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by Jack Brown | Feb 14, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
Listen, I love my kids. I do. But it’s been a long winter around here. The holiday season was a terrible round-robin of stomach bugs, the heat went on the fritz in their bedroom, and a cold snap kept us cooped up in the house on days when their energy level could have...
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 11, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
How’s this for genre mashups: Brontë gothic in which two of the characters are animals. Wildean romcom in which all the actors are women. Golden Age Spain in which a woman lives as a man. Multidisciplinary invention in which diversity seeks community. Renaissance...
by Will Meyer | Feb 8, 2019 | Basemental, Columns, Featured, Music
Hadley’s Mike Parham, whose solo moniker is Mibble, recently released a new album, “Welcome the Earth Dog.” Parham’s superb home recordings sound like miniature musical collages, complete with sound effects, samples, and a lackadaisical posture towards the...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Feb 8, 2019 | Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hi Yana, I’m currently in a long-term monogamous relationship with my partner, and I am really interested in transitioning our relationship from monogamy to non-monogamy. At my request this past summer, we tried non-monogamy after identifying and agreeing to clear...
by Monte Belmonte | Feb 4, 2019 | Columns, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
In my last column, I gave you a brief how-to in regards to opening a bottle of wine. It’s a seemingly easy enterprise that is terrifying for far too many people. For some reason, wine and all that surrounds wine is just like that. Complicated. Confusing....
by Chris Rohmann | Feb 4, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
When Nora Helmer famously slammed the door on her empty marriage at the end of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, she changed the course of theatrical history, and social history as well. But shutting the door on one story implicitly opened another, and thus left a...
by Jack Brown | Feb 1, 2019 | Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki has always kept a close tether to the world around him. In wonderfully thoughtful films like My Neighbor Totoro and Pom Poko, beloved by young and old (and crowds and critics) alike, he has eagerly yet tenderly explored our human...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 27, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Theater, Sheryl Stoodley firmly believes, “can be the starting point for conversations – much-needed at this point in our United States and in the world.” To that end, Serious Play, the theater Stoodley leads, “works toward reshaping society’s conversation on...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 22, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In a program note for The Engagement Party, Samuel Baum says his play is “an exploration of secrets and lies.” Which puts it right in his wheelhouse, as his credits include the TV psycho-crime drama Lie to Me and the movie Wizard of Lies. He says he’s also interested...
by Monte Belmonte | Jan 21, 2019 | Columns, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
“How do I use this wine opening contraption?” “What if I get cork in the wine?” “What if the cork breaks in half?” “Why didn’t I just buy the one with the screw-cap?” “Can you please open this for me?” Being the closest thing my family has to a “wine expert,” it...
by Hunter Styles | Jan 18, 2019 | Columns, Featured, The Beerhunter
More than two dozen breweries opened in Massachusetts last year, and we should expect even more growth in 2019. If we see fewer brewery openings over time, it will be because craft beer fans have so many locally-loved businesses to buy from. More than ever, we’re...
by Jennifer Levesque | Jan 18, 2019 | Columns, Featured, Valley Show Girl
While exploring the rainforest and meeting up with friends in beach towns in Puerto Rico, Matthew King sipped on mojitos while chatting with me via email about his latest musical conquest, TapRoots. Since 2009, Matthew has been playing percussion with both The...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 20, 2018 | Featured
Best of the Valley Readers’ Poll The poll will be open from noon on December 20th through 5 p.m. on January 31st. For over thirty years, the people of Western Massachusetts have been making their voice heard by voting in the Valley Advocate’s Best of the...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 17, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stagestruck
Allyn Burrows, Shakespeare & Company’s artistic director, calls it “a great way to get out in the middle of winter … a great opportunity for the audience to let their imaginations just run wild.” It’s the theater’s annual Studio Festival, a weekend of...
by Chris Rohmann | Jan 13, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Barely two weeks into the new year and already my theatergoing calendar is crowded with upcoming shows. From an operatic Sweeney Todd to a historical fantasy to a “pseudo-historical psycho-romance,” to pick three for this month, 2019 is off to a promising start. The...
by Will Meyer | Jan 10, 2019 | Basemental, Columns, Featured
Earlier this month, the inconceivable happened. I got word that my friends were playing a punk show in the Hampshire Mall, in the sports bar arm of “PINZ”— a combination boutique bowling alley, arcade, and faux-industrial looking bar decorated with enough flat-screen...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 30, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Six theater companies form a kind of chain across the southern and western Berkshires. From the closest to the Valley to the farthest, they are the hilltowns’ Chester Theatre Company, then westward (passing dance mecca Jacob’s Pillow) to Shakespeare & Company in...
by Hunter Styles | Dec 24, 2018 | Columns, Featured, The Beerhunter
Delayed breweries in Buckland and West Springfield open their doors The craft beer tide is rising, and it is lifting many local brewers into the role of small business owners. But this work isn’t always smooth sailing. In recent weeks, I’ve been chatting with the...
by Monte Belmonte | Dec 24, 2018 | Columns, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
According to the Gospel of John, Jesus’ first miracle was turning water into wine. A miracle he performed at the request of his mother. His mother who, as the story goes, was subjected to the shame and embarrassment of being Jane The Virgin-ed at the hands (or perhaps...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 19, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
I attended over 30 theater productions in the Valley this year, but that wasn’t half of what was on stage. What struck me most was the variety of fare – from the breadth of established companies’ seasons, to the ethnic and gender diversity on campus stages, to...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 14, 2018 | Advocate Sessions, Featured, Music
Ali Kat and the Revelators perform rocking funk and soul with sax, guitars, and high energy vocals. Check out the band’s Advocate Sessions performance in the video below. Interview with Ali Kat and the Revelators:
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 14, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
What is there to say that you don’t already know about Hamilton, the game-changing musical that costs a bank loan to see on Broadway and is now on tour, where this month it’s at the Bushnell in Hartford for only an ATM max-out? Playing through Dec. 30 (by far the...
by Will Meyer | Dec 14, 2018 | Basemental, Columns, Featured
November brought with it not one, not two, but three Mal Devisa releases. First, on November 9th, came a full-length titled Shade and the Little Creature and a complementary EP called Mystery Tsrain, presumably named for the Amherst record shop. And a few days later,...
by Monte Belmonte | Dec 11, 2018 | Columns, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
When I started pursuing wine snobbery, I would’ve identified myself as a “red wine drinker.” Now that I have academically pursued alcoholism for the better part of a decade, one should expect some hard-core side-eye from me if you deign to say something as audacious...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Dec 11, 2018 | Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hi Yana, I met a man on Tinder about a year ago, and we were unable to meet in person for over a month due to scheduling issues. In that time, we texted everyday for hours and when we were finally able to meet in person, I felt an intense connection with him. We met...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 8, 2018 | Advocate Sessions, Featured
Mtali Banda Oneness Project performs meditative jazz alongside R&B and gospel influences. Check out the group’s Valley Advocate Sessions performance in the video below. Interview with Mtali Banda Oneness Project:
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 2, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Harrison David Rivers specifies that his play When Last We Flew takes place in “a small town in Kansas (NOT Kansas City).” He also specifies that all eight characters are people of color. And that two of them are gay. As it opens, we find 17-year-old Paul in the...
by Monte Belmonte | Nov 27, 2018 | Columns, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
From a fermentation perspective, your traditional “hard” cider is basically apple wine. It certainly isn’t beer. No hops. No malts. Just apple juice and the magical yeast that turns sugar into alcohol. So, I hope you’ll indulge me in this, a wine column, as I write...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Nov 27, 2018 | Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hi Yana! When it comes to sex, I’ve never really cared for it to begin with. Then, five years ago, I found out I have genital herpes, and that put an even bigger damper on things. I’ve had sexual partners since then, but having to have “the talk” before getting...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 26, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In a program note for his play The War and Walt Whipple, now running at the Majestic Theater, author/director Danny Eaton describes the play’s page-to-stage gestation. First, “a few friends” saw a draft and offered comments, leading to a staged reading with audience...
by Jack Brown | Nov 21, 2018 | Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
If you’ve ever been on a pair of skis, you know the feeling: a strange and exhilarating mixture of lightness and speed, freedom and danger, that feels a bit like a giddy dream of flight and a bit like you’re cheating death. And while today’s aerialists — particularly...
by Hunter Styles | Nov 21, 2018 | Articles, Columns, Featured, The Beerhunter
As a kid, I would sometimes wander the aisles of Don Gleason’s Camping Supply on Pearl Street in Northampton and daydream about living off the grid. In unchaperoned moments I’d climb in the tents, test flashlights, browse survival kits, and plan my inevitable,...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 19, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Every couple of years, Danny Eaton premieres a new play of his at the Majestic Theater, which he founded and leads. They range through topics dear to him, often touching on military service and veterans (he’s one himself) and all of them, in one way or another,...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 9, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
I’ll get right to the point. The King Lear I saw last weekend courtesy of NT Live is the most thoughtfully conceived, perceptively acted and richly achieved production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy I’ve ever seen. It stars Ian McKellen, and that in itself more...
by Advocate Staff | Oct 12, 2018 | Featured, Music, Valley Advocate Sessions
Moxie is a soulful teenage indie pop and rock group from Brattleboro, VT, and also our 100th act to be featured on Advocate Sessions. Check out Moxie’s set below alongside an interview with the band and a special 100th Sessions Video Retrospective in which David...
by Jennifer Levesque | Oct 11, 2018 | Columns, Featured, Valley Show Girl
On January 13, 2017, Neon Fauna played a gig at 13th Floor Music Lounge in Florence in the midst of recording sessions for the full-length album “Drag Beach.” Like all of their shows, the band felt it was a burst of energy and thought of bootlegging it. Sound engineer...
by Monte Belmonte | Nov 8, 2018 | Columns, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
The sound was terrifying. It was like nothing I’ve ever heard in the Valley. Was it the high-pitched, piercing shriek of a machine, desperately in need of lubrication? No. It was birds. Thousands of birds. A scene and a sound straight out of the Hitchcock movie....
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Oct 11, 2018 | Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hi Yana, I made a rookie mistake. I had a spur-of-the-moment, sober threesome with a couple I’ve been friends with for over 12 years. They visited me from across the country. We are very close friends and I’m feeling very tender now. I’m feeling like it wasn’t a big...
by Jack Brown | Nov 8, 2018 | Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
Like so many, I have been glued to my radio these last few weeks, as ever-changing reports have been released about the death of Saudi journalist and author Jamal Khashoggi. Those horrifying reports have often been paired with reports from the Saudi Arabia-Yemen...
by Monte Belmonte | Oct 11, 2018 | Columns, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
“It’s a white boys’ game, dude. When I first went to take the somm exam, I had this idea that there is going to be one other black person there and it’s going to be a woman. And there’ll be, like, two Indian guys and everyone else will be white. There was actually one...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 8, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Two productions in the Valley this weekend and next share Latin American roots, and couldn’t be more dissimilar. One is a colorful musical celebrating a New York barrio, the other a surreal movement-theater piece celebrating two surrealists. The sensational success of...
by Jack Brown | Oct 11, 2018 | Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
Even as a young actor, Robert Redford often carried himself with the quiet dignity of an old-timer. In films like The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Redford combined his boyish charm and good looks with a steady center that seemed borrowed from an older...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 5, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Three plays in the Valley this weekend and next tackle provocative questions of art and identity. A woman musician is deprived of a career because of her gender. Two writers tangle in a carnal mix of sex and ambition. And an actor looks at the black experience via...
by Chris Goudreau | Oct 9, 2018 | Featured, News
Every Tuesday during open mic night at Bishop’s Lounge in Northampton, Longmeadow artist Max Rudolph rolls out dozens of pages of artwork—each spanning more than 10 feet long—across the tables in back and asks people to pick up a crayon or marker and draw whatever...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Nov 1, 2018 | Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hi Yana, I started dating a girl recently who always wears really long nails. Like the type that are super pointy at the end and as long as her pinky fingers are (they are super cool!). After we started dating she mentioned something about thinking about cutting them,...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 9, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
A demon barber, a cockroach killer, a charitable speller, a balletic frog. This month, up and down the Valley, indoors and out, intimate and expansive, there’s a seasonal bounty of performances to choose from. The Royal Frog Ballet is an “amoeba of...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 30, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
An instant evening of theater cooked up in a single day; a 19th-century musical with 21st-century themes; a multi-disciplinary evocation of “what is left when memory is gone.” This weekend in the Valley, there’s a diverse trio of shows to choose from – or see...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 26, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
In Shakespeare’s time, actors wore their own clothes with token costume pieces, they performed on a bare platform, and they were all male. Those facts are the springboard of Elizabeth Williamson’s vision for her production of Henry V, which plays at Hartford Stage...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 3, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
A desperate young woman, Ersilia Drei, has attempted suicide. From her hospital bed, she spins a heartrending, headline-grabbing story for an opportunistic reporter. His article draws a circle of interested parties into her twisting orbit: The novelist who sees in her...
by Hunter Styles | Oct 26, 2018 | Featured, The Beerhunter
Jay Sullivan joins me at a taproom table and sets down a bottle of Real Friends. He flicks open the bottle, then lines up three glasses: one for himself, one for Sean Nolan, and one for me. The beer is a grisette, a Belgian-style farmhouse ale similar to a saison,...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 28, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Stage, Stagestruck
The live-capture stage-to-screen season at the Amherst Cinema has begun, with a lineup of adaptations of world classics from the London stage – a dance-happy movie musical, a steamy exploration of transgressive desire, a surreal whodunnit, a Gothic horror story – plus...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Oct 26, 2018 | Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hi Yana! I’ve been struggling a bit for the last few weeks. I’m a little bitty trans guy who recently had top surgery and I somehow managed to get it bad for my surgeon. Fantasizing about her is one thing (I should also mention that I’m a sub), but it’s grown into...
by Jennifer Levesque | Sep 28, 2018 | Columns, Featured, Valley Show Girl
Since this past March/April time-frame, I’ve been booking some shows at 13th Floor Music Lounge in Florence. The shows started in July, but it took months to get to the actual show part of it. I wanted to curate these shows a little differently, and put a somewhat...
by Monte Belmonte | Oct 26, 2018 | Columns, Featured, Monte Belmonte Wines
Airports are not known for elegance. They exist in a particular hell, somewhere between a hospital and the Registry of Motor vehicles. Bad food, bad lighting, an unwelcome groping from a TSA agent: all to ready ourselves as we prepare to experience the miracle of...
by Hunter Styles | Sep 28, 2018 | Columns, Featured, The Beerhunter
The mountain drive from Montpelier up to Burlington is, of course, beautifully scenic. But a Valley Beerhunter has homework to do, even on the occasional summer camping trip. So I pulled off the highway last month in Williston, VT to stop in at Burlington Beer...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Sep 28, 2018 | Columns, Featured, The V-Spot
Hi Yana, I gave birth a beautiful baby girl about three months ago. And it’s wonderful! She is a good sleeper and I generally feel like “we got this.” Problem is, I’ve had, like, zero libido since I gave birth. My husband is clearly (politely) dying...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 24, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
“What am I bid for this fine specimen of white manhood?” The swaggering black auctioneer scans the audience of prospective buyers, who quickly bid the price up, until the white man on the auction block goes to the jubilant winner for a fat five-figure sum. This...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 22, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Barack Obama and Ann Richards both sprang to national prominence with sensational speeches at a Democratic National Convention. Richards’ came in 1988, and she used the opportunity to pitch her unique brand of tough-minded common-sense liberalism and kick sand on the...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 26, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
Playwright Taylor Mac has described Hir as “a kitchen-sink drama.” Which is fair, as long as you understand that the sink in question is full of filthy dishes and fresh vomit. The genre- and gender-bending play, at Shakespeare & Company through October 7, begins...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 24, 2018 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Review, Stage, Stagestruck
This weekend and next, two theater companies demonstrate, once again, the breadth and variety of Valley stages. In Greenfield, Silverthorne Theater Company opens a two-week run of “six unruly comedies” by America’s cheekiest stage satirist, Christopher Durang. In...
