The cultural highlights for our region this weekend include chamber music, old time music, brass band music, Broadway … plus a whole lot more.
At MASS MoCA in North Adams, Alec Soth & Dave King perform as The Palms, tonight and Saturday night at 8pm. Virtuosic drummer Dave King — of the jazz duo The Bad Plus — and internationally renowned photographer Alec Soth join forces for this music-meets-art performance. A kaleidoscopic trip down memory lane, the work-in-progress delves into the physicality of memory that’s been lost in the digital age. From the sound of a slide dropping into a projector's carousel to the smell of a photo album opened for the first time in decades, this all-star duo makes magic from an improvisatory rummaging in the attic of memory.
Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., kicks off its summer season with “Who Could Ask For Anything More?: The Songs of George Gershwin,” an original jukebox musical featuring the Gershwins’ greatest hits, including songs like “I Got Rhythm,” “Embraceable You” and “Summertime”. Also running at Barrington Stage is “Chester Bailey,” starring real-life father and son, Tony Award winner Reed Birney and Ephraim Birney, as a doctor and patient during WWII. Both shows are now running through Saturday, July 3.
Fans of Broadway musicals may also want to check out Broadway star and Tony Award-winner Kelli O’Hara tonight at 7pm in the Colonial Concert Series Outside Under The Big Tent
at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield. And Grammy Award winner and Tony nominee Elizabeth Stanley, a veteran of “Jagged Little Pill” and “On the Town” on Broadway, performs at Barrington Stage Company on Monday night at 8pm.
Also in Pittsfield this weekend, the Berkshire County Historical Society highlights music written in the 1800s with a free concert by The Victorian Quadrille Orchestra on Sunday at 6:30pm at Arrowhead, the historic home of Herman Melville. The Victorian Quadrille Orchestra is unusual in that the music is performed in its original form, notes and instrumentation as written in the nineteenth century. Sort of not-so-early music, if you will.
Speaking of early-ish music, the Berkshire Bach Society features nine-time Grammy award-winner violinist Eugene Drucker, performing a selection of trio sonatas by Bach with Roberta Cooper on cello and Arthur Haas on harpsichord, on Saturday at 5 p.m., at the First Congregational Church in Great Barrington.
If loud, brassy party music is your thing, you’re in luck. Brasskill is a lively 15-piece party brass band whose mission is to get you out on the dance floor, which they will attempt to do at the Foundry in West Stockbridge, Mass., on Saturday at 7pm. The band’s wide-ranging repertoire includes music from the New Orleans second-line tradition, punk and pop covers, international grooves, as well as original compositions and arrangements.
Old-timey duo Moonshine Holler may also get you on your feet and moving around when they perform at Dewey Hall’s TapRoot Sessions Outdoors Concert Series tonight at 7pm in Sheffield, Mass. With Pete Killeen on fiddle, mandolin, banjo or guitar and Paula Bradley on banjo, guitar, vocals, kazoo or feet, the duo is "a two person music festival that captures the essence of American southern roots music" of the 1920's and 1930's.
The Great Barrington Public Theater kicks off its summer season with DAD, a new comedy by Mark St. Germain, running tonight through July 3rd at the Daniel Art Center's McConnell Theater on the campus of Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington. DAD takes a loving and quizzical look at sibling and parent rivalries and the challenges of aging and reconciliation.
Chester Theatre Company concludes its season-opening run of Will Eno’s “Title and Deed” at Hancock Shaker Village this weekend. The play stars James Barry and is directed by Keira Naughton, both names quite familiar to Berkshire theater audiences.