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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 Dusty Christensen | Jul 12, 2022 | Articles, Featured, Uncategorized
Ilya Tunitskiy arrived in the United States when he was 7 years old, his family, who are Jewish, having fled religious persecution in Tajikistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Tunitskiy said he grew up to be a normal teenager who, like so many others,...
by Emily Thurlow | Jul 12, 2022 | Articles, Featured
When Taurean Bethea came out as a gay man at 33 years old, he never pictured himself waving a flag or marching in a parade about it. “It wasn’t something I felt was needed. Like, why do I need to announce my orientation? It just didn’t make sense to me,” he said. But...
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 Jennifer Levesque | Apr 29, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Featured
Treating yourself to a night (or day) out can sometimes feel like you have to alter your everyday life to squeeze in that extra me-time. Do you feel guilty for that? You shouldn’t. Mental health awareness month is right around the corner, and with a pandemic that has...
by Steve Pfarrer | Apr 28, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Featured
Just under a couple years ago, Nayana LaFond, like so much of the world, was stuck at home, sheltering from COVID-19. The Athol artist, who until that point had mostly been a semi-abstract painter, was looking both to keep busy and maybe take on a new project. In...
by Dusty Christensen | Apr 28, 2022 | Articles, Featured, News
When police raided a house at 276 Amherst St. in Granby earlier this year, they described finding an “elaborate” marijuana grow operation with nearly 1,400 plants, an extensive lighting system for six grow rooms and a packaging operation. The person they arrested,...
by Dusty Christensen | Apr 28, 2022 | Articles, Featured
Seen from the road, the commercial warehouse at 17 East St. is unassuming. A garage door opens up to a sally port in the front with a drab office building connected to the side. The ambitions of its owners, however, are anything but modest; they want their new...
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 Abbey Soukup | Apr 28, 2022 | Featured
Tucked in the back of INSA’s Easthampton headquarters on Pleasant Street is a little slice of heaven. Like any restaurant with great food, the kitchen is where the action is at — and at INSA, it’s a place that combines the sweet smells of chocolate, sugar, and, yes,...
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 Dusty Christensen and Abigail Soukup | Feb 24, 2022 | Articles, Featured, News
The machines inside Analytics Labs seem like futuristic, esoteric devices. Workers in lab coats move around instruments with names like Agilent High-Performance Liquid Chromatography System, performing what seems like complicated science experiments. But the work that...
by Bob Flaherty | Feb 24, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Featured
The call went out for actors who were good at Shakespeare. It was quickly answered by a white-haired man in a black overcoat and low-brimmed hat: “Hath not a Jew eyes?” pleads Joe Vincent in a roiling voice. “If you prick us, shall we not bleed? If you tickle us,...
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 Steve Pfarrer | Feb 24, 2022 | Arts, Featured
When documentary photographer Jill Freedman died in 2019, she left behind a huge body of work focused on people living on the margins in urban American, on protestors against poverty and war, and on cops and firefighters doing their intense work day after day. “I...
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 Bob Flaherty | Jan 27, 2022 | Articles, Featured
Before the cellphone contagion, what games did families play during long trips in the car? Spotting license plates from other states or guessing the names of passing motorists kept our cherubs amused,: “Oh, that’s a Fester for sure!” These days, you could keep the...
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 Bob Flaherty | Sep 14, 2021 | Articles, Featured
When it’s right in front of you, like the nine decaying cherry trees on Northampton’s Warfield Place that the city of Northampton recently removed in order to rebuild the road and sidewalk, residents lose their minds. Some likened the tree-cutting “violence” to napalm...
by Monte Belmonte | Sep 14, 2021 | Articles, Featured
When disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo blamed his poor behavior on being Italian, I cringed. To quote Lady Gaga, “I’m Italian-American.” Aren’t there enough negative Italian stereotypes to deal with besides lecherous pervert? We’re supposed to talk with our...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Sep 14, 2021 | Articles, Featured
Dear Yana, From your perspective as a sex educator and relational therapist, what are your thoughts about how to know if two people have sexually grown apart due to outgrowing one another sexually or whether a relational sexual reboot is just needed? I guess...
by Dusty Christensen | Sep 14, 2021 | Articles, Featured
In the world of marijuana breeders and growers, Gregory Krzanowski is royalty. But you wouldn’t necessarily know it by searching that name on the internet. Search “Chemdog,” however, and information abounds about the 48-year-old’s famous cannabis “cultivar,” as...
by Steve Pfarrer | Sep 14, 2021 | Articles, Featured
When it comes to art, September has usually been an especially busy time in the Valley, as college galleries and museums unveil new exhibits to welcome back students and faculty, and area galleries display their monthly changes as well. Last fall, the pandemic shut...
by Joanna Buoniconti | Sep 14, 2021 | Articles, Featured
If the billboards popping up on the Massachusetts Turnpike are any indication, cannabis-infused seltzers are becoming the new “must-have” product for cannabis consumers. But what exactly is a cannabis-infused seltzer? How is it made? And what’s the appeal? We turned...
by Advocate Staff | Sep 7, 2021 | Articles, Featured
Arcadia Folk Festival returnsNORTHAMPTON – Signature Sounds Presents and Mass Audubon announce the return of the third annual Arcadia Folk Festival on Sept. 19, at Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary, 127 Combs Road, Easthampton. This outdoor fall musical event, which will...
