CANADIAN COMIC OPHIRA EISENBERG PERFORMS at MASS MOCA
Ophira Eisenberg
(NORTH ADAMS, Mass.) – Hailing from Alberta, Canada, and now based out of New York City, comedian and storyteller Ophira Eisenberg performs at MASS MoCA on Saturday, August 18, 2012, at 8 p.m., for an Alt Cabaret performance on the Club B-10 stage, in conjunction with Oh, Canada, the cultural laboratory’s year-long salute to contemporary Canadian art and culture. Eisenberg is a regular on The Moth, a New York City-based nonprofit organization that conducts live storytelling events, and can frequently be found performing stand-up at many of the city’s comedy clubs.
BROADWAY MUSICAL STAR BETTY BUCKLEY to PERFORM at MAHAIWE
Betty Buckley
(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass.) – Tony Award-winning singer and actress Betty Buckley performs at the Mahaiwe in Ah, Men! The Boys of Broadway on Sunday, August 19, 2012, at 7pm. The concert features Buckley performing men’s songs from Broadway shows that she has always wanted to sing, including numbers from Sweeney Todd, West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Pippin, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles. Accompanying her will Clifford Carter on piano and Tony Marino on bass. She debuted the stage show earlier this year in New York and released a CD of its music this summer with Palmetto Records.
BRAZILIAN HIP-HOP COMES to JACOB’S PILLOW
A scene from Compagnie Käfig's 'Agwa' (photo Michel Cavalca)
(BECKET, Mass.) – Compagnie Käfig, a French-Algerian dance company led by artistic director and internationally acclaimed choreographer Mourad Merzouki, brings a dynamic ensemble of hip-hop dancers from Brazil to Jacob’s Pillow from Wednesday, August 15 through Sunday, August 19, 2012, in the Ted Shawn Theatre. The company performs a program of two virtuosic works, Correria and Agwa, both relying on athleticism, artistry, and drama.
A major figure on the hip-hop scene since the early 1990s, choreographer Mourad Merzouki works at the junction of many different movement disciplines, fusing circus and martial arts, fine arts, and music with a continuous exploration of all hip-hop styles. He is known for opening up new outlooks in dance, while honoring the hip-hop movement’s roots and its social and geographical origins.
(L-R) Richard Jackson, Edith Wharton, and Tod Randolph (photo-Illustration by Kevin Sprague).
(LENOX, Mass.) – The Wharton Salon joins The Mount’s year-long celebration of Edith Wharton’s 150th birthday by putting Edith Wharton herself onstage this year in The Inner House, running from Wednesday, August 15 through Sunday, August 26, 2012, at The Mount. Adapted by Dennis Krausnick from Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, actress Tod Randolph plays Edith Wharton in a vivid account of Wharton’s public and private life directed by veteran Wharton director, Normi Noël.
The Inner House is taken from Edith Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, and several of her private letters and poems. It begins with Wharton at five years old taking a walk with her father down “the old Fifth Avenue” in New York City, her earliest years of “making up” which sowed the seeds of her later writing career, her early unpreparedness for marriage to Teddy Wharton, her days at The Mount in Lenox, her unhappiness and divorce, her later affair with Morton Fullerton, her journey abroad, her assistance to France in The Great War, and loving descriptions of her close friends, mentors, and companions, including Henry James, Walter Berry, and Bernard Berenson.
PIANIST CHRISTOPHER O’RILEY to PLAY THE COLONIAL
Christopher O'Riley (photo by Wendy Lynch)
(PITTSFIELD, Mass.) – Pianist Christopher O’Riley, best known as the host of the classical music program From the Top on public radio and for his transcriptions of popular tunes by rock groups including Radiohead, Cocteau Twins, Arcade Fire and other, performs at The Colonial Theatre on Friday, August 17, 2012, at 8pm.
O’Riley’s repertoire spans classical styles, from Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Chopin, Ravel and Busoni to contemporary artists such as Radiohead, Nirvana, Pink Floyd and Elliott Smith. His unique, passionate and heartfelt piano interpretations of both classical and popular music create unforgettable musical performances and astonishing audience experiences. His most famous recording, True Love Waits, featuring his transcriptions of songs by Radiohead, was awarded four stars by Rolling Stone magazine.
TIME TRAVEL BACK HALF a MILLENNIUM to ANCIENT CHINA at THE CLARK
Sarcophagus, Northern Wei dynasty (386–535 CE), tomb dated 477 CE
(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.) – Unearthed: Recent Archaeological Discoveries from Northern China, featuring rare Chinese burial objects in an exclusive exhibition that considers both the discovery and the impact of modern Chinese archaeology runs through October 21, 2012, at The Clark and . The exhibition features objects recently excavated from sites in the Shanxi and Gansu provinces and never before seen outside of China, including a full-size stone sarcophagus discovered intact in 2004. Unearthed leads The Clark’s interrelated summer exhibition program of four exhibitions, including three presentations in Williamstown and one in New York.
TURGENEV DRAMA CONCLUDES WTF’S MAIN STAGE SEASON
Jessica Collins
(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.) – A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev, with a world premiere translation by Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, brings down the curtain on the Main Stage season at Williamstown Theatre Festival, with a production running through August 19, 2012. The play is being given an experimental staging, with a thrust stage built out into the first four rows of the audience.
ARTBERKSHIRES CONCLUDES SEASON with GALLERY TOUR, DINNER
Preston Singletary, Eagle Warrior, 2011 (courtesy Schantz Galleries)
(PITTSFIELD, Mass.) – ArtBerkshires concludes its summer 2012 programming on Friday night, August 17, 2012, with a gallery tour of RETHINK!, the contemporary American Indian artists exhibition at Berkshire Museum by curator Maria Mingalone at 5p.m., followed by a Dish and Dine talk and dinner at Ferrin Gallery at 6:30 p.m., featuring tableware by Molly Hatch, dinner by Red Lion Inn chef Brian Alberg, and discussion of the Covet project by participating artists and authors.
MUSIC by CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS and his CONTEMPORARIES IS CENTERPIECE OF 2012 BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL
Camille Saint-Saens
(ANNANDALE-on-HUDSON, N.Y.) – The world-renowned Bard Music Festival returns for its 23rd annual season, filling the last two weekends of Bard SummerScape 2012 with a compelling and enlightening investigation of Saint-Saëns and His World. Twelve concert programs over the two mid-August weekends, complemented by pre-concert lectures, panel discussions, and expert commentary, make up Bard’s examination of Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921), whose long and remarkable career spanned and helped shape the course of French music from Gounod to Ravel.
The twelve concerts offer an immersion in the music of Belle Époque France, with its trademark opulence and emotional richness, presenting masterpieces from all genres of Saint-Saëns’s prodigious oeuvre, including a rare concert performance of his grand opera Henry VIII, alongside a wealth of music from contemporaries and compatriots. Weekend 2, “Confronting Modernism” (August 17–19), explores the ways the French late-Romantics set the stage for modernism’s subsequent upheavals. Together, Bard’s offerings present a vivid portrait of a dazzlingly creative and colorful era in European history: a Golden Age of promise and possibility that came to an end with the tragedy of World War I.
For tickets and further information on all SummerScape events, call the Fisher Center box office at 845.758.7900 or visit Bard Music Festival.