The weekend’s cultural highlights in the region include a new music ensemble; a deadpan standup comic; a rock-horror musical comedy; futurist and futuristic puppet theater; the return of a virtuoso violinist; a one-night festival of performance art, and a whole lot more.
Brooklyn-based new music ensemble So Percussion brings its innovative interpretations of modern classics and collaborative new works to the Tent at PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, in Chatham, N.Y., on Saturday at 8pm. Champions of innovation and curiosity, So Percussion produces its own original music and frequently collaborates with other musicians and performers. They are well known for using original and exotic instruments in performance and on recordings. So Percussion’s repertoire ranges from music of the 20th century by John Cage, Steve Reich, and IannisXenakis, to commissioning and advocating works by contemporary composers, including David Lang, Steve Mackey, and Paul Lansky.
The rock-horror musical comedy “Little Shop of Horrors,” is running at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield through Saturday, July 23. The production features Broadway actress BryonhaParham voicing the role of Audrey II – the infamous plant – from offstage, while onstage Taurean Everett, a lip-syncing drag queen, will embody the plant, which is usually represented by a puppet.
Joe Pera brings his deadpan standup comedy style to the Dré Pavilion at MASS MoCA in North Adams on Saturday at 8pm. The Buffalo-born, Brooklyn-based comic has been called “... more Twilight Zone than Moth, more Andy Kaufman than Chris Gethard.” I love Andy Kaufman, and I miss him so. I spend a lot of time on YouTube watching old videos of Andy Kaufman.
But getting back to this weekend, superstar violinist Joshua Bell will appear with the Boston Symphony Orchestra as soloist in Saint-Saëns’s romantic Violin Concerto No. 3 at Opening Night at Tanglewood tonight at 8, in a program featuring music by Ravel, Saint-Saëns, and Prokofiev, led by Canadian conductor Jacques Lacombe.
Over at the Bard SummerScape Festival on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., “Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed”, four puppet plays by leading Italian Futurist FortunatoDepero, originally staged in 1917, have been newly rediscovered, translated, designed, and directed by Obie and Bessie Award-winning artist Dan Hurlin. Their first performance almost a full century after their creation, Hurlin’s production combines traditional bunraku puppetry techniques with state-of-the-art technology – from 3-D printing to sound sampling – and a live score by Tony Award-nominated composer/sound designer Dan Moses Schreier, running tonight through July 17 in the Fisher Center at Bard.
The world-renowned Klezmatics will headline the fifth annual Yidstock: The Festival of New Yiddish Music, at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., beginning next Thursday, July 14, and running through Sunday, July 17. The lineup for the four-day festival also includes the original klezmer revival outfit Klezmer Conservatory Band; Sklamberg & the Shepherds, with Lorin Sklamberg, singer/pianist/composer Polina Shepherd from Siberia, and master clarinetist Merlin Shepherd from the UK; and Paul Shapiro’s Ribs and Brisket Revue, whose distinctive sound mixes klezmer with early jazz and R&B.
The CATCH performance series brings ten cutting-edge acts in a variety of genres to Basilica Hudson in Hudson, N.Y., for the second summer in a row on Sunday at 6pm. This year’s performers - innovative creators in theater, dance, music, and other fields - include Banana Bag & Bodice, a celebrated downtown theater company now based in Beacon; Chelsea and Magda, a Philadelphia-based performance duo with roots in the Hudson Valley; the NYC-based music/story duo James and Jerome; interactive installation artist Steve Lambert; Dan Safer’s NYC and Catskills-based trans-disciplinary performance collective Witness Relocation; Obie-award winning composer Heather Christian; choreographer Faye Driscoll; and Adrienne Truscott, choreographer, circus acrobat, dancer, writer, and as of late, comedian, among others.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of Berkishire Daily and the Rogovoy Report, available online at rogovoyreport.com