Arts

Arts

Theater Review: John Douglas Thompson Soars in Satchmo at the Waldorf

Shakespeare & Company’s final new production of the summer season is Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout'sSatchmo at the Waldorf, a one-man play set in 1971 in the dressing room of the jazz great Louis Armstrong, after what would turn out to be his last performance.

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Arts

Interview with John Kelly, author of The Graves Are Walking, on the Irish Famine

After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously remarked, “What’s the point of being Irish if the world doesn’t break your heart?” Central to that tragic view of life was the Irish potato famine of the 1840s that left more than a million people

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Arts

The British Are Ailing — Existentially!

Celia Schaefer, Timothy Deenihan, and Danielle SkraastadTomorrow in the Battle, at Stageworks/Hudson, is an excellent and challenging work about three British professionals: Jennifer, a sexy female financier about to get swallowed up  by the collapse of the banking industry;  Anna, a defense minister about to lie to Parliament about

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Arts

A Talk with Peter Wheelwright, Architect and Author of As It Is On Earth

Peter Wheelwright, a former dean (now associate professor) in the School of Architecture at Parsons The New School for Design, has just published his first novel, As It Is On Earth. Wheelwright grew up in Lenox, MA., and he and his wife, the photographer Eliza Hicks, have a house in

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Arts

Compagnie Käfig Thrills at Jacob's Pillow

Photos by Christopher Duggan, courtesy of Jacob's Pillow What do you get when you cross a choreographer from Lyon trained in the circus and martial arts and experienced in hip hop with a group of street dancers who arose from the favelas of Rio De Janeiro? If the

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Arts

Reviews: Comic Catharsis Across the Eras

Carolyn Michelle Smith, Tina Benko, and Kathy Searle in WHADDABLOODCLOT!!! at Williamstown Theatre Festival There was a time when I fully subscribed to the notion, as Philip Barry often put forth in his lovely plays The Philadelphia Story and Holiday, that the rich should be looked upon with the same

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Arts

Trey McIntyre Project: Power and Grace

Photos courtesy of Jacob's Pillow In 2008, after 18 years of making dances for ballet companies across the globe, Trey McIntyre formed his own company, which debuted at Jacob’s Pillow to instant acclaim. His reputation has grown over the years, and the Trey McIntyre Project filled the

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Arts

A Month in the Country at Williamstown

Kate Kearney-Patch, Jessica Collins, and Elisabeth Waterston It isn’t very often that the translators of a play receive the kind of star billing that Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky get for their work on the  Williamstown Theatre Festival production of Ivan Turgenev’s 1850 play,  A Month in the

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Arts

Tempest with a Twist at Shakespeare & Co.

Photos by Kevin Sprague What's in an "A"?  In Shakespeare & Company's rich and nimble production of The Tempest, it's the difference between Prospero—the exiled Duke, loving father, and generally embittered sorcerer at the center of the story—and Prospera, that

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Arts

Jonah Bokaer: In-Between Days

Photos by Liza Voll, courtesy of Jacob's Pillow The dancer/choreographer Jonah Bokaer seems to be fascinated with the spaces and states that fall in between – the shades of gray (though not so well defined as that) between black and white. Thus one of the most compelling moments

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Arts

Review: "Allergist's Wife" at Shakespeare & Company

The actress Annette Miller has a history of playing formidable women on the stages at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox. We've seen her as the prime minister of Israel in Golda's Balcony, the fashion legend Diana Vreeland in Full Gallop, and as the outspoken Watergate wife

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Arts

Review: The Elephant Man at Williamstown

Bradley Cooper and Alessandro Nivola in"The Elephant Man." Any theatrical production of The Elephant Man, the Bernard Pomerance play about the hideously deformed neurofibromatosis-type-I-sufferer John (Joseph) Merrick, has a lot of memories to live up to, particularly the excellent 1980 film version starring John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins,

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