together, people … thank you for coming.” Like...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 13, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
With campuses closed and classrooms empty, teachers are applying long-distance work-arounds to complete their spring courses, gathering their students in Zoom rooms and juggling assignments on Moodle. Teachers of acting, directing, and other hands-on theater skills...
by Jack Brown | Apr 8, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m starting to miss the world. Out of work and holed up in the house — half the week in a kind of monkish solitude, the other half with three increasingly stir-crazy kids — is exactly the opposite of what anyone wants out of...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 1, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
A ghost light is the single lamp that’s left burning onstage when the theater is dark, the audience has gone home and the cast and crew have called it a night. It’s the light that’s on when all the other lights are off. Ghost lights are shining 24/7 all over the...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 13, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Stage, Stagestruck
Yesterday morning I filed my column for next week’s Advocate, previewing upcoming screenings in Amherst Cinema’s National Theatre Live series. Yesterday afternoon I cancelled it when the cinema announced it’s closing until at least April 17th. There won’t be a...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 3, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In baseball parlance, having “a cup of coffee” refers to a player who is called up from the minors for a brief stint with the major-league team – staying just long enough to have a figurative cuppa. Stan Freeman’s The Pitch is about a fictional ballplayer who barely...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 27, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Jane Eyre may be the most-adapted of 19th-century English novels, and that’s saying something, in a field shared with Austen and Dickens. The Wikipedia entry for Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 gothic masterpiece lists over 50 film, radio and TV versions, together with dozens...
by Advocate Staff | Feb 26, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music
Spring is in the air. Sort of. In some ways, after a snowy start, it has felt that winter didn’t come at all. But with clocks about to change to Daylight Savings (on Sunday, March 8!) it’s time to come out of our shells and check out a good show or museum. Here is an...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 25, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In these fake-news days, when fiction rules the cybersphere and truth is called a lie (and vice versa), the lifespan of a fact can be the length of a tweet (if it’s not stillborn). The play now running at TheaterWorks in Hartford (through March 8) can’t help but be...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 23, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two of the shows coming up on three Five College stages this week and next are family-friendly journeys into Neverland’s backstory. The other is a rock musical about a sensational axe murder. First up is Finding Neverland, the musical based on the 2004 film. It was...
