Columns
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 Monte Belmonte | Jul 12, 2022 | Articles, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines, Uncategorized
Why, then, the world’s mine oyster, Which I, with sword, will open. — William Shakespeare from The Merry Wives of Windsor Scott Soares’s world is an oyster. Well, his world when he is not being appointed by Presidents Obama and Biden to be USDA...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Jul 12, 2022 | Articles, Featured, The V-Spot, Uncategorized
Hey Yana, I’ve been in a serious relationship for almost two years now and am only now feeling strong flare-ups of intense insecurity around sex. My partner and I have been having sex every day at least once a day, if not two or three, consistently for the...
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 Advocate Staff | Apr 28, 2022 | Articles, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
I was in a certain local fine wine store, eavesdropping on a person who was picking out wines for a home wine tasting. I happened to be standing in front of a selection of Chablis, when I heard them say, “We need some white wines. Anything but Chardonnay!” I blushed...
by Advocate Staff | Apr 28, 2022 | Articles, Featured, The V-Spot
Dear Yana, As a polyamorous person who’s having much more success building new connections these days, I worry sometimes that I am dating from a feeling of not enoughness-ness, in a way that keeps me too focused on the new and the possible, and not enough with the...
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 Monte Belmonte | Feb 24, 2022 | Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines, Monte Belmonte Wines
The witches in “The Scottish Play” warned of a monster of their own making. But this witch may become the best damned spot to go out. Something wicked AWESOME this way comes! Chef Michaelangelo Wescott is opening a new restaurant on Main Street in Northampton, in the...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Feb 24, 2022 | Featured, The V-Spot
Dear Yana, I’m a former power bottom now freshly-turned Dom in a new dynamic. I’ve been finding that when my sub and I are apart, I’ve got a lot of great ideas of new things to do with her. Though I always vow to myself to try out those things when I’m with her next,...
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 Monte Belmonte | Jan 27, 2022 | Articles, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
I’m pretty sure it was the author/physician/scientist Vikram Paralkar who said it first, but it became a popular meme in the early days of the pandemic: “It’s only Quarantine if it’s in the Quarantine province of France. Otherwise, it’s sparkling isolation.” In March...
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...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 23, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Every year, in my annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod, I make sure to catch whatever is playing at Harbor Stage Company in Wellfleet, which describes itself as “a theater by the sea that’s right on the edge” and lives up to that billing. This year’s reduced schedule...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 22, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Here’s my second e-postcard from Cape Cod, following yesterday’s report on WHAT theater’s Nat Turner in Jerusalem. Up the Cape now, to Provincetown, where the play Tennessee Williams wrote in that town is being revived. Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie in 1943, when...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 20, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Every summer I spend a week on Cape Cod, enjoying the beach and, of course, the theater. This year I saw four shows at three Outer Cape theaters, two of which I haven’t visited in a while. The Provincetown Theater is reviving a classic that was written there; in...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 10, 2021 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
It’s August, and the summer theater season is winding down. No, wait. It’s not. Five Berkshire stages are running to the end of the month, and in the Valley, no fewer than six live-in-person productions will be vying for our attention this weekend alone. Here’s a...
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 Chad Cain | Jun 7, 2021 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
By Yana Tallon-Hicks I recently began a new relationship and am something of a late bloomer (I’m in my mid-20s), so I have very little actual experience when it comes to physical intimacy with a partner. My boyfriend and I have discussed it a bit, and he’s very...
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...
