The cultural highlights in our region in coming days include pop legends at Tanglewood; abstract expressionism at the Rockwell Museum; new plays; old musicals, and a whole lot more.
A grand slam of superstar artists from country, pop, R&B, and folk-rock, including Dolly Parton tonight, Earth, Wind & Fire tomorrow night, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys on Sunday afternoon, and Jackson Browne next Tuesday, kick off the 2016 summer popular artists series at Tanglewood. I’m planning to catch them all, but if I had to pick one I’d say I’m most excited about hearing Brian Wilson play the groundbreaking 1966 album “Pet Sounds” in its entirety. While it had familiar hits including “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Sloop John B,” just below the surface of that largely experimental album lurked the soundtrack to one man’s nervous breakdown.
For the first time ever, Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge will explore the contrast between the abstract and realist movements, placing works by Norman Rockwell, Andrew Wyeth, and Andy Warhol side by side with avatars of abstract expressionism such as Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, and Jasper Johns. In addition, the exhibit, “Rockwell and Realism in an Abstract World,” which goes on view today, features works by over 40 other preeminent artists, including Walton Ford, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Jeff Koons, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Philip Pearlstein, Robert Rauschenberg, David Salle, Saul Steinberg, and Cy Twombly. The exhibition’s official opening reception will take place on Thursday, July 14, at 6:30pm.
The summer theater season at Barrington Stage Company gets fully underway this weekend when Debra Jo Rupp stars in Pulitzer Prize-winner David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo,” playing a teenage girl trapped in an older woman’s body, and Tamara Tunie of TV’s “Law and Order” creates the lead role in the world premiere of “American Son,” which is already the winner of the prestigious Laurents/Hatcher Award for Best New Play of 2016.
Aston Magna, the nation’s longest-running festival of early music, kicks off its 44th season this weekend with ““Love and Lamentation: 17th Century Italian Monody,” tonight at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y, and Saturday night at Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The concerts, featuring virtuoso early music artists performing on authentic period instruments, includes works by Monteverdi, Marazzoli, Rossi and Marini. And remember – don’t be late for early music!
“Fiorello!,” the 1959 musical about New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who broke up the stranglehold that so-called Tammany Hall had on New York City politics, is being revived by Berkshire Theatre Group at the Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge, now through Saturday, July 23. The winner of three Tony Awards, the musical, created by the legendary Broadway duo of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, best known for Fiddler on the Roof, is one of only nine to have also won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
“Gems of Many Genres,” a new music series in the newly restored Egremont Barn, a part of the historic Egremont Village Inn in South Egremont, Massachusetts, kicks off this weekend with a concert by Richie Havens sideman Walter Parks, on Saturday at 7 and 9pm.
The Clark Art Institute isn’t the only venue displaying artworks featuring the human form in the way nature intended. “EXPOSED: Heads, Busts, and Nudes,” an exhibition of figural ceramic sculpture from 1970 to the present, goes on view at Ferrin Contemporary, on the campus of MASS MoCA in North Adams, on Saturday, with a reception from 4 to 6pm.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of Berkishire Daily and the Rogovoy Report, available online at rogovoyreport.com