Arts
by Advocate Staff | Jan 31, 2023 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Uncategorized
By STEVE PFARRER Staff Writer Time was when Rachel Portesi did much of her photography using Polaroid film. She loved the immediacy of the image, the way each photo was different and often didn’t quite match what her eye had seen, and what she calls “the feeling of...
by Advocate Staff | Jan 27, 2023 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Uncategorized
By STEVE PFARRER Staff Writer A few years ago, Luc Abbott, a marketing consultant who works with various clients in the area, decided to produce an online guide of regional businesses and organizations that, broadly speaking, embodied progressive values and...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 28, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
I filed my first article for the Advocate in May 1986. This one is my last. After 36 years and some 2,000 reviews, previews, features, interviews and musings, I’m giving up my ticket to the critic’s proverbial aisle seat and taking my place in line at the box office....
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 13, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck, Uncategorized
One night last month I was at the Academy of Music for a show, and there, behind the concession stand, was Nikki Beck. “Are there three of you?” I asked, amazed. She laughed and said, “Probably.” Nikki is one of the busiest theater people around. You’ll never see her...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 4, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck, Uncategorized
In this season of entertainments that cater to our appetite for cozy tradition (I’m talking about you, Nutcracker, Messiah and Christmas Carol), two shows next weekend hit the nostalgia nerve from a different angle, adding a holiday-themed sequel to a classic love...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 28, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
As winter approaches, National Theatre Live serves up a summertime tonic (as in, gin and). The live-capture of the National’s stylish Much Ado About Nothing screens twice this month in the big theater at Amherst Cinema, the Valley’s indispensable film house. Director...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 17, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
When I was in London this fall, I saw two shows that turn received history on its head. In the West End, I finally caught up with the long-running mini-musical SIX, in which the half-dozen wives of Henry VIII sing their side of the story. And at the Globe, a new,...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 8, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In the Valley this weekend and next, there’s a show in which a man becomes a woman, one in which a man becomes a feminist, and a few more that feature (mostly) women who promise to become hilarious. The latter shows all spring from the same fertile source, Pam...
by Steve Pfarrer | Nov 2, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Uncategorized
Growing up in Springfield, Aprell May knew a few bits and pieces about her Native American ancestry. But it was not something that family members talked about much. In fact, May says that for years she thought of herself as a “Lost Bird” or a “Missing Feather”...
by Jennifer Levesque | Nov 2, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, Uncategorized
The dose of nostalgia you get from toy gawking — in my opinion — is like no other. Whenever I’m on a Walmart or Target run, I have a tendency to gravitate toward the toy aisles to see what new Marvel action figures line the shelves – yes, I am that person. This time...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 2, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Stagestruck, Uncategorized
Next month on area stages (and a screen), three shows featuring women front and center, bucking prejudice, expectations, even labels. Plus, a musical farce with a woman in a beard. That one first. “Die Fledermaus,” the fall offering from Valley Light Opera, is the...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 26, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Next month on area stages (and a screen), three shows that place women front and center, bucking prejudice, expectations, even labels. Plus, a musical farce featuring a woman with a goatee. That one first. Die Fledermaus, the fall offering from Valley Light Opera, is...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 19, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two shows happening in Franklin County this weekend (c’mon Hampshire, it’s not that far) – one an actual happening, the other a comedy about politics that we could wish were actually happening. The comedy, opening at Silverthorne Theater Company on Friday for a...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 19, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
I went to college with Angela Davis, though we moved in different circles. One of us was a campus radical, marching for peace and justice, the other was a serious student focused on getting good grades. The good student was Angela; I was the peace-marcher (and...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 18, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
The funniest show I’ve ever seen onstage I didn’t see onstage. It was One Man, Two Guv’nors, the runaway hit that began at London’s National Theatre, went on to Broadway, and made a star of James Corden. I saw it onscreen at the Amherst Cinema, part of the NT Live...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 13, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
The title of the Puppets in the Green Mountains festival that was supposed to happen two years ago came from Goethe: “There are two things that parents should give their children: roots and wings.” Sandglass Theater’s biennial puppetfest revives this month, after the...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 11, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Danny Eaton opened the Majestic Theater 25 years ago with a jukebox musical, The Buddy Holly Story. So it’s fitting that this anniversary season on the West Springfield stage kicks off with another hit-parade show – and closes next spring with The Buddy Holly Story....
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 2, 2022 | Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
His name was Moses, his chosen people were New Yorkers escaping summer in the city, his promised land was Jones Beach, and his Red Sea crossing was a borough-slicing expressway to Long Island Sound. He was Robert Moses, the fascinating, maddening subject of a smart,...
by Dusty Christensen | Aug 26, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Uncategorized
Stephen Parmenter married his wife Nina on a special, palindromic date: Nov. 11, 2011. Read another way: 11/11/11. So as the couple’s 11th anniversary approaches, Parmenter knew his anniversary gift to his wife had to be special. Nina is originally from Vietnam,...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 25, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
2020’s Summer of Rage following the murder of George Floyd — another “last straw” in police killings of Black men — gave rise to much soul-searching in many areas of American society, including the theater community. Some of the fruits were on view this summer. Most...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 2, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
The most stimulating, challenging and heartbreaking play I’ve seen this year is playing at Chester Theatre Company through this weekend. Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over takes place on a violent street corner in today’s America, where two young Black men dream of...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 1, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
It’s become standard practice in the region’s theaters to offer a land acknowledgement before every performance. As Jacob’s Pillow’s artistic director Pamela Tatge says every night, “The land on which we dance is the ancestral homeland” of the Native peoples whose...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 28, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
By coincidence, two plays now running in our region center on pairs of Black brothers, one bonded by blood, the other by circumstance. Hymn, now playing at Shakespeare & Company, is a study of class and family framed as a bromance. Pass Over, at Chester Theatre...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 25, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
After a boundary-busting 30-year run, the Ko Festival of Performance is coming to a close. Formed as a collaborative, for many years the summer mainstay has been guided by Sabrina Hamilton, one of its co-founders. In a message announcing this final season, Sabrina...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 22, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
The title character in Anna in the Tropics, now playing at Barrington Stage Company, isn’t a person, but a book. And she plays a central role, thematically, narratively, even physically. The book is Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy’s winter’s tale of love – illicit,...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 20, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck, Uncategorized
Just about the only things Shakespeare & Company’s two current productions have in common are fresh air and trees. The Bard’s sun-and-shadow comedy Much Ado About Nothing sprawls over the outdoor New Spruce Theater, the set’s Italianate columns backed by a grove...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 19, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Kyle Abraham, who calls his company A.I.M (Abraham In Motion) and dedicates his work to “issues of social and historical significance” and “identity in relation to personal history,” brought a new full-length work to Jacob’s Pillow last week. His deft and daring,...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 12, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Plays about Big Issues are often more issue than play. Too many are simply platforms for a message, their characters little more than representatives of situations or points of view. The Big Issue in Anna Ouyang Moench’s Birds of North America, at Chester Theatre...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 8, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage
The set in Barrington Stage Company’s ABCD is bisected by a hallway lined with lockers. It both connects and separates two city schools that are miles, and worlds, apart. May Treuhaft-Ali’s world-premiere play (her first professional production, in fact) is based on...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 7, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
It must be a challenge to cast Once, the 2011 musical based on the 2007 film. The stage version calls for 13 performers who can sing, act and play an instrument, all of them to a high standard, plus do a passable Irish or Czech accent. I’m very happy to report that...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 5, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Code-switching is a term in linguistics that describes how people raised in two different cultures “switch” their use of language, and by extension behaviors, according to which milieu they’re in. These days, it applies particularly to people of color in a...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 2, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
The Covid Era has been a bad-news/good-news time for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Bad news: On top of being shuttered by the pandemic, in late 2020 the Doris Duke Theatre, the company’s cozy second stage, burned to the ground in an unexplained fire. Last summer and...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 30, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
After shutting down two years ago, then edging back with skeleton seasons last year, theaters in the region are back at full capacity this summer, for the most part with vax-and-mask policies still in place. Here are some of the shows I’m looking forward to seeing up...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 27, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
When I saw that Chester Theatre Company was reviving Pride@Prejudice this summer, I went Wow. I love this play. I saw Chester’s original staging in 2011, then again the next year at Capital Rep in New York, and in the Year of Covid I directed an adaptation set in a...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 21, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
It’s Pride Month, and two Valley theaters are celebrating. Both shows are musicals, one a world premiere, the other a 24-year-old cult classic that’s as raunchy and outrageous as the night it first pranced onstage. That one is Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 12, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Film, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
On opening night of Barrington Stage Company’s season premiere, artistic director Julianne Boyd celebrated the re-opening of the theater’s second stage, closed by Covid for the past two and a half years. Appropriately for this rebirth, three of this summer’s shows in...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 7, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
When I visited Double Edge Theatre last weekend, over a dozen performances had already taken place this season. The troupe is 40 this summer, and they’re celebrating on their Ashfield campus by hosting two international festivals of work by like-minded theaters, in...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 1, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
After two-plus years, the ghost light has been turned off and Ghost Light Theater steps – or rather, runs – back onstage in Holyoke, this weekend and next. And WAM Theatre, the Berkshires’ peripatetic feminist/activist troupe, touches down at Mass MoCA this Sunday...
by Jennifer Levesque | Apr 29, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Featured
Treating yourself to a night (or day) out can sometimes feel like you have to alter your everyday life to squeeze in that extra me-time. Do you feel guilty for that? You shouldn’t. Mental health awareness month is right around the corner, and with a pandemic that has...
by Steve Pfarrer | Apr 28, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Featured
Just under a couple years ago, Nayana LaFond, like so much of the world, was stuck at home, sheltering from COVID-19. The Athol artist, who until that point had mostly been a semi-abstract painter, was looking both to keep busy and maybe take on a new project. In...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 18, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
One of the things I’ve missed in the past two years of no-theater, followed by limping-back-theater, is the not-quite theater offered by NT Live. After the worldwide pause, those live-capture performances from the English stage have resumed, and the Amherst Cinema has...
by Advocate Staff | Apr 14, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Celebrate the cannabis holiday with Pleasantrees
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 4, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
If you were in the Valley in the Nineties or before, you probably remember the old Amherst Cinema, in the Amity Street building that now fronts the new Amherst Cinema. If you were ever inside, you’ll remember it as a shabby, downtrodden place where, according to the...
by Bob Flaherty | Feb 24, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Featured
The call went out for actors who were good at Shakespeare. It was quickly answered by a white-haired man in a black overcoat and low-brimmed hat: “Hath not a Jew eyes?” pleads Joe Vincent in a roiling voice. “If you prick us, shall we not bleed? If you tickle us,...
by Steve Pfarrer | Feb 24, 2022 | Arts, Featured
When documentary photographer Jill Freedman died in 2019, she left behind a huge body of work focused on people living on the margins in urban American, on protestors against poverty and war, and on cops and firefighters doing their intense work day after day. “I...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 24, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two women leaders of Valley theaters retired at the end of last year from the organizations they’ve nurtured from seedlings into models of socially engaged theater. Priscilla Kane Hellweg leaves Enchanted Circle Theater after an even 40 years at its head. And Lucinda...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 7, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
“We hope that this is the most enjoyable piece of bad news audience members have ever experienced.” That’s how writer/performer/musician/clown Jonathan Mirin ended a recent newspaper interview, and it’s a fitting entrée into his latest show, Canary in a Gold Mine....
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...
