Arts
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 18, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In 1981, Ota Shogo had a vision: “A broken faucet center stage. A thin line of water from the spout. The sound of water. A variety of people come by, approach, touch the water, and pass on. In this composition, silence breathes as living human time, not as form.” From...
by Advocate Staff | Feb 13, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Staff Picks
Shea Lobby Series Presents: Sweet Lightning, Wallace Field, and Hawthorn // SUNDAY Boston-based duo Hawthorn, made up by Heather Scott and Taylor Holland, blend their voices expertly in arrangements that tackle themes of maternity, divorce, parenting, and healing from...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 12, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Brian Stanton, an aspiring actor, is doing a class exercise based on Oedipus Rex, and he freezes. The story of the Greek king who’s tragically ignorant of his real parents strikes too close to home. Brian, like Oedipus, was adopted, and like Oedipus he’s both eager...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 10, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
The name of the Performance Project’s youth program, First Generation, comes from its entrance requirement. All the participants identify as being a “first” in their family – the first to grow up in this country, to graduate high school or go to college, to be...
by Advocate Staff | Feb 6, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, Staff Picks
Left Hand Backwards, Lobotomobile, The Freqs, and Sciencefight at 13th Floor Music Lounge // SATURDAY Palmer-based punk and metal group Left Hand Backwards celebrates its 10th anniversary as a band this Saturday in Florence at the 13th Floor Music Lounge. Joining them...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 4, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
“I secretly believe that I am a goddess with very brief moments of incarnation,” Jennifer Johnson declares, robed in a long white shift, a pair of ram’s horns set on her head. She’s portraying – or perhaps channeling – Leonora Carrington, the free-spirited...
by Advocate Staff | Jan 30, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music
LAVA Center Grand Opening Weekend // FRIDAY to SUNDAY Greenfield welcomes a new performing space on Main Street this weekend. The LAVA Center, part black box theater, part art gallery, is opening with three days of activities to reflect the center’s community-oriented...
by Chris Goudreau | Jan 30, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music
Hundreds of small flickering candles lighting paths to a live ice carving demo at sunset and a fire juggling event with acrobatics and a unicycle are just some of the things in store for this year’s Luminaria, which kicks off the week of Winter Fest Amherst on Feb. 1...
by Jack Brown | Jan 27, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Cinemadope, Featured, Film
Ever since I was first introduced to the tiny hot dog, I have been an appetizer man. Those delectable little morsels — a bite or two at most — can contain a density of flavor that many full meals can only wish to attain. And while many are served ahead of an...
by Chris Goudreau | Jan 16, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music
An Amherst theater company named Queer & Now will be combining drag performances, lip syncing to contemporary pop music, as well as dance, theater, and mythology from around the world this weekend at Hawks & Reed Performing Arts Center in Greenfield. Queer...
by Jack Brown | Jan 14, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
Ask most Americans when slavery ended, and you’ll likely hear something about the Civil War and Abe Lincoln. Ask them about the rest of the world, and you may be met by a blank stare. But the truth is that it continues on in our modern era, and that many of us,...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 14, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
With all the talk of “witch hunts” flying around these days, it probably wasn’t quite a coincidence that two shows I saw recently in Berkeley, Calif., are on that very topic. Not the trumped-up political kind of witch hunt, though, but real ones born of historical...
by Jennifer Levesque | Jan 9, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Music, Valley Show Girl
The first full moon of the new decade — the Wolf Moon — will start to howl at approximately 2:21 p.m. on Friday, January 10. Just so happens it’s also my birthday, maybe you’ll hear me howling at her from a distance wearing a crystal crown to welcome my 36th year on...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 7, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
You’d think things would slow down after the hectic holidays, but no. The Cratchits are still picking at the Christmas leftovers and the Sugar Plum Fairy has barely taken off her toe shoes, when January blows onstage full of New Year promise. This month I’m looking...
by Connolly Ryan | Jan 3, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Featured
First Snow, Best Snow By Connolly Ryan You remember the first time it snowed on your world? To your little body and giant eyes, the snowflakes looked like extraterrestrial Ferris-wheels and gyroscopic carousels spinning ever so slowly and quickly at the...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 19, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, Staff Picks
Books, music and a birthday at Federal St. Books // SATURDAY There are few better things to celebrate than the re-opening of a bookstore, and such a celebration comes to us this weekend when Federal St. Books has its grand reopening under the ownership of Hillary...
by Chris Goudreau | Dec 18, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Featured
Northampton’s annual First Night will ring in the new decade with 12 hours of performances from local musicians and bands, theater ensembles, comedy troupes, alongside salsa dancing, yo-yo tricks, and fireworks on New Year’s Eve the downtown portion of the city. The...
