It’s not even Memorial Day weekend yet, but in the breadth and depth and variety of cultural offerings in the greater Berkshire region, it’s beginning to offer hints that summer is not far away.
Cabaret singer Amanda McBroom will inaugurate the 2014 season at Mr. Finn’s Cabaret with “Let’s Fall in Love,” a program of songs of romance by Broadway songwriters including Cole Porter, Jacques Brel, Sammy Cahn, and Jerome Kern, as well as her own compositions, at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, tonight and Saturday, at 8pm, and on Sunday, at 5pm. McBroom of course is best known for penning the Bette Midler hit, “The Rose.”
Author Maureen Footer will discuss how interior designer George Stacey shot to prominence with projects for fashion high-priestess Diana Vreeland and commissions for socialites with last names such as Astor, Paley, Harriman, and Whitney in the 1930s, along the way continuing and extending the ideas established by Edith Wharton in “The Decorations of Houses,” in a talk at the Mount in Lenox on Sunday, at 4pm.
An all-female company of actors will perform a staged reading of “Measure for Measure” by William Shakespeare at No. Six Depot Roastery and Café in West Stockbridge on Sunday at 3p.m., as part of WAM Theatre’s Fresh Takes Play Reading Series, which offers new and reimagined works that tell women’s stories.
Composer Ludwig Van Beethoven’s pathway from disciple of classical composer Haydn to hero of the Romantic movement will be traced in “Beethoven and the Dawn of Romanticism,” a chamber concert at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington, on Saturday, at 6pm, as part of the Close Encounters With Music series. Works to be performed include the famed Kreutzer Sonata and the Archduke Trio.
Works by New Hampshire-based artists J. Ann Eldridge and Bill Duffy will be on display at Spencertown Academy Arts Center from Saturday through June 22, 2014. There will be an opening reception for the exhibition, “Off the Beaten Path: Prints by J. Ann Eldridge and Photographs by Bill Duffy,” on Saturday, from 4 to 6 p.m. The reception and exhibition are free and open to the public.
Cabaret and opera singer Robert Osborne will perform the cabaret and film songs of Franz Waxman, who wrote hits for the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Billie Holliday and Joan Crawford, at Hudson Opera House on Saturday, at 7pm.
Alan Evans, the cofounder, writer and drummer of the popular jam-band Soulive, will bring Playonbrother, his new “electrified soul-rock trio,” to Club Helsinki Hudson tonight at 9pm. Like Soulive, the trio features musicians playing Hammond B-3 organ and electric guitar. With Evans’s hard-driving drumming, the overall sound of Playonbrother updates classic 1970s funk for the 21st century.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of Berkishire Daily and the Rogovoy Report, available online at rogovoyreport.com.