Columns
The V-Spot with Yana Tallon-Hicks: How do I transfer my solo orgasms to partnered sex?
Hi Yana, I have no problem with giving myself an orgasm with a vibrator on my clit, but I’ve never managed to orgasm with a partner. I’m OK with that — I’ve greatly enjoy partnered sex without orgasm, but I’d love to broaden my orgasmic horizons. Even bringing the...
Stagestruck: Putting Down My Pen
I filed my first article for the Advocate in May 1986. This one is my last. After 36 years and some 2,000 reviews, previews, features, interviews and musings, I’m giving up my ticket to the critic’s proverbial aisle seat and taking my place in line at the box office....
Stagestruck: Backstage Stars
One night last month I was at the Academy of Music for a show, and there, behind the concession stand, was Nikki Beck. “Are there three of you?” I asked, amazed. She laughed and said, “Probably.” Nikki is one of the busiest theater people around. You’ll never see her...
Stagestruck: Christmas at the Darcys’
In this season of entertainments that cater to our appetite for cozy tradition (I’m talking about you, Nutcracker, Messiah and Christmas Carol), two shows next weekend hit the nostalgia nerve from a different angle, adding a holiday-themed sequel to a classic love...
Stagestruck: Wit and Wile on the Riviera
As winter approaches, National Theatre Live serves up a summertime tonic (as in, gin and). The live-capture of the National’s stylish Much Ado About Nothing screens twice this month in the big theater at Amherst Cinema, the Valley’s indispensable film house. Director...
Stagestruck: Riot Grrrls
When I was in London this fall, I saw two shows that turn received history on its head. In the West End, I finally caught up with the long-running mini-musical SIX, in which the half-dozen wives of Henry VIII sing their side of the story. And at the Globe, a new,...
Stagestruck: Becomings
In the Valley this weekend and next, there’s a show in which a man becomes a woman, one in which a man becomes a feminist, and a few more that feature (mostly) women who promise to become hilarious. The latter shows all spring from the same fertile source, Pam...From the V-Spot Vault: The Love is There, But the Sex Isn’t
Editor’s note: this article originally ran June 10, 2019. Hi Yana, Over the course of the last couple months my partner’s sex drive has slowly fallen off, and is now creating tension in our relationship. We’ve been together for nine months, and...
Monte Belmonte Wines: A deep drink of Question 3
While getting out my glasses (wine glasses, not reading glasses) and preparing to write this column, I had a new email message from the mailing list of Four Seasons Wine & Liquors in Hadley. While most of their subject lines read “For The Woman You Love: Wine...
Stagestruck: A Fall Harvest for the Theater
Next month on area stages (and a screen), three shows featuring women front and center, bucking prejudice, expectations, even labels. Plus, a musical farce with a woman in a beard. That one first. “Die Fledermaus,” the fall offering from Valley Light Opera, is the...
Stagestruck: Fall Harvest – a cornucopia of theater, music & dance
Next month on area stages (and a screen), three shows that place women front and center, bucking prejudice, expectations, even labels. Plus, a musical farce featuring a woman with a goatee. That one first. Die Fledermaus, the fall offering from Valley Light Opera, is...
Stagestruck: A Happenin’ Weekend
Two shows happening in Franklin County this weekend (c’mon Hampshire, it’s not that far) – one an actual happening, the other a comedy about politics that we could wish were actually happening. The comedy, opening at Silverthorne Theater Company on Friday for a...
Stagestruck: Angela and Lefty
I went to college with Angela Davis, though we moved in different circles. One of us was a campus radical, marching for peace and justice, the other was a serious student focused on getting good grades. The good student was Angela; I was the peace-marcher (and...
Stagestruck: Love and War
The funniest show I’ve ever seen onstage I didn’t see onstage. It was One Man, Two Guv’nors, the runaway hit that began at London’s National Theatre, went on to Broadway, and made a star of James Corden. I saw it onscreen at the Amherst Cinema, part of the NT Live...
Stagestruck: Roots & Wings
The title of the Puppets in the Green Mountains festival that was supposed to happen two years ago came from Goethe: “There are two things that parents should give their children: roots and wings.” Sandglass Theater’s biennial puppetfest revives this month, after the...
Stagestruck: Dancing (and Singing) Queens
Danny Eaton opened the Majestic Theater 25 years ago with a jukebox musical, The Buddy Holly Story. So it’s fitting that this anniversary season on the West Springfield stage kicks off with another hit-parade show – and closes next spring with The Buddy Holly Story....
Stagestruck: The Colossus of Roads
His name was Moses, his chosen people were New Yorkers escaping summer in the city, his promised land was Jones Beach, and his Red Sea crossing was a borough-slicing expressway to Long Island Sound. He was Robert Moses, the fascinating, maddening subject of a smart,...
Monte Belmonte wines: Three wines sure to cure a white wine funk
When I go to Pita Pockets in Northampton I always get the shawarma pocket, hot. When I go to Mesa Verde in Greenfield, I always get the blackened chicken burrito with chipotle sour cream. When I go to Captain Jack’s in Easthampton, I always get “Just Clams.” I am a...
The V-Spot with Yana Tallon-Hicks: What actually makes for good sex
After over a decade of doing this work, I firmly believe that everybody who is interested in having sex wants to be good at it. Or, at the very least, they want to have sex that is good rather than sex that is not. Meaning, we are motivated to experience good...
Stagestruck: Black Plays Matter
2020’s Summer of Rage following the murder of George Floyd — another “last straw” in police killings of Black men — gave rise to much soul-searching in many areas of American society, including the theater community. Some of the fruits were on view this summer. Most...
Stagestruck: Don’t Pass Over This One
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...
Stagestruck: The Land on Which We Dance
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...
Stagestruck: Brothers in Blood
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...
Stagestruck: Turning in the Keys
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...
Stagestruck: Tropical Tolstoy
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,...
Stagestruck: Wars, Merry and Cold
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...
Stagestruck: Pillow in Motion
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,...
Stagestruck: Small Disasters
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...
Monte Belmonte Wines: The wine world is your oyster
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...The V-Spot with Yana Tallon-Hicks: I’m Threatened By My Girlfriend’s Masturbation Habits
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...
Stagestruck: Two Schools, Worlds Apart
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...
Stagestruck: Once, Upon a Stage
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...
Stagestruck: B.R.O.K.E.N code B.I.R.D switching
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...
Stagestruck: Bodies of Evidence
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...
Stagestruck: Hot-Weather Hits
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...
Stagestruck: Annotated Austen
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...
Stagestruck: Out and Proud
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...
Stagestruck: The Artist and the Rebel
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...
Stagestruck: Calling the Ancestors
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...
Stagestruck: Complete Works and Half Life
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...
Monte Belmonte Wines: Chardo-haters Gonna Hate
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...
The V-Spot with Yana Tallon-Hicks: Am I Polysaturated or Polyinfatuated?
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...
Stagestruck: Live on Screen
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...
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Stagestruck: Movie/Theater Face-Off
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...
Monte Belmonte Wines: Something wicked this way comes
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...
The V-Spot: Help a New Top Hit Their Kinky Stride
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,...
Passing the Torch
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...
Stagestruck: High Wireless Act
“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....
Monte Belmonte Wines: The end of sparkling isolation?
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...
Stagestruck: Coming Back to Live – Theaters took to the stage again this year, cautiously and creatively
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,...
Stagestruck: From Silver Screen to Holiday Stage
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...
Stagestruck: Deck Us All
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...
Stagestruck: Bright Half Life
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...
Stagestruck: Singin’ in the Storm
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...
Stagestruck: Identity Crises
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...
Stagestruck: Ah, Wilderness! – race-blind or race-conscious?
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...
Back from the Edge – Gateway City Arts almost died last year. Now it’s being reborn.
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...
Stagestruck: An Absurdity of Chairs
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...
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