Helen Epstein
By Helen Epstein July 30 featured a Russian warhorse program at Tanglewood: Glinka’s “Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila”; Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, and Prokofiev’s Music from the ballet Romeo and Juliet. These are familiar (some might say over-familiar) works for orchestra, but, of course, there’s a reason they’re still being programmed.…
Read MoreSee Rock City by Arlene Hutton. The second play in the Nibroc Trilogy. Directed by Jay Stratton. Staged by the Chester Theater Company, Chester, MA, through August 8. Reviewed By Helen Epstein Arlene Hutton’s absorbing Nibroc Trilogy, produced by the Chester Theater Company (CTC), is now in its second phase with See Rock City. Although…
Read MoreBy Helen Epstein If you want a country theater experience, complete with magical valley and stream and a freight train in the distance, go to Chester, MA this month. Chester Theater Company‘s The Nibroc Trilogy is a winner and will culminate on the final two Saturdays of the season (August 14 and 21) with the…
Read MoreBy Helen Epstein The Tanglewood Music Center (TMC) is an incubator for many of the musicians we’ll be hearing in the future, and its conducting seminar is one of the most visible and prestigious in the world. Conducting fellows lead concerts in Ozawa Hall that are a showcase not only for their contemporaries but for…
Read MoreBy Helen Epstein It isn’t often that you get to hear the same conductor, same composer, and two different orchestras but that unusual experience was offered at Tanglewood as Michael Tilson Thomas (filling in for James Levine) conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) in Mahler’s Second Symphony last week and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra…
Read MoreLast Train to Nibroc by Arlene Hutton. Staged by the Chester Theater Company, Chester, MA, through July 25. Reviewed By Helen Epstein I drove back to Chester Theater Company(CTC) last night expecting another engrossing evening and got it. I love making the trip to the village (pop. 1000) and the makeshift theater in its small…
Read MoreBy Helen Epstein Perhaps a director’s most important choice is sifting through the great backlist of dramatic literature and choosing a play whose sensibility she not only wishes to explore and inhabit, but that she can cast and direct well. When the play, the director and design team, the actors, and historical moment all line…
Read MoreReviewed By Helen Epstein Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel. Directed by Michael Dowling. Staged by the Chester Theatre Company, Chester, MA, through July 11. This summer Chester Theatre Company (CTC) Artistic Director Byam Stevens is exhorting theatergoers to “free the inner audience” within them. Theatergoers, he says, have become like critics, losing a sense of…
Read MoreBy Helen Epstein Shakespeare & Company’s new director Tony Simotes is in his last week of radiation and chemotherapy for throat cancer in Boston, but he was in the Berkshires this weekend to preside over the first read-through of Richard III.
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