Arts
Stagestruck: Hot Topics – Summer theaters reflect the times
Hamlet, we recall, reminded the players visiting Elsinore that the theater’s job is to reflect “the very age and body of the time.” Times being what they are, it’s no surprise that quite a number of shows this summer do just that. The schedule in the Valley and...
Review: ‘Daydreaming’ at the Elusie Gallery
The work of two artists are on display now through June 30 at Easthampton’s Elusie Gallery in an exhibit titled “Daydreaming,” which features surrealistic illustrated pieces by Samson E. King with images of nature and everyday objects colliding in a kaleidoscope...
Stagestruck: Classics Revisited – Masterpieces coming to summer stages
In a season studded with world premieres (five at Williamstown Theatre Festival alone and three at Barrington Stage Company, for example), I’m equally struck by some of the revivals coming up in the Valley and Berkshires this summer. I don’t mean chestnuts from the...
Stagestruck: The Flamingo Kid cruises into Hartford
I missed The Flamingo Kid when the Garry Marshall movie came out in 1984, but I recently caught up with it. It’s a coming-of-age story that takes place in the summer of 1963, the era of Marshall’s TV series Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. Although it was...
Staff Picks: Global Groove Fest, Dissident Voices concert, Bee Fest
Global Groove Fest // FRIDAY Multi-instrumentalist Matthew King organized a mini festival celebrating the musical roots of Caribbean culture. King’s musical project, soulful fusion band TapRoots, are slated to perform. Also on board to perform, the Valley’s ska jazz...
Stagestruck: Summer Theater Preview – New & Different
I’m looking at my summer theater calendar and counting over 60 productions due up over the next three lively months in the Valley and beyond. Some dozen world premieres, along with even more regional premieres, stand alongside classics from Ibsen to Albee, not to...
Stagestruck on Broadway: Family Squabbles – the Clintons and the Lears
Two plays now on Broadway for limited runs, a world classic and a world premiere, revolve around fractured families whose dynastic dreams turn sour. One involves the ambitious daughters of an English king, the other the ambitious wife of a former U.S. president....
New Holyoke Art Space PULP Kicks Off With Pop Art Exhibit
Along the canal district in Holyoke on Race Street is a new art gallery, PULP Art + Object, which held its grand opening on May 4. The gallery’s inaugural exhibit is by self-taught artist Dave Laro, whose work is inspired by Andy Warhol’s pop art aesthetic. Laro’s...
Stagestruck: Pre-Season Previews – Summer begins, spring continues
There’s usually a bit of a lull between the end of one theater season and the start of the next – the spring pause before the summer rush. But the pause keeps getting briefer and the seasons are starting to overlap. Take this week, when three Berkshire theaters open...
Cinemadope: Summer season means outdoor movies
All of us have our seasonal touchstones. As New Englanders, especially, we seem to have a compulsion to carve up our years (maple season, mud season, mosquito season) and mark the moment that one quarter melts into another. For many, the spring-to-summer transition...
A Street Fair Named Desire: Valley festivals you can find downtown
It can be hard to remember it based on the cold, rainy weather we’ve had recently, but the middle of May is here. That means being outside, enjoying the flowers, and looking ahead to months more of being out and about before the temperature inevitably drops again and...
Q&A: ‘Rafiki’ film hopes to spark change in Kenya
The 2018 film, Rafiki, by co-writer/director Wanuri Kahiu, follows Kena and Ziki, two friends who encourage one another to follow their dreams by going to college and starting careers as young women in Kenya. Their friendship blossoms into love, but in their home city...
Stagestruck: Scully, Scandal, and Buckets of Blood – National Theatre Live in Amherst
Two revisioned classics, a brand-new political drama, and some audience favorites are on tap in the Amherst Cinema’s series of broadcasts from the London stage via National Theatre Live. First up, this Saturday and again on the 14th, is Shakespeare’s most lyrical...
Valley Advocate Staff Picks: Maniac, Valley Winds Cinco de Mayo, and Motherhood Out Loud
Motherhood Out Loud at STCC // FRIDAY-SATURDAY Stagestruck columnist Chris Rohmann recently wrote about this production and described this play as 14 vignettes that “traverse the full terrain of the mom experience, from the throes of labor to the empty nest.” While...
Stagestruck: Liaisons, both neighborly and dangerous, at the Bushnell
When the twin towers crumpled on September 11, 2001, American airspace was closed for fear of further attacks and all U.S.-bound flights were diverted to other airports. One of these was Gander International, i n Newfoundland, where 38 airliners landed, carrying...
Stagestruck: Around the World in 80 Minutes
Jules Verne’s 1873 novel/travelogue, Around the World in 80 Days, is best remembered these days from its movie versions, including Disney’s in 2004 and the Oscar-winning three-hour blockbuster from 1956, both of them teeming with exotic multitudes and spectacular...
Stagestruck: The Dollar Princess – WAM Theatre premieres “Lady Randy”
Anne Undeland, the playwright and star of Lady Randy, says she wanted to find a 19th-century woman to build a one-person show around. “It soon became clear that if I wanted name recognition, I had to find a woman who was associated with a famous man. Dammit!” She...
Valley Advocate Staff Picks: Opal Canyon album release, experimental music, and the Radical Interconnectedness Festival
Opal Canyon album release @ The Parlor Room // FRIDAY, 4/26 A little bit country, a little bit psychedelic rock and a lot of heart and soul. Valley supergroup Opal Canyon are releasing their debut album, “Beauty and Loss,” this Friday at The Parlor Room. The group is...
Stagestruck: Community Colleges Get in on the Act
I often write in these pages about theater at the Five Colleges, all of which have robust degree programs and busy production seasons. But I don’t pay as much attention to the Valley’s other academic theaters as they deserve, and I’m going to partially correct that...
Stagestruck: Angles and Aliens — Three productions take a slanted view of our world
These are precarious days, observes Peter Schumann, founder and director of Bread & Puppet Theater. The social order, the democratic contract and the earth itself are tottering from unprecedented stresses. Bread & Puppet’s Diagonal Life: Theory and Praxis,...
The Human Tragedy of ‘Lost Girls’
The artwork of Zitong (Ann) Xu blends myth, magic, and the fantastical together to tell human stories about sorrow for “Lost Girls” at the Barnes Gallery at Leverett Crafts & Arts through the month of April. With lifelike haunting faces of women combined with...
Stagestruck: Shakespearean Trifecta
It’s the Bard’s birthday next week, and three shows on area stages are celebrating it. (Shakespeare’s actual birthdate is unknown, but it was sometime around April 23, 1564, and since he died on April 23, 1616, that symmetry has become traditional.) This weekend and...
Poetry: Gentleness on the Heartening Prowl
Some moss and meltwater flashing in the placid gulch. The delicate theatrics of any flower’s mouth. All the tranquil angles quilted into a female face. The hand that was made to touch the saddest parts of trees. Where does gentleness go when softness shuts...
Stagestruck: ‘Death of a Salesman’ and ‘The Tattooed Man Tells All’
Two plays coming to area campuses this week and next have starkly different, but equally pessimistic takes on life and death. Death of a Salesman, at Springfield College, finds tragedy in an ordinary life, while The Tattooed Man Tells All, at Smith College, draws...
Stagestruck: New Kid on the Block
There’s a new theater company in the Valley, with a kick-ass name and no less a purpose than helping to “undo established hierarchical structures and their attendant damage.” It’s called Strident Theatre, and its vociferous founder is actor/director/playwright Susanna...
Stagestruck: Imperfect “Nonsense”
My brother is the world’s biggest P.G. Wodehouse fan. Well, maybe not the biggest — he’s got legions of competitors for that title — but big enough to have come up from his home in New Jersey to accompany me to the American premiere of a new Wodehouse-derived play....
Stagestruck: 25 Years on the Edge
In 1994, Stacy Klein moved her adventurous company, Double Edge Theatre, from Boston to a former dairy farm in rural Ashfield, and started milking the Muse. A quarter-century later, the 100-acre spread is home to a resident company of artists and a hub of visceral,...
Valley Advocate Spring Arts Preview 2019
Welcome to the Valley Advocate’s 2019 spring arts preview. Inside this collection of a dozen arts events happening across the Pioneer Valley, you’ll find poetry readings, dance performances, live local music shows, a DIY literary festival, important filmmaking, and...
Stagestruck: Blood, Tears & “Sweat” – Two plays reflect on the past and echo the present
Two of the Five Colleges’ season-ending productions, both by award-winning women playwrights, hark back to moments in recent history that continue to reverberate. One takes place in a remote backwater, the other in the industrial heartland, but they share themes of...
Stagestruck Abroad: Toronto — Shades of Identity
Greetings from Toronto, where it’s still winter, the wind whipping in from Lake Ontario is keen and bracing, and so is the theater. I’ve seen two plays here, a one-man show and an eight-woman show, both of them the work of bi-cultural authors, performed in key venues...
‘From Farms to Table’ exhibition in Northfield celebrates land, bird, and beast
For the past year or so, the Deerfield Valley Art Association has had a gallery and gift shop at 105 Main Street in Northfield. Particularly at this time of year, downtown Northfield may offer more to those driving through than those who actually stop and walk around....
Stagestruck: Degrees of Separation — Putting the opioid crisis center stage
Eight people are seated in a semi-circle at a meeting of Narcotics Anonymous. They are actually actors in a play, but though they’re not the recovering addicts they portray, each of them has a real-life connection to the nation’s — and the Valley’s — opioid crisis....
Stagestruck: Infinite Chances for Love
Nick Payne’s time- and mind-bending play Constellations receives its local premiere this month at Gateway City Arts, a production of Ghost Light Theater, the Valley’s five-year-old purveyor of contemporary plays that speak to universal themes. The piece has made its...
Staff Picks: The Mammals at Hinterland; Art of Adam Bosse; The Fly at Amherst Cinema
Saturday, March 16 // The Mammals at Hinterland One of my favorite folk bands of all time, The Mammals, led by Ruth Ungar and Mike Merenda (Mike + Ruthy), will be playing at Valley View Farm in Haydenville this Saturday in collaboration with Laudable Productions. The...
Stagestruck: Happier Valley Comedy – Joy in the unexpected
Scott Braidman is giving me a tour of his workplace, the Hadley headquarters of Happier Valley Comedy, of which he’s the artistic director. It’s a bright, welcoming space in the Mill Valley Commons, a mixed-purpose building fronted by Route 9 and backed by cornfields....
Review: Art made on an iPhone 6?
Turners Falls artist ixchelailee has produced a series of digital collages that stand toe to toe with any other non-digital artwork that you might find in art galleries across the Pioneer Valley. Her exhibit, “Art as veil: hiding behind and walking through,” on...
Graphic novels come of age in Eric Carle Museum exhibit
Comic books and other forms of graphic novels haven’t always been met with respect from literary circles. During the 1950s, anti-comic book censorship called Comics Code Authority limited the kinds of stories and content that graphic novels could depict. Today that...
Stagestruck: Motor City Soul
There’s a party going on in the basement of Chelle and Lank’s house – an unlicensed after-hours drink-and-dance dive in inner-city Detroit. That is, until a police raid on a similar establishment explodes into violence and the neighborhood goes up in flames. Detroit...
Mythic Women: The dolls of Turners artist Belinda Lyons Zucker
“The coming months will be a more favorable time than usual to boost feminine authority and enhance women’s ability to shape our shared reality.” So says Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology column this week under the entry for Taurus. Whether or not she believes in...
Stagestruck: Center Stage for Seniors
Two elder ensembles are this week’s headliners. The Berkshire-based WAM Theatre has just announced its plans for a troupe of women over 65, and the latest offering from the British stage in the popular National Theatre Live series features a cast of old folks....
Book Bag: ‘Enchantée’ by Gita Trelease; ‘Seven Full days’ by Ferris Shelton
ENCHANTÉE By Gita Trelease Flatiron Books gitatrelease.com In Paris in 1789, as poverty grips most of the populace, and the aristocrats’ indifference to people’s suffering breeds growing anger, 17-year-old Camille Durbonne is struggling to provide for herself and her...
Stagestruck: Big Apple Bites
At first glance, you’d think the two plays I saw in New York City last week have little in common. One is an international import from London to Broadway, the other an Off-Broadway transfer from a small regional theater in Vermont. One is twice as long as the other...
Purging Plastic: The quest to break the addiction to single-use garbage
Eight billion metric tons. According to Industrial Ecologist Roland Geyer of the University of California, Santa Barbara, that is the amount of plastic that has been produced since the 1950s, and almost half of that, was created after the year 2000, causing plastic...
Valley Show Girl: And The Kids’ Whimsical Indie Rock
Signature Sounds recording artists And The Kids from Northampton have made a name for themselves throughout their active musician years in the Valley. They’ve been locally and nationally covered and very recently had a live set at Paste Magazine that was streamed...
Stagestruck: Mashups in Makeup
How’s this for genre mashups: Brontë gothic in which two of the characters are animals. Wildean romcom in which all the actors are women. Golden Age Spain in which a woman lives as a man. Multidisciplinary invention in which diversity seeks community. Renaissance...
Stagestruck: Hi, Honey, I’m Home!
When Nora Helmer famously slammed the door on her empty marriage at the end of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, she changed the course of theatrical history, and social history as well. But shutting the door on one story implicitly opened another, and thus left a...
Stagestruck: Conversations and Conflicts
Theater, Sheryl Stoodley firmly believes, “can be the starting point for conversations – much-needed at this point in our United States and in the world.” To that end, Serious Play, the theater Stoodley leads, “works toward reshaping society’s conversation on...
Stagestruck: Found and Lost
In a program note for The Engagement Party, Samuel Baum says his play is “an exploration of secrets and lies.” Which puts it right in his wheelhouse, as his credits include the TV psycho-crime drama Lie to Me and the movie Wizard of Lies. He says he’s also interested...
Stagestruck: Having a Go, Script in Hand
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...
Stagestruck: Happening New Year — Valley stages ring in the 2019 season
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...
Stagestruck: Six Degrees of Connection – The Berkshires’ Year in Theater
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...
Valley Variety — 2018 in Review
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...
Stagestruck: Not Throwin’ Away My Shot at “Hamilton”
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...
Stagestruck: Angels in Middle America
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...
Stagestruck: Staged Readings — the key to writing “your best play”
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...
Stagestruck: The War Within
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,...
Stagestruck: King Lear on NT Live
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...
Stagestruck: Latin Roots
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...
Stagestruck: Art and Identity — Valley plays confront life-changing issues
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...E-Edition
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