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New York Times
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In the Berkshires, Installing Art, Bearing the Consequences
When the British sculptor Laura Ellen Bacon was in the woods here, making a newly commissioned work on the grounds of the Clark Art Institute in the Berkshires, she was expecting a hefty dose of nature. But maybe not quite what she got, something out of 'Wild Kingdom.' For an abstract piece, 'Gathering My Thoughts,' Bacon wove thin strands of willow together, building up to a monumental shape — a mysterious, wavy growth in the forest that evokes the primitive instinct to use plants and branches to build enclosures. And if it looks like an enormous animal nest, that's par for the Clark show, 'Ground/work 2025,' where six outdoor commissions will remain on view for more than a year (until October 2026). The works are drawing visitors, and then some: spiders, caterpillars, deer and squirrels. 'I saw bears on a few different occasions,' said Bacon, who is based in Derbyshire, England. One time, a bear came within about 30 feet of her. 'I was down on my knees weaving away, absorbed in what I was doing, and it was just watching me,' she said. 'I kept my distance by moving up the path a little bit. Then it went all around the work. It climbed on there and gave it a really good sniff.' The meeting encapsulates the unpredictability and surprise of outdoor sculpture — both for makers and viewers — that the show's curator, Glenn Adamson, wanted to harness for the show, which also features works by an international cast: Javier Senosiain, Yo Akiyama, Hugh Hayden, Milena Naef and Aboubakar Fofana. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Pamela Anderson. Amber Heard. Dancing on ice. All in one theater festival.
WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. — A queer fantasia is underway in the Berkshires, where a premiere provocateur of American theater has been handed the keys to Williamstown Theatre Festival. Under the creative leadership of Jeremy O. Harris, the summer mainstay's 71st season features Pamela Anderson as an ex-courtesan haunted by 'the specter of lunacy,' figure skaters lip-synching to Donna Summer and a new show in which a gaggle of toxic gays 'neocolonize' a Oaxacan nude beach. For die-hards, all that and more can be experienced as a whirlwind three- or four-day binge during one of the festival's three consecutive long weekends, which conclude Aug. 3. (Choosing shows a la carte is also an option. I saw eight in 48 hours.) Spread across four venues — two regular stages, a black box in a strip mall and an ice rink bordering a graveyard — the concentrated programming is a weekender-friendly feast of risky and captivating multidisciplinary performance. It's a big swing from a legacy institution that until recently appeared on the brink of collapse. A longtime magnet for top talent and incubator for New York productions, Williamstown has struggled to find a way forward since 2020, when operations shut down due to the pandemic, and an investigation by the Los Angeles Times revealed a history of troubling labor practices. As the nonprofit has endeavored to remake its creative and financial model, visits there in recent years have been characterized by half-staged works in half-empty theaters. Not so on opening weekend of the reimagined festival, the first in a three-year term as creative director for Harris, the 'Slave Play' author whose career includes screenwriting, producing, acting (in a recurring role on 'Emily in Paris') and being Extremely Online. The world premiere of his new play stars Amber Heard, ushering in her self-described 'theatre era.' There are sufficient faces from young Hollywood among the casts — such as Nicholas Alexander Chavez of 'Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,' Whitney Peak of 'Gossip Girl' and Tonatiuh of the upcoming Jennifer Lopez-starring 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' — that Vogue did a photo spread. Crowds flush with industry insiders spilled onto the main stage lawn between acts and perched elbow-to-elbow at area restaurants. A giddy conviction of stamina accompanied the comparison of itineraries. (There are six different routes to seeing the core lineup, depending on how many days you have.) Tennessee Williams is the season's curatorial inspiration, and the recurring themes are especially suited to midsummer heat: memory and existentialism, languor and confinement, horniness and forbidden desire. The vibes are loose-limbed and playful, irreverent toward convention but mindful of its place among the region's tony patrons. Three of the offerings are full-length plays, two by Williams — the surreal and purgatorial 'Camino Real' and the posthumously published prison drama 'Not About Nightingales' — and Harris's own boozy oddity steeped in Williamsian influence, 'Spirit of the People.' That play's title, a reference to mescal and the modest means of its original distillers, characterizes the festival lineup as a whole: Significant barriers to entry notwithstanding (getting here isn't easy, and staying isn't cheap), there's a pervasive effort to ensure that everything presented can be at least understood by anyone living in present reality. (With the exception of 'Camino Real,' but more on that in a minute.) Harris's mission as both a playwright and producer to position theater as vibrant pop culture gives this season the buzzy air of a music or film festival. 'Spirit of the People' is an overfilled and sloshing glass raised in that direction. The story is one I happen to recognize, as a frequent visitor to the coastal hamlet of Zipolite, where a heartbroken Canadian woman (played by Heard) decamps to reinvent herself as the owner of a Mexican mescaleria. A group of American millennials (played by Brandon Flynn and two 'Slave Play' alums, Ato Blankson-Wood and James Cusati-Moyer, among others) overstays their vacations, and Harris engages in anthropological study of their queerness (image obsession, compulsive mating, drugs, etc.) while mining the impacts of Western tourism on the land and its people. Where 'Slave Play' zeroed in on race and desire, here Harris broadens his lens to explore how power functions across borders by means of money and ignorant entitlement. The play, directed beautifully here by Katina Medina Mora, brims with compelling insights on contemporary anxieties (the dangers of AI, the sullying of social ideals under capitalism, etc.), but is also overrun with what we in the community call 'gay mess' (petty rivalries, bed-hopping and the like) and with heavy-handed reveries about the symbolic significance of mescal. As with pours of straight liquor, moderation will be key to the play's future. (Like several shows on opening weekend, it ran significantly over the approximated run time, clocking in at over three hours.) 'Slave Play' director Robert O'Hara delivers 'Not About Nightingales' as an erotic fever dream, in which the inmates of an Alcatraz-like island and their weasel-like warden (Chris Messina) are in heat. Written by Williams in 1938 and inspired by real events at a Pennsylvania prison, the play chronicles an uprising over wretched food in a brig that resembles a Berlin sex club. The raw animality of the staging emphasizes everyone's appetite for both survival and satisfaction. A triangle of desire develops between Messina's warden, his new secretary (Elizabeth Lail, of 'You') and the Black prisoner (William Jackson Harper, of 'The Good Place') he beats into submission before recruiting him to work in his office. O'Hara draws out the story's resonance not only with present mass incarceration but with the legacy of chattel slavery. It's a brutal production with a touch of Old Hollywood noir and the most affecting of the season's full-length dramas. 'Camino Real,' in which a menagerie of characters (among them Don Quixote, Casanova and Lord Byron), rattle around a carceral town square, is the most remote. The staging from director Dustin Wills evokes a desert landscape by Dalí and is equally beguiling to behold and confounding to interpret. Making sense of the play, a departure for Williams into modernist abstraction, may be beside the point — the author defended its rife symbolism as 'nothing more nor less than my conception of the time and the world I live in.' Funnily enough, of the sprawl of ensemble members, Anderson is the most engaging and accessible. She has no great facility with language or modulation, and a tendency to swallow words — but her unaffected air is endearing and suited to absurdism. As the beleaguered and faded beauty Marguerite, she got the most laughs and a mid-show round of applause. The fest's other happenings — most of them in what's called the Annex, a hollowed-out Price Chopper outfitted into an elongated playing space — benefit from their inclusion in a broader lineup that offers a wide berth for experimentation. The most striking among them, 'Vanessa,' is a chamber opera about a doomed love triangle composed by Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti, themselves forbidden lovers when it premiered in 1958. (My colleague Michael Brodeur has the full review.) 'Many Happy Returns,' a dance piece from Monica Bill Barnes inspired by 'Mrs. Dalloway,' combines everyday musings addressed to the audience (by her collaborator Robbie Saenz de Viteri) with lighthearted movement she executes with wiry precision. In 'The Things Around Us,' musician and writer Ahamefule J. Oluo likewise delivers a shuffle of anecdotes that could be disparate pages torn from a memoir. They're combined with an astounding display of musicianship, in which he wails on the trumpet, controls soundboards with his feet, and creates a score by recording and looping playback in real time. In an after-midnight stand-up set, Julio Torres delivered an earnest plea for job mobility as Pigasaurus, the hog who eats food scraps on 'The Flintstones.' The extreme-sport nature of the marathon schedule reaches its pinnacle on ice, where a virtuosic company of five skaters (lithe, limber and queer-coded) perform interpretive, disco-scored dance inspired by the Williams novel tucked into the show's title, 'The Gig: After Moise and the World of Reason.' Viewers bundle up, park rinkside in folding chairs and don headphones through which Harris narrates the impressions of a struggling writer in 1970s Manhattan who dated a figure skater. Conceived by director Will Davis with ice choreographer Douglas Webster, the hour-long spectacle includes swooping, synchronous glides, passionate pas de deux and a handful of Olympic-style stunts. The forms don't quite synthesize — you could bag the voice-over and just enjoy the icy grooves — but the daring is the point. Summer theater ought to be wild, a playground where soaring high and falling flat are both welcome results. Williamstown's reinvention is a thrilling testament to what's possible when artists are given license to let loose.
New York Times
2 days ago
- New York Times
Savoring Country Pleasures at 5 New Getaways
While sandy beaches are a hallmark of summer, there's something irresistible about sultry days in the countryside, hiking in the shade of leafy trees and paddling down rivers. And at these five new properties it's easy to savor such pleasures without having to travel far from the city. Whether you want to luxuriate in a suite in the Finger Lakes, camp amid mountains in the Berkshires or gather around a fire pit near Joshua Tree National Park, refined design and starry nights await at these convenient getaways. Massachusetts Huttopia Berkshires An eco-tourism brand founded in Lyon, France, in 1999, Huttopia creates properties meant to appeal to outdoor adventurers. Its newest U.S. escape, Huttopia Berkshires, which opened this month, is no different. Spread across 123 acres in Hancock, Mass., the resort is about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Boston, in an area rife with lakes and hiking and biking trails. Choose from 45 wood-and-canvas tents available seasonally, and 11 year-round tiny houses (with more accommodations in the works). The Bonaventure tents, for up to two guests, are the camp's basic offering, with queen beds, electricity, a cooler, cookware and shared bath houses. For more room (up to five guests), privacy and amenities, try the Trappeur tents, which have two bedroom areas, a bathroom, mini-fridge, sink, wood stove, terrace, barbecue and fire pit. If you love the outdoors but don't necessarily love sleeping in a tent, the Sierra Tiny Houses accommodate up to five guests and have wood stoves, kitchens, bathrooms and outdoor lounge areas. Cool off in a swimming pool with mountain views and meet fellow campers at a community fire pit by the main lodge. Stop at the camp's Café-Bistro for pizzas, salads, croissants, crepes, smoothies, wine and local craft beers. Go for a drive and catch a concert at Tanglewood, in Lenox, and visit museums, including the Norman Rockwell Museum, in Stockbridge; Mass MoCA, in North Adams; and the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown. Prices from $93 a night (for the Bonaventure tents). Stockton, N.J. The Stockton Inn Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Pared-down ‘Vanessa,' in a strip mall, demands a trip to the Berkshires
NORTH ADAMS, MASS. — Deep in the Berkshires, just off the Mohawk Trail, in an abandoned strip mall anchored by an erstwhile Price Chopper, awaits a sleek, smart production of Samuel Barber's 'Vanessa' that's worth well more than the tank of gas it may require to get there. Heartbeat Opera's streamlined vision of Barber's resurgent 1958 nail-biter — a bizarre love quadrangle with sharp psychological corners — arrives as the first opera ever presented as part of Williamstown Theatre Festival. And even among the unpredictable mixed bouquet of this 71st season — helmed by a collective led by playwright Jeremy O. Harris ('Slave Play') and featuring plays, dance, experimental musical theater, readings and an ice show at a local hockey rink — the bright white bloom of this 'Vanessa' still stands out. R.B. Schlather, whose recent productions of 'Giulio Cesare' and 'Rodelinda' have inspired a recurring migration of opera lovers upstream to Hudson, New York — directs this adaptation by Heartbeat artistic director Jacob Ashworth. It's an elegant paring of the opera's four acts (more often presented in three) down to an uninterrupted 100-minute sequence — an urgent plunge into darkness that would have delighted Strauss. Schlather made clever use of 'the Annex,' a flexible performance venue swiftly constructed for the festival in a defunct retail space. (Alas, my suggestion of 'the Rent-A-Center for the Performing Arts' came too late.) Set against a long white screen that, these days, all but assures overuse of eye-popping projections, Schlather's vision cannily opts for stark shadow play, looming silhouettes and a hard-edged monochromaticism, compellingly undone by creeping carpets of mist and washes of uneasy daylight. It's a 'Vanessa' that feels like a memory of a dream of the opera, highly concentrated but twice removed, its nuances rendered in high, haunting contrast that lingers when you close your eyes. A treatment this resolutely minimal could easily have veered into absurdist territory — remember those Calvin Klein fragrance ads from the '90s? Instead, Schlather's alchemy of intense focus and dreamlike freedom honors the cyclic spell of Barber's opera with reverence and verve. At the core of this production's compressed force is a lean new arrangement of Barber's score by Dan Schlosberg — doing double-duty in Williamstown as composer and music director for a revival of Tennessee Williams's 'Camino Real.' Barber's score, which won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize (along with the libretto by partner and collaborator Gian Carlo Menotti), is here meticulously distilled for a seven-piece ensemble of clarinet, trombone, trumpet, piano, harp, cello and violin. Listeners who experienced Gianandrea Noseda lead the National Symphony Orchestra in a concert performance of 'Vanessa' this past January will marvel at Schlosberg's maintenance of Barber's intensity and depth. Meanwhile, the ensemble's nimbleness felt perfectly equipped for the busy weather of the music. Like the production itself, the graceful restraint of the arrangement served only to sharpen its details. Every note felt like a precipice. It also left room for some powerful singing by the ensemble, which Ashworth's adaptation keeps to five singers. Soprano Inna Dukach was an instantly arresting Vanessa — heels in hand, pining erratically for the arrival of her long-delayed lover, Anatol. Tenor Roy Hage, as the son of the same name who shows up instead, imbued his Anatol with humanity enough to make you forget what an opportunistic jerk he is. My favorite singer of the evening was mezzo-soprano Ori Marcu, who effortlessly embodied Vanessa's woebegone niece Erika, the fleeting hopeful flight of her signature aria ('Must the Winter Come So Soon?') a highlight of the evening. Baritone Joshua Jeremiah's compassionate approach to the Doctor opened some show-stealing moments, especially his aria in the second half. And mezzo-soprano Mary Phillips made a memorable Baroness, her silences as weighty as the burnished tones of her voice were light. The balance of Barber's largesse and Ashworth's economy was most beautifully realized in the climactic quintet ('To leave, to break, to find, to keep …') deftly woven by the five singers and entrancingly tangled in thick lines of cello and clarinet. There are worries all around about the future of opera, its viability in a cultural landscape defined by its sudden, seismic shifts. But this 'Vanessa' was, among other things, a master class in resourceful thinking: how to make a lot from a little. How to make something new from something old. And how to give opera a more accessible place in our lives — even if that means a strip mall. 'Vanessa' runs as part of Williamstown Theatre Festival through Aug. 3.
New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A ‘Tosca' Shows the Boston Symphony's Conductor at His Best
Andris Nelsons may have become a fitful, inconsistent music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but every once in a while, he proves that he has still got it. Such was the lesson on Saturday night at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home in the Berkshires, as Nelsons and a starry cast delivered a concert 'Tosca' of high intensity and even higher emotion. This Tanglewood season is a solid one, with the premiere of a new John Williams piano concerto written for Emanuel Ax on the agenda next weekend, a Gabriella Ortiz-curated Festival of Contemporary Music sprawling around the grounds at the same time, and the obligatory appearances of Yo-Yo Ma, famous friend of the orchestra, to come in August. New at Tanglewood this year: tastefully installed screens next to the Shed stage that show the musicians at work, and, by some miracle, enhanced cellphone service. Still unchanged: the humidity. But 'Tosca' was always likely to be a high point of the season, and it was. Opera has often brought out the best in Nelsons in Boston, and the closer to the most commonplace parts of the repertoire the work has been, the stronger the performance from him. Wagner transfixed him as a child, and it was at the Latvian National Opera that his career began to take off in his 20s. Now 46, he rarely looks more engaged on the podium than when he is supporting a singer in full flow. And for this Puccini, Nelsons had some singers of quality to support. Bryn Terfel sang his last staged Scarpia at the Met earlier this year, but he still brings unrivaled authority and conviction to a role that has defined his career. Has the passing of time brought a more vicious edge of desperation to his portrayal, as if an older Scarpia might feel as though this is his last, appalling chance to corner his prey, causing him to act with such depravity? Either way, Terfel's snarling chief of the Roman police remains a privilege to see. So, too, the glorious Cavaradossi of the Korean baritone-turned-tenor SeokJong Baek. Here, as at the Met last fall, his extraordinarily firm, high cries of 'Vittoria!' drew instant applause, and they were far from the only point at which this colossal voice, wielded by turns with machined precision and melting sensitivity, could have earned such approval. Nelsons continues to sustain the soprano Kristine Opolais, his former wife, at a difficult moment in her career as her voice declines. Her sickly Katarina Ismailova made sense in the Boston Symphony's performances of 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' last year, and this Tosca seemed similarly conceived to wring as much as dramatically possible from the sadly limited vocal resources she now has available to her. She has always been a compelling actor; trapped, fragile and honest, the result was a moving if far from musically convincing assumption of the title character. Dan Rigazzi's sensible concert staging smartly coordinated the central trio, the keenly taken minor roles (Patrick Carfizzi, a fine Sacristan), and what appeared to be most of the choral singers in western Massachusetts (the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and Boston University Tanglewood Institute Young Artists Vocal Program). Having Spoletta (Neal Ferreira) search the rogues at the back of the orchestra for the rebel Angelotti (Morris Robinson) was one of several small but telling directorial touches. And the Boston Symphony itself? Making the orchestra the star of the operatic show, which is what concert performances do by raising the instrumentalists out of the pit, has its difficulties; let the orchestra loose, and the singers can be inaudible, but hold it back too much, and you start to question the point. Even Nelsons, with all his sympathy for vocal artists, typically struggles to get the balance right. Still, it was more than worthwhile to hear players like these in a score like this. Take the delightful woodwind scampering as the Sacristan fussed in the first act as an example, or the acidic, metallic slice of the cellos as they hinted at Cavaradossi's torture in the second, let alone the great floods of string tone that Nelsons was rightly happy to unleash as the score took melodic wing. It was hard not to wonder, watching Nelsons at work, if this is not what he should be doing all the time: polishing the classics to an admirable sheen at one of the great opera houses of old. Eleven years into his Boston posting, his tenure remains stalled. Even a Beethoven cycle this past January was erratic, its successes unquestionable, its misfires unaccountable. His interpretive diffidence lets soloists enjoy their spotlight. Yuja Wang was magnificently stylish on Sunday with the energetic trainees of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto, a piece whose dreamy flights and angular blasts might have been written specifically for her. But the same trait too frequently robs purely symphonic works of the vitality they need. Maybe, then, there was something to be read into the planned return of Esa-Pekka Salonen to the Boston Symphony the week before 'Tosca,' or more likely not: The incomparable Finn, now freed from the disasters unfolding at the San Francisco Symphony, has conducted only four programs with this ensemble in his entire career, the most recent more than a decade ago. Infer what you will, but the story was short. Salonen withdrew for personal reasons, and Thomas Adès stepped in. Adès has enjoyed a longstanding collaboration with the Boston Symphony, recording his Piano Concerto and 'Totentanz' with it and serving as its artistic partner for three years, but it has always felt as if a bit more could be made of the relationship. Best known as a composer, Adès continues to improve as a conductor, still reveling in the hidden details of the scores he admires, but more technically able now than before both to unearth them and to put them into context. On July 13, he offered Salonen's program unchanged, giving a forceful reading of Gabriella Smith's naturalistic 'Tumblebird Contrails,' a wonderfully creative accompaniment to Pekka Kuusisto's darkly introspective solo in the Sibelius Violin Concerto, as well as a thoroughly meticulous Sibelius Fifth Symphony that treated the piece as if it were radically new. All of which led to a fugitive thought, untethered to any present reality: If Adès led an orchestra, what might he achieve?
