Posts Tagged ‘Berkshire On Stage’

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Old Crow Medicine Show is a Mighty Appetizer Before the Fall Bluegrass Feast at Mass MoCA [Berkshire on Stage]

Friday, May 24th, 2013
The Old Crow Medicine Show plays the Hunter Center at Mass MoCA on May 25,2013.

The Old Crow Medicine Show plays the Hunter Center at Mass MoCA on May 28, 2013.

Story by Larry Murray

It may be an appetizer, but it’s no wimpy finger food, it’s a solid evening of entertainment before the bluegrass and roots FreshGrass music festival at Mass MoCA in late September. Heck, the Old Crow group generates spectacular nights of bluegrass all by itself, the sort of music memories are made of. In fact, I would travel miles just to hear Ketch Secor play his fiddle with bandmate Critter Fuqua. So IMHO, this is going to be a spring evening not to miss as FreshGrass presents the Old Crow Medicine Show in Mass MoCA’s Hunter Center for the Performing Arts on Tuesday, May 28, at 8pm. Come September 20-22, 2013, you can plan to spend a whole weekend in North Adams for another feast of bluegrass. Read all about it here.

Old Crow Medicine Show (Ketch Secor and Critter Fuqua plus Kevin Hayes, Morgan Jahnig, Gill Landry and Chance McCoy) shot to stardom as energetic performers with an unbridled spirit that leaps off their strings whenever they pick up an instrument. Discovered by legendary bluegrass picker Doc Watson while they were busking on a street corner in Boone, North Carolina, the group’s ascendancy happened on the heels of its first major appearance at Watson’s annual Merlefest music festival. So well-received there, the band followed that appearance with a residency at the Grand Ole Opry, which further launched a career whose success now spans across two decades, over 800,000 album sales and a Grammy Award.

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Paul Taylor Dance Company Returns to Mahaiwe Memorial Day Weekend May 24-26, 2013 [Berkshire on Stage]

Thursday, May 23rd, 2013

Great Barrington, MA: The Paul Taylor Dance Company will return to the Mahaiwe for its sixth consecutive summer season on Friday and Saturday, May 24 and May 25 at 8pm and Sunday, May 26 at 3pm and 7pm. “We are proud to be the Berkshire home for America’s national treasure Paul Taylor Dance Company,” said Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center Executive Director Beryl Jolly. “Mr. Taylor’s dazzling, thought-provoking, and entertaining dances are a perfect kickoff to the summer season.”

The renowned modern dance company will perform the New England premiere of Mr. Taylor’s Perpetual Dawn (2013), which depicts young people experiencing the awakening of love, perhaps for the very first time. The new work is set to sprightly concertos by Baroque composer Johann David Heinichen. Other repertory favorites to be performed include Cascade (1999, music by J.S. Bach), Kith and Kin (1987, music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), Lost, Found and Lost (1982, music by Donald York), Last Look (1985, music by Donald York), and Offenbach Overtures (1995, music by Jacques Offenbach).

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Families, Gardens, Love in Bloom, the Mac-Hayden Returns to Its Roots with “The Fantasticks” [Berkshire on Stage]

Thursday, May 23rd, 2013
Showing their new-found togetherness is struck by Bellomy (Derrick Jaques), Luisa (Stephanie Granade), Matt (Andrew McMath), and Hucklebee (Gabe Bleyeu) in The Fantasticks. Even as they celebrate newfound happiness, El Gallo (Patrick Heffernan) wonders how long they will stay that way.

Showing their new-found togetherness is struck by Bellomy (Derrick Jaques), Luisa (Stephanie Granade), Matt (Andrew McMath), and Hucklebee (Gabe Bleyeu) in The Fantasticks. Even as they celebrate newfound happiness, El Gallo (Patrick Heffernan) wonders how long they will stay that way.

Everyone loves The Fantasticks, the tale of interfering fathers, a swashbuckling rogue, charm and comedy which opens May 23, 2013 and plays until June 2 at the Mac-Hayden Theatre in Chatham, New York. The Fantasticks, the world’s longest running musical, opens the 45th anniversary season at The Mac-Haydn Theatre.

“Since the show was part of our very first summer in 1969, it seemed right to put it into an anniversary season”, Artistic Director/Producer Lynne Haydn said about the perennial favorite show, adding “especially since several of our people have performed in the show Off-Broadway: Tom Flagg as the Mute, Jim Charles as the Mute, the Boy and El Gallo and Christine Long as the Girl.”

Mac-Haydn’s newest presentation of the show stars past season favorites Patrick Heffernan as El Gallo, Andrew McMath as the Boy, Gabe Belyeu and Derrick Jaques as the Fathers, and David Beditz and Monk Schane-Lydon as Henry and Mortimer. Newcomers this season, Stephanie Granade will be the Girl, and the Mutes are Lea Nardi and Scott Caron.

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Review: “A Strange Disappearance of Bees” Has Critics Buzzing With Excitement [Berkshire on Stage]

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013
(l to r) Jenny Strassburg and Melissa Hurst in “A Strange Disappearance of Bees” at Oldcastle Theaetre Company.

(l to r) Jenny Strassburg and Melissa Hurst in “A Strange Disappearance of Bees” at Oldcastle Theaetre Company.

Review by Gail M. Burns and Larry Murray

Gail M. Burns: Without question, “A Strange Disappearance of Bees” has to be one of the best original plays I’ve seen in a long time. By “original” I mean conceived wholly from the mind of the playwright – we see lots of adaptations, translations and historical or biographical plays, but this one is a new creation.

Larry Murray: It’s been years since a new play came out of the blue and knocked my over like a stroke of theatrical lightning.

Gail: For starters, it is clearly plotted and truly moving and engaging. These are good but imperfect people – just like you and me – and through the course of the play we come to care about them and understand why they make the choices they do.

Larry: Elena Hartwell, whom we had the pleasure of meeting – almost by accident – in the lobby before the performance began is the sort of person you just naturally fall into a conversation with. And her play is peopled with uncomplicated characters who you just can’t help liking.

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Barrington Stage Offers “Bashir Lazhar,” American Premiere of an Unorthodox Play [Berkshire on Stage]

Tuesday, May 21st, 2013
Juri Henley-Cohn plays the teacher, Bashir Lazhar.

Juri Henley-Cohn plays the teacher, Bashir Lazhar.

Talking with Julie Boyd, we reviewed the Barrington Stage summer slate of shows for 2013. Most were obviously good solid choices, but I just wanted to blurt out that I had my doubts about Bashir Lazhar drawing an audience. After all it’s not exactly On The Town or Much Ado About Nothing (also on their schedule) which people are familiar and comfortable with. It is rather, a Canadian play about a French Algerian political refugee, and not just a little off the beaten track. Everyone knows Boyd doesn’t pick duds. So I asked her to talk about it.

Julie Boyd said simply: “It’s wonderful. Not only as a play but also because Juri Henley-Cohn is such a fabulous actor. It’s a show we did a staged reading of last year, and it is a story I have absolutely fallen in love with. I think the movie Monsieur Lazhar was wonderful, and this is just a different kind of subject for the theatre. I am attracted to people who enter new worlds and how they deal with it. Immigrants like Lazhar are often unprepared for the realities of their new life.

“What makes this interesting is that as they are learning, we are learning, too. It’s a wonderful journey that Bashir Lazhar takes,” explained Boyd. “We’ve also gone ahead and commissioned an original score for this, and with the immensely talented and imaginative Shakina Nayfack at the helm, and the set, lights and production that is planned, it will end up being kind of magical.”

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Aaron Neville (Mass MoCA May 25) and Keith Richards on Doo-Wop and the Great American Songbook [Berkshire on Stage]

Tuesday, May 21st, 2013

Aaron Neville (72) and Keith Richards (69) have long shared a love of Doo-Wop music. The music style is undergoing a rebirth im popularity, and there’s a fascinating story there, making the news of Neville’s upcaoming appearance at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in North Adams, MA, even more significant. Mass MoCA hosts Aaron Neville in concert on May 25, 2013 at 8:00 pm.

Aaron Neville is perhaps better known as the soulful and smooth tenor of the Neville Brothers, but truth be told, he just loves the Doo-Wop style. “Me and Frankie Valli were on a flight from New Orleans to Los Angeles,” he recalls. “It was a six-hour flight, and we sang all the way.” Sometimes Doo-Wop just doesn’t get the respect it deserves. “People are always talking about the Great American Songbook, all the jazz standards,” Neville says. “This is American music, too. It’s part of an era. It should be in there. Everything I’ve done has had some kind of Doo-Wop influence, from day one.” When it was new, it was such a fresh and original sound that it stopped people in their tracks. It was – and still is – unlike any other pop music form.

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Burns and Murray Give Naches to Jonathan Epstein and New Stage for “The Jewish Jester” [Berkshire on Stage]

Thursday, May 16th, 2013
Robert D. Lohbauer (l) and Jonathan Epstein in “The Jewish Jester: A Fable With Music.”

Robert D. Lohbauer (l) and Jonathan Epstein in “The Jewish Jester: A Fable With Music.”

Review by Gail M. Burns and Larry Murray

Gail Burns: I didn’t know quite what to expect from “The Jewish Jester: A Fable With Music,” but with Jonathan Epstein in the leading role, how can you go wrong…

Larry Murray: He may be the lowly servant of the king in this play, but he’s also its star. Between Epstein and Robert Lohbauer, his co-star, it’s a pretty dynamic duo on stage, making a great evening entertainment out of a bit of a mushy play. Its advance publicity pointed out that it is a combination of Elizabethan English and Yiddish, but that is only the tip of the Word Play iceberg. It’s also puns, physical comedy and role reversals.

Gail: I was confused as the dialogue is sometimes Elizabethan, sometimes modern, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose. I wanted to get my hands on a script to clarify playwright Daniel Klein’s rhyme and reason, but that is one of those perks the press can access that the average ticket-buyer can’t. No one should have waste time in the theater trying to figure out what the playwright is up to structurally.

Larry: As to the play itself, it’s like a sweet tsholnt, a Jewish stew that has been simmering for a long time. Some meshuggener (slightly crazy guy) named Daniel Klein put this concoction together. He’s the guy who wrote (with Thomas Cathcart) “Plato and a Platypus Walked into a Bar.” It takes a creative imagination to come up with a nudnik Jewish Jester and condemned King sharing the same jail cell, yet the whole megillah comes together at the Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge.

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Oldcastle Theatre Presents a Play About Searching: “A Strange Disappearance of Bees” [Berkshire on Stage]

Tuesday, May 14th, 2013

Oldcastle Theatre presents a play about searching: “A Strange Disappearance of Bees”

Bennington, VT: The next offering from Oldcastle Theatre Company, a professional Equity regional theatre newly installed in its renovated, fully accessible theatre space in downtown Bennington, Vermont is “A Strange Disappearance of Bees” by Elena Hartwell on May 17, running through June 2.

“A Strange Disappearance of Bees” is a beautifully written play that began simply. To hear Hartwell tell it: “I first learned about Colony Collapse Disorder at a time when my own life had started to fragment. In the space of a few years I lost my job, my confidence, my significant other, my house, and my longtime canine companion. I began to think about the parallels between human experiences and all the possible causes of CCD. The disappearance of millions of honeybees has been attributed to pesticides, cell phone interference, mites, an HIV-like virus, and the large–and less nutritious–mono-crops of big agro-businesses.

“It struck me that sometimes people disappear too. Cancers from chemicals, isolation through technology, a disconnect from community. Out of those ideas came this play. As my own life got back on track, a new love, four new animals, a new home, a re-imagined career, the drafts became more hopeful at the end. This play, to me, is art representing life, and life representing art.”

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