Inside the witch house: Horror filmmaking couple Aaron Fradkin and Victoria Fratz Fradkin set their most recent, ‘Beezel,’ in Northampton
By JENNIFER LEVESQUE For the Advocate It’s always spooky season when you have a love for horror movies, scary stories and a curiosity of anything dark and morbid. And fall accentuates that spooky feeling for everyone. Finding a new horror series or collection of...
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, unrequited, doomed. The setting, though, in Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer-winning play, is a Little Havana in 1920s Florida.
Stagestruck: Wars, Merry and Cold
Just about the only things Shakespeare & Company’s two outdoor productions have in common are fresh air and trees. In the Bard’s sunny “Much Ado About Nothing,” Beatrice and Benedick engage in a “merry war” of wits, while in Lee Blessing’s “A Walk in the Woods,” two diplomats strive to negotiate an arms-control treaty in the shadow of nuclear war.
Stagestruck: Pillow in Motion
The evening unwraps slowly in a flowing sequence of encounters – tentative, teasing, edgy and sexy – as the dancers circle and entwine. They highlight “the beauty in our [Black] culture, the way we love and love on each other.”
Stagestruck: Small Disasters
Anna Ouyang Moench’s “Birds of North America,” at Chester Theatre Company, is the kind of piece in which Chester specializes and excels – small, subtle dramas that pull you in and make you think. It’s about climate change, but doesn’t hammer the theme. It’s more metaphor than polemic, more quiet anguish than loud confrontation.
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 Rural...
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...
Social Equity Programs try to level playing field for cannabis
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,...
Pride Proud: Celebrations emerge in some cities, replacing those that fizzled in others
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...
Stagestruck: Two Schools, Worlds Apart
In the early 2000s, teachers and students at two U.S. schools – one student body predominantly Black and Latinx, the other white and Asian-American – were caught in wholesale cheating on mandated exams. May Treuhaft-Ali’s world-premiere play “ABCD,” at Barrington Stage Company, is molded by these incidents, but she’s motivated by the knowledge that they were not outlier instances.
Stagestruck: Once, Upon a Stage
“Once,” the 2011 musical based on the 2007 film, 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. Berkshire Theatre Group’s production pretty much checks all those boxes, with delightful results.
Sessions
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Cajordion on the Valley Advocate Sessions Stage
Cajordion is whimsical busking-honed duo, which plays instrumental pop music on cajon, accordion, and a plethora of other instruments.
The V-Spot: My Sex Drive’s Back But My BF’s Isn’t
“When me and my BF first got together about a year and a half ago, we were having the best sex of our lives! Then I decided with the help of my therapist that I needed to be medicated due to suicidal thoughts and anxiety/depression. The medication helped a lot with my mental illness, but unfortunately it made my sex drive plummet.”
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Stagestruck: All the Livelong Eons
Two shows now playing on the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Stockbridge stages look at who we are as humans. One goes up close to delve into folks’ working lives, the other takes a long view – very long, from the dawn of time to the day after tomorrow. Working, subtitled...
