Arts
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 4, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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,...
by Chris Goudreau & Dave Eisenstadter | Apr 3, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Featured
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Apr 1, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 25, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Dave Eisenstadter | Mar 22, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Review
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....
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 19, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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....
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 17, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Advocate Staff | Mar 14, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Staff Picks
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 11, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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....
by Chris Goudreau | Mar 8, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Review
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...
by Chris Goudreau | Mar 5, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Featured
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 1, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stagestruck
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...
by Dave Eisenstadter | Feb 26, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Review
“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...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 24, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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....
by Steve Pfarrer | Feb 19, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Review
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 15, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Fran Ryan | Feb 14, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News
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...
by Jennifer Levesque | Feb 14, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Music, Valley Show Girl
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 11, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 4, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 27, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 22, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 17, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 13, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 30, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 19, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 14, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 2, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 26, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 19, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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,...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 9, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 8, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 5, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 9, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
A demon barber, a cockroach killer, a charitable speller, a balletic frog. This month, up and down the Valley, indoors and out, intimate and expansive, there’s a seasonal bounty of performances to choose from. The Royal Frog Ballet is an “amoeba of...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 30, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
An instant evening of theater cooked up in a single day; a 19th-century musical with 21st-century themes; a multi-disciplinary evocation of “what is left when memory is gone.” This weekend in the Valley, there’s a diverse trio of shows to choose from – or see...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 5, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In the past, Life in the (413), New Century Theatre’s live-on-stage roast of all things Valley, was aimed at boosting its upcoming summer program. The sixth iteration, at the Academy of Music on Sunday, is aimed at reviving the company after its sudden collapse a year...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 26, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In Shakespeare’s time, actors wore their own clothes with token costume pieces, they performed on a bare platform, and they were all male. Those facts are the springboard of Elizabeth Williamson’s vision for her production of Henry V, which plays at Hartford Stage...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 3, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
A desperate young woman, Ersilia Drei, has attempted suicide. From her hospital bed, she spins a heartrending, headline-grabbing story for an opportunistic reporter. His article draws a circle of interested parties into her twisting orbit: The novelist who sees in her...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 28, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Stage, Stagestruck
The live-capture stage-to-screen season at the Amherst Cinema has begun, with a lineup of adaptations of world classics from the London stage – a dance-happy movie musical, a steamy exploration of transgressive desire, a surreal whodunnit, a Gothic horror story – plus...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 24, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
“What am I bid for this fine specimen of white manhood?” The swaggering black auctioneer scans the audience of prospective buyers, who quickly bid the price up, until the white man on the auction block goes to the jubilant winner for a fat five-figure sum. This...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 22, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Barack Obama and Ann Richards both sprang to national prominence with sensational speeches at a Democratic National Convention. Richards’ came in 1988, and she used the opportunity to pitch her unique brand of tough-minded common-sense liberalism and kick sand on the...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 26, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Even before the houselights dim, The Play That Goes Wrong is going wrong. On the uncurtained stage, a techie is still working on the floorboards and the stage manager is frantically trying to secure a part of the set. She recruits an audience member to help out while...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 26, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Playwright Taylor Mac has described Hir as “a kitchen-sink drama.” Which is fair, as long as you understand that the sink in question is full of filthy dishes and fresh vomit. The genre- and gender-bending play, at Shakespeare & Company through October 7, begins...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 17, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two moonlit pieces of music theater hit Valley stages this weekend. The Smith College Theatre Department premieres Moonlight on the Miskatonic, a musical based on the creepy tales of H. P. Lovecraft. And Pilgrim Theatre revives Moon Over Dark Street, a cabaret of...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 24, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
This weekend and next, two theater companies demonstrate, once again, the breadth and variety of Valley stages. In Greenfield, Silverthorne Theater Company opens a two-week run of “six unruly comedies” by America’s cheekiest stage satirist, Christopher Durang. In...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 20, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Stage, Stagestruck
Before a play hits the stage, it goes through several other stages. The first is the opposite of public performance – the writing, solo and in private. Then, for the members of the Northampton Playwrights Lab, it’s shared with a small circle of fellow dramatists, who...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 19, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Walk down Main Street in any small American town and look around. There are the unassuming shopfronts and placid homes, holding private, ordinary lives. But behind the doors lie extraordinary secrets and dreams. Three plays this weekend in our not-so-ordinary Valley...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 15, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
For two decades, Sandglass Theater, the justly world-renowned puppetry troupe headquartered in Putney, Vermont, has produced an international festival that serves as a gathering and showcase for masters of the form. The tenth biennial “Puppets in the Green Mountains”...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 12, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Hot on the heels of my recent rundown of women’s representation in the area’s summer theaters comes more encouraging evidence from some of the fall season’s first shows. The Majestic Theater is playing a cowboy musical in which the lead is not a boy. WAM Theater,...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 6, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two years ago I reviewed A Fiery and Still Voice, a living-history performance at the William Cullen Bryant Homestead in Cummington, Mass. The delightfully engaging show by Enchanted Circle Theater is back for four Saturdays this fall – Sept. 8th & 15th and Oct....
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 5, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Readers of this column will know my practice of periodically reporting on the progress (or not) in the representation of women and people of color in area theaters. The summer season has recently ended, so I’ve been making a tally of this summer’s shows. The news is...
by Gina Beavers | Aug 29, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Film, Music
Betty Davis was more than just Miles Davis’ wife; she was a funky musical force who was a head of her time when it came to demanding control over her image and her recordings. In the early 1980s Betty disappeared from public life. In 2012 filmmakers discovered...
by Gina Beavers | Aug 28, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Music, Uncategorized
Minneapolis trio Mama Caught Fire heads a line up of girl power tonight! Kimaya Diggs and Emma June complete the trifecta. Iron Horse Music Hall, 10 Center St.,...
by Gina Beavers | Aug 26, 2018 | Arts, Stage
Louie Anderson is a bonafide comedic icon. His Emmy winning turn as Christine on the FX show Baskets has only cemented his legacy. Anderson brings his humor to the Academy of Music tonight! 274 Main St., Northampton. Tickets are $25-$45.
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 25, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
A few years ago, when I told my brother I was directing a production of As You Like It, he said, “That’s the one about Beatrice and Benedick, isn’t it?” Well, no, but the confusion is understandable. Several of Shakespeare’s comedies have interchangeable titles: As...
by Gina Beavers | Aug 25, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Music
The great conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein would be 100 this year! Happy birthday, Maestro! Celebrate with the BSO at Tanglewood tonight. 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. in the Shed. 297 West St., Lenox.
by Gina Beavers | Aug 25, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Music, Stage
Three days of metal, punk, and rock? Could it be? Yes! And it happening NOW!! RPM Fest is New England’s biggest heavy music and camping festival, featuring 50 bands including Black Tusk, Tombs, Whores, Acid Witch, Child Bite, INCITE, Against the Grain,...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 24, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Review, Stagestruck
Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield is ending its impressive summer season with a pair of productions, one celebrating a 50-year-old milestone, the other confronting our troubled present. On the mainstage, a lovingly rendered revival of West Side Story, running...
by Gina Beavers | Aug 23, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Music
“King of the Surf Guitar” Dick Dale is at the Iron Horse tonight. Dale “pretty much invented the style single-handedly.” Just think of Pulp Fiction’s reintroduction to “Misirlou.” He’s the precursor to Jimi Hendrix and...
by Gina Beavers | Aug 22, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Music
Louis Dunphy’s Celtic Crossings began in 2005 as a LIVE radio program on WMUA 91.1fm Amherst and now airs every Sunday morning @ 7am on The River. The show focuses on Celtic music and often hosts nationally and internationally recognized performers with live...
