Columns
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...
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 Yana Tallon-Hicks | Mar 2, 2021 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hello Yana! I’m curious about my sexuality. I have, for the majority of my life, thought I was a heterosexual male. But at times I have thought maybe I am bisexual. I’m aware that sexuality is a spectrum. I just don’t know where I land on that spectrum. I have a...
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 Monte Belmonte | Dec 10, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
Almost from day one of the pandemic lockdown, Sharon Swihart has been living with the irony — and a little bit of guilt — that, as a wine manager, she is an “essential worker.” “My life has not changed at all in the pandemic’s wake,” says Swihart, the wine buyer at...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Dec 10, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Dear Yana, I’ve been texting with this guy during quarantine and it’s been very fun and hot. I boss him around and give him writing assignments in exchange for photos of myself which he is suitably grateful for. However, recently he sent me an unsolicited dick pic....
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 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 Monte Belmonte | May 14, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
“You like hip-hop? First you got Chardonnay…it’s like the granddaddy of wine. It’s versatile, smooth…it’s like the Jay-Z of wine. This is how Elijah, played by Mamudou Athie, describes wine in the new Netflix movie Uncorked. It follows Elijah on his...
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 Jennifer Levesque | Apr 22, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Music, Valley Show Girl
Pioneer Valley natives Kara Rose Wolf, Kerrie T. Bowden and Laura Marie Picchi are soul sisters. Their trio, Eavesdrop is musical proof. They combine three-part vocals with percussion and acoustic guitar into their style. A mixture of Americana, folk, pop and soul,...
by Monte Belmonte | Apr 22, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
You may have recently seen the New York Times story about the anglicized version of the Finnish word kalsarikannit. The translation, and the trending hashtag that goes with it, is #pantsdrunk. It’s part of the Finnish of knowing you’re going nowhere, taking your...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Apr 22, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hi Yana! It’s been a month of quarantine, and my boyfriend’s and my different feelings about it are really starting to show. He’s taking more of a wait-this-out approach by sleeping a lot, playing video games, not keeping much of a schedule, etc. I’m working really...
by Jack Brown | Apr 22, 2020 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
As we all navigate our way through this new landscape of isolation and social distancing, most of us have lost the small local connections we once took for granted. The familiar hello of a barista who poured our morning coffee, the nod of the bus driver who brought us...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Apr 15, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hi Yana, I have a high sex drive and my partner has a low sex drive. How do I navigate this? My sex life has been leaving me disappointed for a while now but I’m afraid of putting pressure on my partner. If I ask for sex I feel like I’m coercing them into it and it...
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 Hunter Styles | Apr 9, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The Beerhunter
This article was supposed to be about gathering in large groups. Less than a month ago, I had planned to dedicate this craft beer column to a preview of White Lion Brewing Company’s new taproom and facility in downtown Springfield, which is currently under...
by Jennifer Levesque | Apr 8, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Valley Show Girl
One day late last week I scrolled through Facebook to find memes to laugh at and maybe some new music to check out. I came across a video that three or more of my friends shared. “Oh yeah!” I got excited when I saw the preview image of the YouTube video of Agawam...
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 Yana Tallon-Hicks | Apr 8, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Dear Yana, I’ve been in a relationship for the last five months. Our relationship is hard for me to describe — it isn’t full of issues nor passion. I’m used to being in relationships that are explosive and demanding, volatile. This relationship I would...
by Chris Goudreau | Apr 1, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Music, The CDs You Gave Me
Western Mass-based experimental/math rock duo Fred Cracklin takes its name from a live action character played by Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore in the 1990s animated science fiction comedy “Space Ghost Coast to Coast.” The series is set up as a surreal...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Apr 1, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hi Yana, I’m writing to see if you have any advice for the polyamorous community during the COVID-19 outbreak. While there aren’t many cases in Hampshire County [as of writing this question on March 20], my partner and I have decided to work from home and...
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 Jennifer Levesque | Mar 27, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Music, Valley Show Girl
A few weeks ago, before this whole quarantine thing happened, I ventured over to downtown Greenfield to catch what would be my last show for quite a bit. I parked my car just in time to see two people pass my parking spot with medical face masks on. If only I knew...
by Jack Brown | Mar 25, 2020 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
It might seem silly to have a local film column this week. As I write, public schools are shutting down for a three-week hiatus, restaurants are shifting strictly to takeout service, and we’re all avoiding crowds. The long-running Pioneer Valley Jewish Film Festival...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Mar 23, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hi Yana, Middle-aged straight guy here. I’m in a committed, monogamous relationship with a partner who I love very much. We have a great and satisfying physical sex life though naturally there are dry spells, particularly during the winter-time. I love my partner very...
by Monte Belmonte | Mar 18, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
With the threat of coronavirus, the increasing potential that we will have at least four more years of a demagogue in the highest office, and Tom Brady considering leaving the Patriots, we are living in the End Times. You need to get yourself prepared. “Preppers”...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Mar 17, 2020 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hi Yana, After 16 years of monogamy, my wife and I decided to try polyamory a few years ago. It’s going well and we’ve grown a lot. Our marriage is truly stronger than ever. We’ve learned a lot about ourselves, about relationships and, major bonus, the sex within our...
