Arts

Arts

Music: Something to Talk About

The first time cellist Yehuda Hanani saw his future wife, Hannah, he was in a taxi heading to his apartment from the airport following an out-of-town engagement.  Stopped at a red light at the intersection 95th and Broadway, where the Thalia used to be, he saw two young women hurrying

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Arts

From Great Barrington to Off Broadway: Here Comes "Castronauts"

"The reputation of the Berkshires' being a hideout for artists is true," says Bobby Houston, an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker (Mighty Times: The Children's March, 2004), who moved to Great Barrington a few years ago from his longtime home in California. "Castronauts was born

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Arts

Romantic Music and Sexual Intrigue

Their relationship is the stuff of legend and, of course, song.  When they met at the home of a mutual friend of both their parents, she was just nine, he eighteen, and her piano playing so inspired him that he resolved to give up law to study music with her

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Arts

'The Duchess' Producer Carolyn Marks Blackwood Talks About Her Film

In 1998, Dutchess County resident Carolyn Marks Blackwood and her partner in Magnolia May Films, Gabrielle Tana, optioned the film rights to a soon-to-be-published biography, Georgiana, The Duchess of Devonshire.  The book went on to become a bestseller here and in the United Kingdom, and its author Amanda Foreman won

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Arts

Guess Who's Coming To Breakfast? James Taylor and Yo Yo Ma

You don't have to wait until next summer at Tanglewood to hear James Taylor and Yo Yo Ma give an outdoor concert in the Berkshires. The two local favorites will be peforming live on the porch of the Red Lion Inn on Monday, September 15, as part of

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Arts

Susan Orlean Discovers That It's A Small World After All

Susan Orlean, the esteemed New Yorker staff writer, never expected that a publisher would approach her about turning her 1996 "Shouts & Murmurs" piece called "Shiftless Little Loafers" into a sweet children's book retitled Lazy Little Loafers. "I was surprised," she says

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Arts

Bravo! Berkshire Opera's "Figaro" at The Colonial

My highly-cultured friend, the Mozart Maven, is a regular at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center so I hesitated asking her to drive an hour to Pittsfield to see the Berkshire Opera's production of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro (which has two more performances on August

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Arts

"In Formations" Kicks up Dust in Ancram

Last week, they played for free before a crowd of passersby and random on-lookers at a little-known venue in lower Manhattan and, for their trouble, got a rave revue in the New York Times; tomorrow, they open at the Veterans Memorial Ball Field in Ancram, then later do a follow-up

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Arts

Two Documentaries for Grown-ups

Is it our imagination or do the programs at our cultural institutions get more sophisticated come September, once the vacationing families have cleared out, and the kids have gone back to school?  This Saturday night, for example, two markedly grown-up documentaries, A Visit with Colette and Always Yes, Caresse will

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Arts

Review: "See Rock City" at Barrington Stage is Worth A Detour

If you're the type of person who worries about the future of American musical theater in the age of Disney on Broadway. hie yourself to Pittsfield where Barrington Stage Company's Musical Theater Lab is staging a thoroughly modern and all-American musical called See Rock City &

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Arts

If It's Tuesday, This Must be Tyringham

It's easy to take our region's rich history for granted, because 18th century houses and 19th century churches are daily sightings for most of us. But how often do we stop to explore the interior architecture of that house of worship we've driven by

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Arts

Review: "Waiting for Godot" at Berkshire Theatre Festival

There's a reason why certain plays--the ones you read in high school and college--are part of the theatrical canon: They are timeless dramas that explore universal truths or ponder eternal questions about human nature. By any standard, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is one of the

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