This week we look at a film festival, a blues concert, a comic mystery, an art opening, and a homegrown folksinger-made good.
Academy Award-winner John Irving and actor Treat Williams are participants in the 15th annual Williamstown Film Festival, taking place at venues in Williamstown and North Adams through Sunday. Among the thirty films being shown is tonight’s feature: A Birder’s Guide to Everything. Imagine a blend of Sideways and Stand by Me, starring Ben Kingsley and James LeGros, in which four teenagers embark on a wacky Connecticut road trip to track down a supposedly extinct duck. The film will be screened at MASS MoCA, and screenwriter Luke Matheny will do a Q&A afterwards.
Iconic folk-blues legend Taj Mahal headlines an evening of “world blues” at the Mahaiwe on Sunday at 7 p.m. Also appearing on the bill celebrating American blues music's global influence are South African guitarist/vocalist Vusi Mahlasela – known simply as “The Voice” in his homeland -- and blues-rock group Fredericks Brown, a band featuring Mahal's daughter, Deva Mahal, who hails from New Zealand. Taj Mahal himself is a native of nearby Springfield, Massachusetts, and has spent his life and career exploring every river and stream of the blues, from the Delta to Africa and back again.
Rupert Holmes’s comic thriller Accomplice, which won the prestigious Edgar Award (the “Oscar of Crime”) and the Dramalogue Award for Best Play, is being staged at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox now through Sunday, November 10. The cast includes four of the company’s most popular and skilled comic actors — Elizabeth Aspenlieder, Jason Asprey, Annie Considine and Josh Aaron McCabe – reunited for the first time since their appearance together in last summer’s comic play, Parasite Drag. Like many conventional English thrillers, Accomplice is set in a lovely country house where a wife and her lover plan to murder her stuffy husband. But Accomplice veers away from the conventional, and has enough plot twists, character twists and compromising situations to spin the British comic-thriller genre on its ear. Rupert Holmes’s script crackles with witty references to well-known thrillers including The Mouse Trap and Death Trap; soap operas; and even dance instructor Arthur Murray.
Nationally acclaimed singer-songwriter Meg Hutchinson, a Berkshire native who came of age creatively at the original Club Helsinki in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, brings her new body of work as heard on her terrific new album, Beyond That to Club Helsinki Hudson tonight at 9 p.m.
A new exhibition, "Storytellers and Conjurers", featuring works by Kahn & Selesnick, Eileen Murphy, Louise Laplante, and Adam Cohen goes on display at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson this weekend, and will remain on view through December 8. There will be a public reception for the artists on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.
Sculptor Tom Doyle will be at Omi International Arts Center in Ghent on Saturday at 3 p.m. for an informal conversation with Bill Maynes, director of The Fields Sculpture Park, where Doyle is currently exhibiting five large-scale works, cast in bronze from original wood forms. The event will take place in the Gallery at the Visitors Center at Omi. Refreshments will be served following the talk.
I’m Seth Rogovoy, and that’s the Rogovoy Report for this weekend.