Stage
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 19, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
In my last column, “Closing the Gender Gap,” I tallied the representation of women performers, playwrights and directors in the area’s professional theaters in 2016. I found some improvement in the gender balance, though we’re still a ways away from true parity....
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 17, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith is a gothic mystery-romance set in Victorian England. It’s a tale of devious crime, illicit love and cascading betrayals, with as many hairpin plot turns as a, well, as a Victorian novel. Alexa Junge’s stage adaptation, developed...
by Hunter Styles | Dec 12, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Newsletter, Stage
Company Time Before her days as the head of Northampton’s School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, Jen Polins directed the Catalyst dancers at South Hadley’s Pioneer Valley Performing Arts charter school for 17 years. In September, craving a return to that rewarding...
by Hunter Styles | Dec 5, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Music, Newsletter, Stage
Visions of Sugarplums Why mess with a good thing? The Albany Berkshire Ballet presents its annual tour of the holiday classic The Nutcracker with an eye toward elegant design, great music, and heartfelt performances. Artistic director Madeline Cantarella Culpo...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 5, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage
When I heard about Silverthorne Theater Company’s upcoming production of A Christmas Carol, set in a 1930s radio studio, I thought of the story Garrison Keillor tells about the early days of television, when flickering black-and-white images were luring audiences away...
by Advocate Staff | Nov 28, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Film, Food + Booze, Leisure, Music, Newsletter, Stage
A Spirited DebateOne of two things will happen to you when confronted with the bold and brassy acts of clairvoyance that Rebecca Anne LoCicero whips up onstage. One will be a sense of reluctant amazement. The other will be a deep, head-shaking skepticism. LoCicero has...
by Pete Vancini | Nov 28, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage
A Tale of Two Cities: Murdertown and Safeville It’s a tale of two cities: one is the self-declared “Safest Large City in America” while right next door, the other has earned the dubious distinction of “Murder Capital of the World.” Director Ruben Polendo and Theater...
by Hunter Styles | Nov 28, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage
Everything Goes Calling all designers, makers, artists, stylists, fashionistas, tattooers, dandies, body painters, costumers, and retailers: next Thursday, Easthampton turns all of its fashion dials up to a fabulous 11. The first-ever STRUT is an all-inclusive,...
by Chris Rohmann | Dec 14, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
You wouldn’t expect to find close connections between the Sinai desert, urban Serbia and the Appalachian mountains, but a new play by University of Massachusetts theater professor Milan Dragicevich brings them tellingly together. Refugee takes an episode from...
by Hunter Styles | Nov 28, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage
Unfinished Business Noel Coward’s surprisingly durable stage comedy Blithe Spirit debuted in London in 1941 and still hasn’t give up the ghost. In fact, it’s one of the longest running non-musical plays ever, having come to Broadway and appeared in film, on...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 27, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
I feel a kinship with the musical Once, because in a former life I did my own share of street-busking, like the bluejeaned lead in the 2007 film. It’s a simple, poignant tale that’s both heartrending and uplifting, filled with simple, tuneful songs that strike the...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 21, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Stage, Stagestruck
Every year I take note of the plays I’ve seen that are written and/or directed by women, and those that revolve around a woman (or women). For me, these are key indicators of progress in achieving gender equality in theater. To be sure, there are plenty of women...
by Hunter Styles | Nov 21, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage
Dress to Impress Writer and director Nora Ephron passed away in 2012 at the age of 71, leaving behind a legacy of enchanting romantic comedies like When Harry Met Sally… and Sleepless in Seattle. But even such a famous woman in Hollywood is not without her sleeper...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 16, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
In this time of national division and upheaval, we can be forgiven for craving a little feelgood. And what feels better than a good musical? As if on cue, two good’uns are coming to this area, both of them stage versions of beloved movies. This week through Sunday, An...
by Hunter Styles | Nov 14, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Music, Stage
This Rough Magic Lost lovers of Shakespeare must labor each year — for centuries, apparently — against the preconception that the Bard’s work is boring. Surely, many stagings are. But they weren’t a bore in Will’s day, and they needn’t be now. This week, the Theatre...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 4, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
The National Theatre’s NT Live series of HD broadcasts from the London stage is back for its eighth season, starting with a mix of new productions and encore screenings. The Amherst Cinema has recently reprised Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge and...
by Chris Rohmann | Nov 7, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
New York has its Tonys and Obies, Boston its Nortons, and now the Berkshire region has its own rewards for outstanding work in theater — the Berkshire Theatre Awards. Twelve professional companies in the Berkshires, southern Vermont, and New York’s Capital District...
by Hunter Styles | Oct 31, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, Newsletter, Stage
Shanghai Nights The Shanghai Acrobats of the People’s Republic of China don’t just have a long name — they’re one of the longest-running and most distinguished troupes in the world. Get out to see them, and you’ll understand why. Circus groups around the world bring...
by Kristin Palpini | Nov 7, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Music, Newsletter, Stage
The Last Waltz, 40 Years Later On CityStage this week, The Rev Tor Band and a local cast of musicians will perform tunes from The Band’s classic 1976 Thanksgiving Day concert, The Last Waltz Live. The show, which was released as a film of the same name, was billed as...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 31, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
Neither of the shows now playing in downtown Hartford are Halloween-themed, but both are thoroughly haunted by ghosts of the past, in one case literally. That one is The Piano Lesson, at Hartford Stage through November 13. It’s the 1930s segment of August Wilson’s...
by Hunter Styles | Oct 24, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, Newsletter, Stage
The host/ess with the most/est turns the business of drag on its pretty little head If Drag Brunch strikes your fancy, don’t think twice — get yourself to Sláinte, the hilltop restaurant in Holyoke, as soon as possible. Just don’t do what I did last Sunday.I showed up...
by Hunter Styles | Oct 24, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Film, Get Out With Staff Picks, Leisure, Music, Newsletter, Stage
Calling All Hallows Admit it: we’re a happy Valley because we’re all a bunch of freaks. And Halloween seems to be the time of year we most like to let those flags fly. The night is a dark, blank canvas for creative expression and demonic possession. That’s why it...
by Kristin Palpini | Oct 24, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Film, Leisure, Music, Newsletter, Stage
Day Screaming Ghosts are scary. Zombies are scary. Being surrounded by too many kids in Disney princess costumes is scary. If you’d rather run into any of these frightening folks in the daytime rather than in the late night hours, check out the Springfield...
by Hunter Styles | Oct 24, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Music, Stage
Hold Onto Your Wigs Local troupe Ghost Light Theater staged a killer Evil Dead: The Musical last year, but now these players are washing the fake blood out of their costumes in favor of a more earnest — but still outrageous — show: the award-winning rock and roll...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 21, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
I didn’t attend my hometown college, but I grew up just down the street from the campus. I biked along its crisscrossed paths as a kid, DJ’d at the college radio station in high school and, most important, acquired my passion for theater from its plays. Antioch...
by Hunter Styles | Oct 17, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage
Take a Page from Greenfield’s Book Got something to say? Sitting on a heretofore untold story, just biding your time for the right moment? Now’s your opportunity to stand up and share. The Greenfield Annual Word Festival has come back around again, providing visitors...
by Hunter Styles | Oct 17, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage
Rolling with the Punchlines A football team needs a good offensive line. So, too, does the lone, lowly comedian. That’s what Mike Birbiglia has been seeking, and perhaps has nailed down — depending on whom you ask, and how touchy they are. The mission of his new show...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 19, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
Last week Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, came to the Smith College campus to unveil her vision for the renovation of the venerable Neilson Library. Coincidentally, in Boston a new play was unveiled which recalls Lin’s uphill battle to fulfill...
by Hunter Styles | Oct 10, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage
Send in the Frogs Now we come fully into October, when the autumn breeze skims through the changing leaves, and the sun’s cold sheen casts the hills of the Valley in a light we’ll miss come winter. You’d be nuts, in other words, to miss taking a few long walks. The...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 12, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
“Consider Lucifer,” says Han van Meegeren, huddled against the grimy wall of his prison cell in postwar Holland. He’s awaiting a summary trial and probable execution for allegedly having sold a previously unknown Vermeer to a Nazi officer during the occupation. The...
by Hunter Styles | Oct 10, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage
In Sickness and in Health On June 5, 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report describing cases of a rare lung infection, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), in five gay men in Los Angeles — all of whom were young and previously...
by Advocate Staff | Oct 10, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Music, Stage
Rock and Shock • Friday to Sunday Rock and Shock is like Disneyland for horror film buffs who love their music heavy. It’s a horror convention by day at the DCU Center. Then starting in the late afternoon and going all night: a concert at the Palladium down the...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 10, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
In Othello in the Seraglio, Shakespeare’s Moor finds an ironic mirror. Not the proud Venetian general, but a proud eunuch in the harem of the Ottoman sultan. Subtitled “The Tragedy of Sümbül the Black Eunuch,” it’s a “coffeehouse opera” conceived by Mehmet Ali...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 3, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
In some ways, the two plays I saw last week in New York couldn’t be more different. One is a big, boisterous romantic comedy of English manners, the other a small, quiet meditation drawn from Hindu scripture. Bedlam’s Sense & Sensibility, now playing Off-Broadway...
by Hunter Styles and Kristin Palpini | Oct 3, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Film, Music, Newsletter, Stage
Olive’s Indie Sound GardenEvery time the electronic looping pedal wings back around and resets, some new element enters the songs played by Olive Tiger: maybe cello, or violin, or a hooky new techno beat. This inventive band, based in New Haven and Brooklyn, calls...
by Advocate Staff | Sep 26, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
Walking Through Time “In Scene 13, Leontes mourning his wife, things get a little more dialog-y. That needs to be run and worked on today,” says John Bechtold, creator of the immersive production of The Winter’s Tale that performs in downtown Greenfield this weekend....
by Hunter Styles | Oct 3, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage
T’were Well it Were Done Quickly Any back-row slackers in the house? Remember wishing your high school humanities professor would just get on with it and fast-forward to Act V of whichever godforsaken Shakespeare text you were all reading out loud, line by line? It’s...
by Kristin Palpini | Sep 26, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Music, Newsletter, Stage
It sounds like the beginning of a joke: So, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis walk into a recording studio …. But in December of 1956, this foursome just happened to all be in the same recording studio — Sam Phillips’ Sun Records in...
by Chris Rohmann | Oct 4, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
“If this be magic,” says Shakespeare’s King Leontes, “let it be an art lawful as eating.” On the Valley menu this week are two events that brought that quote to mind. At the Broadside Bookshop tomorrow (Wednesday), the multitalented Andrea Hairston unveils Will Do...
by Chris Rohmann | Jun 11, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
As it happens, two different productions of the same show open on area stages on the same day this week. On Wednesday, Million Dollar Quartet premieres in the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge, and the Majestic Theater in West Springield...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 21, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Featured, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
I was intrigued by the description of The Water Project in the press release I received: “Live theater joins forces with the Pioneer Valley’s thriving independent music scene in this original immersive production. … Immerse yourself in the currents of time in this...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 19, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Columns, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
I usually find Double Edge Theatre on their home turf — at The Farm in rural Ashfield — where they live and work and, every summer, perform a “traveling spectacle” that takes audiences on an episodic journey around the spread. But last week I encountered...
by Hunter Styles | Sep 19, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Music, Newsletter, Stage
Play it Again, Sheldon John Sheldon has latched himself to so many meteoric musical acts, it’s a wonder that he hasn’t ascended beyond our earthly ears completely. Thankfully, he retains an intimate connection to the Valley, despite his years writing and playing for...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 19, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
Thank you, Barrington Stage Company, for reviving this past summer’s hit play American Son. Thanks because I missed it in July and was glad of the opportunity to catch up with it during its brief return engagement. And thanks, too, because this run (through Sept. 25)...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 15, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
For the six members of the Northampton Playwrights Lab whose plays are having staged readings this weekend and next, the performances represent the first public airings of new scripts and newly revised older work. Some are brand new, having received feedback and...
by Chris Rohmann | Sep 14, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
If you’re like me, you studied William Cullen Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis” in high school English class, and haven’t given it or its 19th-century author a thought since then. Well, I paid the man and his work a return visit the other day at his hillside homestead,...
by Hunter Styles | Aug 29, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage
Seth in the City Billy Flynn sings his smarmy way through Chicago with the promise of razzle dazzle. “Give ’em an act with lots of flash in it,” he croons, “and the reaction will be passionate.” The Seth Show, by contrast, pulls no theatrics. Seth Lepore is up...
by Hunter Styles | Aug 29, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage
Downtown Northampton’s biggest — and possibly last — public performing arts space is a real beauty: a 4,000 square foot, high-ceilinged room where local Freemasons used to hold community gatherings over a century ago. Completed in 1898, it takes up much of the fourth...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 22, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
The Valley’s summer theaters have folded their figurative tents, but looking west, the season isn’t quite over. Out toward the Berkshires, five troupes are still up and running through this weekend and beyond. Chester Theatre Company’s season closer is The...
by Hunter Styles | Aug 22, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage
“You, minion, are too saucy!” The Two Gentlemen of Verona is widely believed to be Shakespeare’s first play. It’s also one of his best. The core elements are simple: two men, one woman, and the antics that result from being struck by Cupid’s arrow. Shakespeare...
by Hunter Styles | Aug 15, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Newsletter, Stage
Damn, Pam Choreographer Pam Tanowitz been garnering ever more attention over the past 15 years for creating new dance techniques and styles that spring from classical dance vocabulary but glitter with abstract shapes and postmodern ideas. Her show at Jacob’s Pillow...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 16, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
I don’t fish. To be frank, I don’t approve of fishing, especially “sport” fishing, since, like hunting, it’s not a sport in the accepted sense, that is, a contest between two equal adversaries playing by the same rules. I don’t understand the outsize thrill folks seem...
by Hunter Styles | Aug 8, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage
House of Hors Local performer and emcee Hors D’oeuvres — that’s “hors du-vors” — produces fun, gender-friendly, body-positive events up and down the Valley, including Maim That Tune Drag Show in Northampton and Drag Brunch in Holyoke. Personally, we’re partial...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 11, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Stage, Stagestruck
So often, music makes all the difference. It not only has those famous savage-breast-soothing charms, it can turn a so-so script into a winner. Take Unexpected Joy, playing through August 20th at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT). This world-premiere musical...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 8, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
It’s such a pleasure to see a play in which language is as important as plot – a play whose dialogue doesn’t simply move the story forward but enriches it. Sister Play, at Chester Theatre Company, is such a gem – an absorbing, what’s-really-going-on narrative powered...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 5, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
“Theater is so subjective!” said my friend as we left the Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare & Company. She was in tears, but I was relatively unmoved. Ugly Lies the Bone, by Lindsey Ferrentino, takes an unflinching look at a searingly dramatic subject that’s too...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 2, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Newsletter, Stage, Stagestruck
The Valley’s oldest and newest professional summer theaters end their seasons this week with two very different plays. New Century Theatre closes its 26th season with Jar the Floor, a multigenerational family drama that furthers the company’s reputation for putting...
by Chris Rohmann | Aug 3, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
Aphra Behn was probably the first Englishwoman to write professionally, that is, to make her living from writing. She’s best known as a playwright, though only recently rediscovered by audiences. While she wasn’t, as Shakespeare & Company’s website has it, “the...
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 30, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Stage, Stagestruck
Two contradictory things are going on at Pittsfield’s Barrington Stage Company. On the mainstage, the fearsome title characters in The Pirates of Penzance never kill anyone because they can’t bear to harm an orphan and all the captives they seize claim to be orphans....
by Chris Rohmann | Jul 29, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Stage, Stagestruck
One thing these two very different children’s theaters share is respect for their audience. They don’t talk down to the kids sitting before them, they don’t ludicrously overact or get synthetically hyperactive in order to whip up some energy. The scripts are witty,...