Arts
Have an Alty Super Bowl, Everybody!
The Super Bowl is as mainstream America as an apple pie filled with mini U.S. flags and red Solo cups, so what is an alternative-type person to do at an upcoming super football party if he wants to keep it real? Represent. The pull to party with the people you love is...
Sunday Performance: Exploded View
Reflective Collective What happens when eight talented women — all of whom are involved in creative communities across Franklin, Hampshire, and Hampden counties — meet to make poetry and art together? In the case of Exploded View, they create multimedia exhibits and...
Ninja Turtles Take Over the Springfield Museums!
From Kuniyoshi to Cowabunga I have to admit that it seemed odd walking through a hall of classical Greek sculptures in the George Walter Vincent Smith Museum to visit an exhibit devoted to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book art. The whole thing felt suspiciously...
Stagestruck: The Cold Warrior’s Mask
Travels with a Masked Man, John Hadden’s compelling “two-character solo performance,” seems to fall squarely in the by-now-familiar genre of the one-person memoir, in this case exploring a rocky relationship with his father. Except that this one is not at all typical....
Nightcrawler: Going Gentle Into That Good Night
After more than two decades delivering the music news in print, Nightcrawler moves online Editor’s Note: Scene stalwart Gary Carra’s Nightcrawler column has long been a fixture at the Valley Advocate — a history that goes back, as he explains here, to the bygone era...
Staff Picks: Addis Revolution, Blue Devil Bluez, and Metal Shenanigans
Metal Shenanigans at Shenanigans • Friday Once a month, Shenanigans in Westfield hosts a free metal night. A night full of metal, with a bar in earshot of the stage? Sign me up. But hey, since there is no cover charge, bring some extra cash in case you wanna buy merch...
Music Reviews: New albums from Spiritual Rez and Rebecca Joy
Spiritual Rez Setting in the West Self-released People love reggae songs for the same reason people hate reggae songs: every slow, delirious second laid down is in service to the beat. Everyone from Bob Marley on down has brought flair, trippy switch-ups, and...
Cinemadope: “The Brand New Testament” at Amherst Cinema
The Man Upstairs Let me say this right up front: I’ve never acted a day in my life. The closest I came was tagging along with a friend while he auditioned for an open call for extras on a pirate movie, where my college-freshman goatee briefly attracted the attention...
Stagestruck: Changing Lives, One Play at a Time
When I was in California last month, I saw two plays by a small, adventurous professional theater company in Berkeley that I’d never heard of. They’re called Shotgun Players, and they’ve gone straight to the top of my Bay Area must-see list. The shows I saw were...
Censorship, or No? Here’s What You Thought
Art, Life, and the Connecting Corridor In last week’s opinion column “Between the Lines: Censorship or Good Sense?” editor Kristin Palpini asked readers for their thoughts on a painting depicting police officers as feral pigs, which was recently removed from a...
On Exhibit: Paintings by Susan Valentine
We All Float On Leverett artist Susan Valentine acquired a kayak last summer. It was worth it. “Leverett Pond is a tiny walk from my studio,” she explains. “On the pond, I was inspired to slow down. I spent many a day on the water’s surface, tooling around and being...
Basemental: Wocky’s new album, reviewed
Roxy Leblanc has been a mainstay in the Hadley underground for as long as I can remember. She fronted the band Great Smokey, an earnest and groovy psych group that took a few forms between 2009 and 2016, before calling an indefinite hiatus last winter. Since then she...
Cinemadope: Schlep West, Young Man
More than most people, Americans love a good road story. I think it’s something that is simply part of our collective national subconscious, a metaphysical result of the vast physical breadth of the nation. Few of us, even today, really get (or take) the chance...
Friday: John Cleese Stops by Worcester
The Holy Monty Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a comedy classic that has been creating rabid fans for decades. If you’ve never seen it, the film, a silly trek with mythical King Arthur and his Spamalot knights of the round table, is highly quotable and hillarious....
Album Review: East Coast New England Boy
EAST COAST NEW ENGLAND BOY Ian Cat Salieri Records If you pick up a copy of Ian Cat’s new album, grab a pair of headphones, too. Or, at the very least, play East Coast New England Boy with the volume turned way up. Within this static and fuzz beats the meticulous...
Thursday: The Prozacs Play Their Final Show
Off The Prozacs This poppy punk band from Westfield is calling it quits after more than a decade of making music. The band’s last show is Thursday at the 13th Floor Lounge in Florence. Say farewell to the band that rocked you with their three albums and multiple...
Between the Lines: VOTE, Should the Capitol Take Down This Painting of Police as Pigs?
A painting depicting police officers as feral pigs has been ordered removed from the Capitol after months of controversy and a tug of war over whether the art should be on display. What do you think? As I write this on Monday, Donald Trump is yet to be sworn in as...
The Absorbing Animations of Sachio Cook
Fine Tooning One morning in early October, I was flipping through local events online to assemble our calendar listings. That process becomes a bit of a blur sometimes, but my eye stopped short on a striking color cartoon — part of an announcement for an animation...
After Orlando: Short Plays Pay Respects on Friday night
Reflecting on a Tragedy The night of June 12, 2016, news of a horrific shooting unfolding in an Orlando gay nightclub sent shockwaves around the world, leaving collective heartbreak in its wake for the 49 lives cut cruelly short that fateful night. The pain cut...
Music Pick: Hothfest at Max Cap
Bone Chilling Metal Turn those cold winter blues into face-melting metal this weekend at the 3rd Annual Hothfest! Two full days of killer lineups featuring local bands scattered throughout touring bands. “When death metal takes over New England!” says the man behind...
Stagestruck: Defying God … and Trump
Partway through last Friday’s performance at West Springfield’s Majestic Theater, something unscripted, overdue, and quite wonderful happened. The show was Peter Shaffer’s brilliant examination of genius and envy, Amadeus. The title refers to Mozart, but the...
Cinemadope: Is Spielberg Corny?
There are times when I look back on my youth and shake my head at my younger self. Mostly, it’s when I think about the dreck that was on in the after-school hours on the local UHF stations: sugar-cereal cartoons that were a 12-year-old’s forbidden fruit. It is with a...
Blaise’s Bad Movie Guide: When Brad Pitt Was the Pits
Recently, I visited the William Cullen Bryant Homestead in Cummington where my sister and her family helped to lavishly decorate the rooms with Yuletide trimmings. Yet my mind was not on sugarplums. Instead, it was on the movie I knew I was going to review for this...
A Mid-winter Night’s Read
This weekend, Shakespeare & Company presents a Winter Studio Festival of Plays, five diverse readings as interpreted by five local directors. Works range from classics by playwrights like Anton Chekhov to established contemporaries like Sam Shepard and emerging...
Jammin’ for Justice
Jammin’ for Justice The nonprofit Watermelon Wednesdays has been providing musical education and holding concerts for the past 17 years. This Wednesday, the group is putting on In It Together, a fundraiser for community, diversity, and social justice to benefit...
Artists of a Feather
The Hosmer Gallery at the Forbes Library is hosting exhibitions this month from three talented local artists. Janice Doppler blends a love of ornithology and wood carving to create stunningly lifelike sculptures of a myriad of bird species, while Patricia Dorr Parker...
Saturday Music: Christine Ohlman at NextStage
Blue-eyed Rock ’n’ Soul The higher the hair, the closer to God, honey. So you know Christine Ohlman, the Beehive Queen, is tight with The Man Upstairs — and you can hear it in her soulful rock. Ohlman, whom you may recognize from her years as a vocalist in the...
Julian’s Gift: Shutesbury sculptor plans to donate his land to conservation
The weird and wonderful artwork of Julian Janowitz only starts to reveal itself once visitors pull onto the long driveway of his Shutesbury home. That bumpy, meandering dirt road leads through a small clearing, then along twists and turns through a tall forest of...
Karaoke, Anyone?
Take the Stage Now that all the big holiday celebrations and events are in the past, it’s time to get back to regular old life. Do it in style by hitting a karaoke night somewhere in the Valley. There are plenty of bars known for their customer caterwauling:...
Through Monday: Instagrammers Take Northampton
Watch Your ’Grammers @igers413 is an online community of Western Mass Instagram users who gather regularly on their phones — and, somewhat less frequently, in person — for local events, challenges, and photo chats. #CHASINGLIGHT, the fourth installation of what has...
Basemental: Stop the Trolls
Staying strong in the face of hate and lost spaces Last week, Basemental interviewed a local musician who lost people close to him in the Ghost Ship warehouse fire on Dec. 2 in Oakland, California. That piece sparked a discussion of safe spaces for artists, which...
Folk quartet Driftwood comes to town with a new LP
Floating Rock and Rolling Folk From year to year, over hundreds of live sets, Driftwood has proved a cohesive quartet since its members first gathered in Binghamton, NY in 2005. But the band’s sound, rather aptly, is a shifting, constant collision of styles, from...
Cinemadope: Three films about hummus, bagels and blintzes
When it comes to film, the Christmas and New Years weeks are not usually a great time for filmgoers, with the exception of a few blockbusters and carefully planned Oscar-hopeful releases. Studios and theaters know that we’re all too damn busy rushing out to buy a last...
Halos & Horns: Our 2016 List of Who’s Been Good or Bad… or Worse
How Does This Work? Who on earth do we think we are, doling out judgement left and right? Find out here. The List HALOS // The People of East Longmeadow — For creating a seven-member Town Council in the wake of a coup on the now-defunct three-member Board of...
On Exhibit: Hanna-Barbera Animation at the Norman Rockwell Museum
Zoinks! In an era before we burrowed into our choice cable channels, American kids grew up watching cartoons on one of three network TV stations. From 1958 through the 1980s, most options on Saturday mornings were products of the Hanna-Barbera company — the creator of...
Advocate Sessions: Video every Friday
Giant Talent. Tiny Stage. For more than 40 years now, the Advocate has covered politics, local news, and entertainment from an alternative angle. But nothing runs through our newsprint’s black, white, and red veins more powerfully than independent music. We’ve been...
Friday Music: Rice at Bishop’s Lounge
Rice, Rice, Baby Who knew there were enough people in Warwick, MA (population 780) to start a great rock band? Rice proves the skeptics wrong. Formed at a house party in 2014, the group infuses Americana and jam music with rock sensibilities. It’s not too much of a...
The Valley’s End-of-Year Gallery Art Sales
Rogue Galleries Supporting local artists isn’t just for the holidays. Last-minute shopping needs aside, there are hundreds of cool pieces on gallery walls, ceilings, floors, and shelves during all of the Valley’s year-end art shows. The tradition of using these final...
Basemental: What Happened in Oakland
One artist’s reflections on the Ghost Ship fire NOTE: On Dec. 2, the Ghost Ship, a 10,000 square-foot arts space inside an Oakland, California, warehouse, caught fire during a performance. Thirty-six people were killed, and more were injured. Steve D’Agostino,...
Cinemadope: Denzel Washington stars in August Wilson’s Fences
Month of August Despite his legendary status in American theater, August Wilson is not a name one hears attached to many film projects. The self-taught dramatist, who dropped out of high school after being falsely accused of plagiarism, left behind an astounding body...
For the Kids: New Year’s Morning Music Party
Sleeping In? That’s So 2016 Get those kids out of bed (it’s not like they stayed awake until midnight, anyway) and let them dive into a new year the fun way: with puppets and breakfast. Hilltown Families and the Flywheel Arts Collective are continuing the beloved...
Kids Stage Pick: The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Rug Rats If that godawful stop-motion Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer movie from 1964 has coursed through your eyeballs a few too many times, consider taking the kids to see CactusHead Puppets, who present The Pied Piper of Hamelin for two days only at the Eric Carle...
Q&A with Ruth Sanderson, Children’s Author and Illustrator
Ruth Sanderson’s Magic Eye Easthampton author Ruth Sanderson says she has nearly lost track of the number of children’s picture books she has published over the past three decades (she counts 85, at least). But every one of those books conjures a fully-realized...
On Exhibit: Sandy Alpert’s Haunting Photography
Here in Spirit Photographer Sandy Alpert’s new exhibition reveals a project she first began gathering imagery for in 1998. Back then, she writes, “I was haunted by the ghosts of my past.” As she worked to capture fellow citizens moving, ghostly and detached, through...
New Albums and live shows by Megan Burtt and Freevolt
THE BARGAIN Megan Burtt Self-released Rock musicians with something to prove sometimes lean too heavily on a dark, distressed demeanor. But it’s not hard to spot which artists take up that pre-fab attitude like an expensive frayed coat, and which artists are simply,...
Concert Friday: Banda Criolla’s Festive Holiday
The Warm-Up Act Fighting to regain some of that precious body heat that you lost on the way in from the car? Let master guitarist Jose Gonzalez and Latin jazz virtuoso Ahmed Gonzalez help you out. Together they’ve founded Banda Criolla,...
Nightcrawler: It’s Not Yuuuge – It’s Jewmongous
Sean Altman was best known as a member of the a capella singing group Rockapella, which had a recurring role on the PBS television show Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego? from 1991 to 1995. Since then, based on Altman’s website, he’s been mugging with former...
Stagestruck: Crossing the Color Line — Area theaters give (some) stage space to artists of color
In my last column, “Closing the Gender Gap,” I tallied the representation of women performers, playwrights and directors in the area’s professional theaters in 2016. I found some improvement in the gender balance, though we’re still a ways away from true parity....
Cinemadope: Wild Things
Director Garth Jennings has had an interesting, if short, career. Coming out of the gate with an adaptation of the Douglas Adams cult classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 2005, his first big film grossed many millions, starred people like Zooey Deschanel...
Holiday Pick: Christmas at Old Sturbridge Village
Over the River and Off the Grid The past is still present at Old Sturbridge Village, which has been bringing visitors up close and personal with New England history since 1946. The annual Christmas by Candlelight evenings make good on those old traditions, with live...
It’s a Wonderful Time… for It’s a Wonderful Life
Attaboy, Clarence When it comes to holiday classics, I’m partial to the festive antics of Die Hard (“Now I have a machine gun — ho ho ho!”). But many kids and families — and, on wistful days, certain single adults — lean toward Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful...
Valley Advocate guide to what to do on New Year’s Eve
Still making plans for New Year’s Eve? Check out what’s going on in the area: The Strange One’s Ball: A New Year’s Eve Spectacle Starring Bella’s Bartok Pearl Street Nightclub, 10 Pearl St., Northampton Come see what Pearl Street Nightclub is calling, “The...
Stagestruck: Turning the Screw
Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith is a gothic mystery-romance set in Victorian England. It’s a tale of devious crime, illicit love and cascading betrayals, with as many hairpin plot turns as a, well, as a Victorian novel. Alexa Junge’s stage adaptation, developed...
Concert Friday: Sister Sparrow’s Sweet, Gritty Soul
A Songbird’s Soul Singer and songwriter Arleigh Kinchelo’s hard soul collective, Sister Sparrow and The Dirty Birds, plays guitar, bass, trumpet, saxophone, and drums — plus harmonica, thanks to her brother Jackson. They’ve released three full-length studio albums,...
This Weekend: Northampton’s Newest Dance Troupe Debuts
Company Time Before her days as the head of Northampton’s School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, Jen Polins directed the Catalyst dancers at South Hadley’s Pioneer Valley Performing Arts charter school for 17 years. In September, craving a return to that rewarding...
The World’s First Sci-Fi Novel, Reborn
In “The Chemical Wedding,” local talent melds 400-year-old text with modern illustrations If the long book title, inked in faux-medieval Blackletter, didn’t give it away — let alone the robotic sheep on the back cover — The Chemical Wedding is one of the...
On Exhibit: Balka’s Lower East Side
The New Country The Yiddish Book Center’s newest visiting exhibit captures the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Lower East Side of New York City, which hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants called home. It’s an urban landscape that tried,...
Staff Picks: Llama Lasagne Holiday Spectacular and More Holiday Festivities
The Big Sway at The Still • Saturday Funky jam band The Big Sway are headed back to The Still for a night two sets of psychedelic rock. So get rid of those holiday blues after your last minute shopping, and celebrate with some feel good music. The Still also has a...
Nightcrawler: Saying Adios to ‘El Tony’ Cruz Reyes
Longtime radio personality Mike “Haze” DeJesus’s tale of his first meeting with Springfield-area rockers Hypnotic Kick smacks of a tacky joke set up. “Eighteen years ago, three Puerto Rican gents and an Irish lad walked into the radio station,” he recalled. “I was a...E-Edition
Best Of 2024
Readers Choice 2024
