Columns
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 11, 2013 | Stagestruck
Jonathan is dead. His ashes are in an urn on the side table and his wife, Zaida, is packing his things away in boxes. Then the front door opens and a man walks in “wearing his face”—Jonathan’s long-lost twin brother Ernie, too late to say...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 11, 2014 | Stagestruck
“It’s so subjective, isn’t it?” wrote a friend recently, sending me a glowing review of a play we’d both seen and both failed to glow over. Most of us critics do try to be objective, putting aside, or at least acknowledging, our...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 25, 2014 | Stagestruck
Left-Coast Classics Dateline Berkeley — Just because it was Christmastime, and we were visiting family and friends on the West Coast, didn’t mean I wasn’t going to see as much theater as I usually do. And I did, starting in holiday style with a...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 10, 2014 | Stagestruck
Every year or so, London’s +Royal National Theatre presents an original family-oriented play as a holiday-time entertainment. They’re often adapted from classic children’s or young-adult literature, inventively and often elaborately...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 19, 2014 | Stagestruck
I don’t go to the movies very often. It’s not that I don’t like movies, I just spend so much time seeing plays there’s little time for films. But there’s one cinema I attend regularly—to see plays. For five seasons, +the Amherst...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 9, 2014 | Stagestruck
I grew up in the theater. From the age of four I attended plays my father was in, and was trotting onstage myself soon afterward. I never wanted to be anything but an actor. Then, when I was 15, everything changed. I spent a summer at an arts camp in Vermont, where...
by Chris Rohmann | Mar 18, 2014 | Stagestruck
For the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about *The Merchant of Venice, since I’m directing it for the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School in a production that plays this coming weekend at the Academy of Music in Northampton. If you know...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 6, 2014 | Stagestruck
Having recently experienced War Horse, that British megahit from the National Theatre, I was eager to see the Bristol Old Vic’s production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which stopped at ArtsEmerson in Boston earlier this month on a U.S....
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 19, 2014 | Stagestruck
Two shows currently playing in Hartford (both through June 22) detail the vicissitudes of love and, even though there’s hardly a moment in either play when anyone is onstage alone, of loneliness. One is an often bittersweet kaleidoscope of 21st-century...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 2, 2014 | Stagestruck
Since the NT Live series of satellite broadcasts of performances from London’s National Theatre debuted five seasons ago, I’ve seen almost all of them. The Amherst Cinema is one of hundreds of venues that bring the stage shows to far-flung audiences who wouldn’t...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 9, 2014 | Stagestruck
“The Vinegar Works” began with an in-joke for PBS viewers: a recitation of Edward Gorey’s ghoulish alphabet poem “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears…”)...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 27, 2014 | Stagestruck
Ring Lardner was the master of comic fiction with a cynical edge and George s. Kaufman the master of urbane Broadway farce. When they teamed up in 1929 to adapt a Lardner show-biz story, the result was June Moon, an urbane romantic comedy with an ironic edge that...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 1, 2014 | Stagestruck
“Blow winds, and crack your cheeks!” shouts King Lear in Act 3 Scene 1 as he rages in the tragedy’s climactic storm. But on the night I saw the play last week, at the New York Public Theater’s free outdoor Shakespeare in the Park, that line...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 19, 2014 | Stagestruck
“Tap predates jazz,” explained Michelle Dorrance when introducing an informal showcase of work by her students at Jacob’s Pillow earlier this summer. That is, before the blue note came the shoe note. But Dorrance is no strict preservationist –...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 23, 2014 | Stagestruck
This could have had the makings of an uncomfortable evening in the theater: a young company in a new play written to order by a friend of theirs, with an opening-night house full of friends and supporters ready to laugh lustily at every suggestion of a joke. Given...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 6, 2014 | Stagestruck
Two shows I’ve seen in the past week, at opposite ends of the state but with a common link, have received glowing press and, judging from the nights I was in the house, enthusiastic audiences. Dancing Lessons, at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, is a...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 13, 2014 | Stagestruck
During an intermission feature that’s part of the National Theatre Live broadcast of A Streetcar Named Desire – this one beamed as a kind of guest showcase from a different London theater, the Young Vic – that theater’s artistic director, David...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 27, 2014 | Stagestruck
Theater in the Berkshires used to be a strictly summer affair, but in recent years three of the four major companies (Williamstown being the exception) have extended their hot-weather seasons into the fall and even winter, joined by upstart troupes/companies like WAM...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 11, 2014 | Stagestruck
Darko Tresnjak has a predilection for carefully composed stage pictures and a passion for symmetry. He’s also drawn to the arresting visual concept. In last year’s Twelfth Night, the set itself was a hedge maze, and in 2012’s The Tempest, both the...
by Gary Carra | May 3, 2013 | Blogs, News, Nightcrawler
We all knew the Midwest Rock ’n’ Roll Express had passenger cars. In fact, that tour is responsible for transporting three of the larger names in classic rock—Styx, REO Speedwagon and Ted Nugent—to various venues the country over, including...
by Gary Carra | Nov 5, 2013 | Blogs, News, Nightcrawler
The name of the new disc and tour—Lightning Bolt—may suggest a quick, intense burst of energy. But as Pearl Jam pushed its way past the 30-song, three-hour mark at Harford’s XL Center on Friday, Oct. 25, it was evident to all in the sold-out audience...
by Gary Carra | Jun 28, 2007 | Blogs, Music, Nightcrawler
Forgive Group Deville's Rick Murnane if he's not quite as bubbly as you'd expect him to be when he performs this Saturday, June 30 at Bishop's Lounge in Noho. Sure, that's the night he and his Group troupe will be celebrating their first release in...
by Gary Carra | Jun 28, 2007 | Blogs, Music, Nightcrawler
When the need arises, the folks at the Springfield Business Improvement District (SBID) can break out market projections, Powerpoint presentations and trend analyses with the best of them. In addressing the desires of Springfield restaurateurs and club owners to...
by Gary Carra | Jul 12, 2007 | Blogs, Music, Nightcrawler
It started as an opportunity for locals to sample savories from various area eateries and soak in the sounds of a few of the region's bigger bands. Since that summer of 1985, however, Committee President Scott Crosson says that his Enfield, Connecticut Fourth of...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Jan 14, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Having accomplished the majority of my boy-on-girl action in my teens and set up shop in lesbianland soon after that, I haven’t needed to put much serious thought into semen besides “Spit or swallow?” and “Please don’t fertilize...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Jan 14, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
On the way to famous sex columnist, I’ve been taking a (long) detour in “slashie” land as a waitress-slash-sex writer (thanks, liberal arts degree!). Lately, between bringing customers bread and interviewing my co-workers about their favorite...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Jan 29, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
In the shadow of the spotlight-hogging G-spot, deep in the invisible caverns of the vaginal interior, there lies a hidden gem: the A-spot. The new vaginal black, as it were, the A-spot (or “the cul-de-sac” as it’s sometimes called) is the new coital...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Mar 26, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Yesterday I watched porn for breakfast. I’m not usually an a.m. porn-watcher. But when Tristan Taormino (well, her assistant) sends me a porno in the mail, I feel special, and therefore inclined to add some extra “oh’s to my morning Cheerios. Tristan...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Apr 2, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Twenty dollars doesn’t go far these days (good thing orgasms are still free), but it’ll go farther in a sex toy store than you think. Just stay away from the cash-wasting penis tiaras and edible undies. Here’s to more banging for your twenty bucks....
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Apr 9, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Dear V-Spot,I am willing to bet I have a question that probably doesn’t come up very often, if ever. My boyfriend and I recently starting experimenting with “fisting.” It is such a turn-on to me that I have some of the most powerful orgasms ever...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Apr 16, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
After a Westfield reader’s fisting question was answered last week, I’m sure some of you have caught the highly contagious fisting fever. I mean, it’s fascinating, really—how do you get such a big, powerful symbol of strength into such a small...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Apr 23, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Today I went to the Bulb Show at Smith College’s greenhouse. Maybe it was the sticky humidity, the intoxicating floral scent, or the suggestive cacti towering next to the quivering folds of pink orchids, but it was the first time in quite a while that I’ve...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Apr 30, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
When my partner and I decided to travel around South America, we couldn’t imagine four months without a strap-on harness and dildo. Nor, upon finding out that good lube was hard to come by abroad, could we possibly live without Sliquid Sassy Booty Formula....
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | May 7, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
No one made putting a cute little bunny on your clitoris look better than my favorite promiscuous cougar Samantha from HBO’s series Sex and The City. This fictional femme fatale and her overacted orgasms made the original Rabbit Pearl and Rabbit Habit vibrators...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | May 14, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Feminist porn. To many, this sounds really oxymoronic. Yet I, a modern feminist, am constantly watching, getting off to and recommending you get off to porn. Allow me to explain. Porn can be violent, anti-feminist, degrading and exploitive. But it isn’t...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | May 18, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
For the past column, “Ahoy, Mateys! A Captain’s Guide to His Semen,” I was looking for an answer to a reader’s question about how to increase the volume of his ejaculate. While bulking him up with quite a load… of information, I stumbled...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | May 28, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Pride season is here! A bi-coastal girl, I’m most familiar with the GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer) Pride festivals in San Francisco and in our quaint little town of Northampton. San Francisco Pride is a massive affair of rainbows, ass-less chaps...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Jun 18, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Missionary can be cozy, comfortable and just the uncomplicated, satisfying position you need after a long workday. Even if you are feeling the universal sexual urge to “mix it up,” it can seem like Mission Impossible to get out of Missionary. Well, you...
by Yanna Tallon-Hicks | Jul 1, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
I wouldn’t dare call JimmyJane’s Form Series “toys.” Sure, technically they’re sex toys. But when JimmyJane’s (jimmyjane.com) founder Ethan Imboden and designer Yves B?har knocked the mental boots, an entirely different sexcessory...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Aug 12, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
I love getting people off. There’s something about the moment you glimpse that final spark in their eye before everything clicks and ah-hah! insecurities and hesitations melt away and it suddenly all makes sense. I’ve witnessed these climaxes in people 18...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Aug 19, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Sure, KY lube is enticing with those commercials where a shy couple simply touches the bottle and, pow! A suggestive hurricane hits, resulting in a pair of dazed looks and rumpled hair. Good thing they came up with that “Yours + Mine” formula, because what...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Aug 26, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
You’ve never been to a sex toy store. Or, maybe you went into one when you turned 18, just because you could. You laughed at the toys, flipped through some dirty books and left. Or you went to one a while ago (just to see what it was like), but didn’t like...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Sep 2, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Everyone’s always looking for the G-spot. With its reputation, who wouldn’t? So boys, how would you feel if I told you that you had a G-spot equivalent—the P-spot, which can lead to longer, stronger and multiple male orgasms? Now what if I told you...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Sep 9, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
If you read last week’s column (and did your homework) you’re probably at least intrigued about the male G-spot (the prostate, or P-spot), and, hopefully, those pesky myths about taking it up the you-know-what (it’s “gay”,...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Sep 16, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Excuses: unfortunately, that’s what many hear when it’s time to put on that condom. Who knew a little latex could be responsible for sensation loss, erectile dysfunction or inability to “really connect,” or that it could even make sex...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Sep 23, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Usually when one hears the word “porn,” intimate kissing scenes between real couples or romantic dramas aren’t what come to mind. Though the readily available “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am” adult flicks can be hot, they aren’t for...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Sep 30, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Whew! Dr. Arnold Kegel sure knows how to work out a girl’s vagina! Now, get your minds out of the gutter, dear readers, (this isn’t a porn script)—I’m talking about Kegel exercises. As they caused quite a stir a while back, you may have heard...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Oct 14, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
When people find out that I write about sex toys, they lean in to whisper the inevitable question: “So what’s the best?” Especially when it comes to vibrators, they’re always looking for The One, the guaranteed insta-orgasm. Though I hate to...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Oct 21, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Like many queer Northamptonites, I regularly pay my dues to the dance floors at Diva’s. When it’s time to do my private business, it warms my heart to see signs informing the club’s multi-gendered clientele that both bathrooms are open to everyone...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Oct 28, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
So you want to get spanked. Maybe called some dirty words. You want to get tied up, see her in a cheerleader’s uniform or bark like a dog for him. The easy answer is “Just do it,” but this isn’t a Nike ad, this is your sex life. And the fear...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Nov 4, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
After last week’s column, you and your partner are ready to get spicy. As one of the most common and multifaceted fetishes, you may be considering BDSM (bondage and discipline/domination and submission/sadism and masochism). Despite what many believe, BDSM is...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Nov 11, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Thanks to a little annoyance called biology, menopause changes female terrain pretty drastically. It’s understandable that post-menopausal dryness, soreness and tightening and deterioration of the inner vaginal walls may make sex more mentally and physically...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Nov 18, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Hi ,Yana. First I want to say I think your column rocks. Initially I was like, “Gasp! Where is Ask Isadora?” Then I read what you had to say, and I was like, “Hey, that was actually pretty good and informative.” I read this week’s P-Spot...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Nov 25, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
…but it doesn’t have to. Sure, for some, three’s a crowd. But for others, three’s a party. And a party’s always better with a little planning. Though there are all kinds of threesomes, I’m focusing on the couple/third-wheel variety,...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Dec 2, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
It’s no longer breaking news—in just the last few months, seven young gay/queer men have taken their own lives after being homophobically bullied. And though I’d love to write the usual column about cockrings or strap-ons, it can’t go...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Dec 9, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Though I don’t get these myself, from what I understand, erections are all about blood flow. Blood flows in, penis becomes erect, blood flows out, things get a little droopy. Unfortunately, tides change frequently and are hard to control. However, cockrings are...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Dec 16, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Though I am a let-it-all-hang-out, sex-revolution-encouraging sex columnist, I do understand that not everyone has the privilege of leaving their dildos in the dishwasher, their restraints attached to their bedposts and their favorite vibe in their purse “just...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Dec 16, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
I once made the mistake of telling a guy that not everyone likes having their G-spot touched. He stared at me with what could only be hatred for dispelling the myth that the G-spot is the be-all-end-all of female orgasms, the turbo switch, the one thing between him...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Dec 30, 2010 | Leisure, The V-Spot
The giving season is upon us. And we generous sex partners love to give. The thrifty side of me thinks the best sex-related gifts are porns or books about something you want to try with your sweetie (think Tristan Taormino’s Expert Guide to Threesomes or The...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Feb 1, 2011 | Leisure, The V-Spot
Ah, the blow job. Somewhere on the road to sex-god(ess), between reading the Kama Sutra and installing the sex swing, the once terrifying adolescent sexual initiation rite sadly becomes a mere pit stop between a faltering erection and penetrative sex. Big mistake. You...
