Sarah LaDuke

  SculptureNow’s 2017 outdoor exhibition at The Mount in Lenox, MA is entitled, Nexus. It is on view through October 31st. SculptureNow offers free guided tours to the general public, students, and vision-impaired visitors and their exhibitions provide opportunities for sculptors to develop their careers.

This year there are 30 works on display in and around Edith Wharton’s historic home and gardens. We spoke with three participating artists about their pieces, Setsuko Winchester, William Carlson, and David Teeple.

There will be an artist guided tour on October 15th at 1:30 p.m.

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico is in a humanitarian crisis with destroyed infrastructure and access to supplies severely limited.

Luis Miranda Jr. - who lives and works in New York City but grew up in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico and still has family there - joins us to talk about what has happened, what is being done, and what is still needed.

Miranda is the Founder and former President at the Hispanic Federation and Founding Partner of the MirRam Group LLC. He is a Board Member of the John Jay College Foundation, vice-chair of the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, and a member of the advisory boards to Nielsen Ratings, and R.Evolucion Latina.

Mid-century designer Russel Wright’s historic home, studio, and woodland grounds, Manitoga, is located in Garrison, NY. This Saturday, Manitoga presents its annual outdoor performance.

Created by Suzanne Thorpe, Resonance & Resemblance is a sonic performance and meditation created for Manitoga and supported in part by grants from the MAP Fund and New Music USA. The event is sold-out.

Suzanne Thorpe composes site-oriented sound works that use a variety of media and technology, and performs on the electroacoustic flute, expanded with digital and analog tools. Thorpe is a former member of indie rock band Mercury Rev and is currently a PhD candidate in Music/Integrative Studies at University of California San Diego, and Co-Director of TECHNE. 

Brandi Carlile and her band are playing The FreshGrass Festival at MASS MoCA this Saturday.

For more than a decade, the big-voiced roots-rocker has shared the road with twin brothers Phil and Tim Hanseroth. Renowned for their high-energy live-show, their 2015 album, The Firewatcher’s Daughter is a collection of building and boiling songs full of nothing more or less than a whole lot of heart.

Brandi's most recent release I mentioned is Cover Stories: Brandi Carlile Celebrates 10 Years of The Story – An Album to Benefit War Child. The Story is Carlile’s 2007 album - produced by T-Bone Burnett and featuring a resonant group of songs that earned the record Gold Status early this year -- 10  years after it’s release. Cover Stories features all new recordings of those songs by artists like Adele, Indigo Girls, Jim James, Kris Kristoffersen, Dolly Parton and Pearl Jam. The album features a forward by President Barack Obama and all proceeds from its sales go to benefit War Child UK.

  The folk and son mexicano band David Wax Museum is currently on a tour that marks their 1000th show and their 10th anniversary. To mark the occasion, they’ve  released Electric Artifacts, an album of outtakes and rarities.

The duo of David Wax and Suz Slezak will be joined by their full band with a horn section for a show this Sunday at 7 p.m. at Caff​è Lena in Saratoga Springs, NY.

David Wax joins us.

The Whiskey Treaty Roadshow are a collaborative of five Massachusetts-based singer-songwriters. As individuals they have released a total of 18 albums; their live record The Heart of the Run is their first as a band. This coming Friday they will release a new EP and perform at MASS MoCA’s FreshGrass Festival.

Billy Keane joins us.

Shawn Stone joins us to talk about what he's seen lately and what cultural events are coming up this week in our region.

Seen: The Trip to Spain

Upcoming: 

Lucky Me
Theater Barn, New Lebanon, opens Friday 9/8, 8 PM, runs three weekends through 9/24

Hieroglyphic Being
EMPAC Studio 1-Goodman, Troy, Friday 9/8, 7:30 PM

Shun Ng & Magic Dick
Caffe Lena, Saratoga Springs, Friday 9/8, 8 PM

Albany Music Scene Band Together/WEXT, WEQX for the Galveston County Food Bank featuring Graham Tichy & Ian Carlton, MotherJudge, Knotworking, Gay Tastee, Bryan Thomas The Low Beat, Albany, Friday 9/8, 7 PM

Axel Strauss (violin), Todd Palmer (clarinet), Ilya Poletaev (piano)
Music of Milhaud, Copland, Barber and Stravinsky 
Tannery Pond Concerts, New Lebanon, Saturday 9/9, 8 PM

  On September 9th, singer-songwriter, sportsfan, writer, and music producer Erin McKeown is playing at Signature Sounds’ The Parlor Room in Northampton, MA on September 9th with Orchestral synth-rock band, The Cabin Project.

Prior to that, on September 4th, McKeown will present her 8th Cabin Fever live-streamed house concert -- for which she and The Cabin Project will play her two recent EPs, Mirrors Break Back and According to Us. The episode is free - donations will be distributed to Houston Food Bank, Black Girls Code, and Border Angels.

     This week's Book Picks  come from Phil Lewis of The Bennington Bookshop.

List:
Before You Know It by John Bargh Ph.D.
The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies
A Hundred Small Lessons by Ashley Hay
Tangerine by Christine Mangan
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
Trace by Archer Mayor
The Child by Fiona Barton

In the new movie, Landline, Jenny Slate and new comer Abby Quinn play sisters Dana and Ali. Dana is engaged and feeling trapped and Ali is a senior in high school feeling somehow tethered and free at the same time when she finds out that their father, Alan (played by John Turturro) is cheating on their mother Pat (Edie Falco). The film also features Jay Duplass as Ben and Berkshire native Finn Wittrock as Nate. Set in 1995, Landline is human and hilarious.  

Co-written by Gillian Robespierre and Elisabeth Holm and directed by Robespierre, Landline begins screening at Images Cinema in Williamstown, MA today. Robespierre will participate in a Skype Q&A at tomorrow night’s 7pm showing of the film.

Robespierre’s first feature-length film - also co-written with Elisabeth Holm and starring Jenny Slate - Obvious Child was released in 2014.

This week, Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, MA announced an extension of its production of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company, directed by Julianne Boyd. The show was scheduled to play on The Boyd-Quinson Mainstage through September 2nd, and now Bobby will be side-by-side with his friends, driving his dates crazy, and waiting through the 10th.

Aaron Tveit plays Bobby at Barrington Stage. On Broadway he’s appeared in Hairspray, Wicked, Next to Normal, and Catch Me If You Can. He played Enjolras in the film of Les Miserables starring Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe, television credits include Gossip Girl, Graceland, FOX’s Grease Live - and other programs not starting with "G".

Picasso: Encounters has been on view exclusively at The Clark Art Institute this summer and will close this coming Sunday, August 27.

The exhibition estigates how Pablo Picasso’s creative collaborations fueled and strengthened his art, challenging the notion of Picasso as an artist alone with his craft. The exhibition addresses his full stylistic range, the narrative themes that drove his creative process, the often-neglected issue of the collaboration inherent in print production, and the muses that inspired him.

We spoke about the exhibition with Jay Clarke - the Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

  This Thursday at 4 p.m., The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts presents Women Writing Through Loss: Connecting Through Calamity featuring Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, Rebecca Soffer, and Emily Rapp Black as they read from their work and discuss the power of connection as friends, as writers, as mothers, and as women who forged powerful friendships after experiencing great personal loss, and writing their way out of it.

Rebecca Soffer joined us to tell us more.

  The exhibition, An Inner World: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting at The Clark in Williamstown, MA features seven genre paintings by Dutch artists working in or near the city of Leiden in the seventeenth century. Genre paintings, or scenes that take everyday life as their subject matter, flourished in the Dutch Republic in this period.

Based around The Clark’s own Girl at a Window by Gerrit Dou, the exhibition is scheduled to be on display through October 1st. We went to the museum recently and spoke with Alexis Goodin, Co-Curator and Curatorial Research Assistant at The Clark.

  Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, MA presents George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award winning 1970 musical Company from through September 2nd on the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage.

In the play, consummate bachelor, Robert, interacts with - as the song says "those good and crazy people his married friends" as he and tries to commit, to find love, and figure out what "it's really about."

The Barrington Stage production of Company is directed by BSC Artistic Director Julianne Boyd. She joined us at The Linda along with the show’s Music Director Dan Pardo and Bobby and his three girlfriends - April, Marta, and Kathy -- respectively played by Aaron Tveit, Mara Davi, Nora Schell, and Rebecca Kuznick.

  Mischief Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong has been doing so on Broadway since March of this year.

In the play, it’s opening night of The Murder at Haversham Manor where things are quickly going from bad to utterly disastrous. With an unconscious leading lady, a corpse that can’t play dead, and actors who trip over everything (including their lines) - the mad-cap romp meticulously disintegrates at The Lyceum Theatre on 45th Street.

Winner of the Tony Award for Best Scenic Design of a Play, The Play That Goes Wrong is directed by Mark Bell and written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields. Lewis, Sayer, and Shields also star -- and two of the actor/co-creators -- Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer - sat down with us in New York City.

  Performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist Andrew Schneider presents his Obie Award-winning show YOUARENOWHERE. This rapid-fire and witty theater performance cycles through expressions of laughter, surprise, and angst. Its dialogue traverses quantum mechanics and parallel universes, missed connections and YouTube videos in an existential meditation on time and presence. The New York Times lauds the show as “A chaotic mix of personal revelation and relativity theory, enhanced by some alarming and splendid visual effects...”

Andrew Schneider has been working in residence at EMPAC to create the follow-up to YOUARENOWHERE, which will receive its World Premiere at EMPAC this September.

He joins us now along with Ashley Ferro-Murray - Curator of Theater and Dance at EMPAC.

The third Main Stage production of the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s 2017 season is A Legendary Romance. Written by Timothy Prager and Geoff Morrow and starring Jeff McCarthy and Lora Lee Gayer, A Legendary Romance is directed by Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee, Lonny Price.

Price played Charley in the ill-fated original production of Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway -- an experience which he has lately translated into an acclaimed documentary film The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened (which is now available to stream on Netflix).

He’s an award winning director who helmed the recent Broadway revival of Sunset Boulevard starring Glenn Close. Other directorial credits include Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill starring Audra McDonald -- which is running in London this summer -- and episodes of the television programs 2 Broke Girls and Desperate Housewives and the screen-via-stage favorites Great Performances and Live from Lincoln Center. He’s also a writer and was nominated for a Tony Award in 2001 for the book of A Class Act. As an actor he has a number of theatrical credits after Merrily and several films, including The Muppets Take Manhattan and Dirty Dancing.

  The new musical, A Legendary Romance is The Williamstown Theatre Festival’s third and final Main Stage show this season. The show will run in Williamstown August 3rd through the 20th.  

With a book by Timothy Prager and Music and lyrics by Geoff Morrow, A Legendary Romance is directed by Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee Lonny Price and stars Jeff McCarthy as Joseph Lindy - a filmmaker blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee and struggling to restore his personal and professional legacy.

For a preview of the production, we were joined at The Linda by Jeff McCarthy who plays Joseph Lindy, Geoff Morrow, and, playing piano, Cody Owen Stine - Associate Music Director for A Legendary Romance and WTF’s Cabaret Director.

In the new film Brave New Jersey, Tony Hale plays Mayor Clark Hill - a sweet and subservient man who finds the drive to pursue what he’s always wanted when Orson Welle’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938 convinces his town that it may be the last night of their lives.

Hale is best known as the youngest Bluth brother, Buster, on the now-Netflix-formerly-Fox favorite Arrested Development and as Selina Meyer’s personal-aide and bag-man on HBO’s Veep.

Shawn Stone joins us to talk about what he's seen lately and what cultural events are coming up this week in our region.

Seen: Maudie, Dunkirk, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Upcoming:

Sweeney Todd - Mac-Haydn Theatre, Chatham, opens 7/27 Thursday (2 and 8 PM) through Aug. 6

Old Salt Union, Chris Kasper - Caffe Lena, Saratoga Springs, 7/27 Thursday, 7 PM

John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous - Palace Theatre, Albany, 7/27 Thursday, 7 and 9:30 PM [7 PM sold out]

Phantogram - The Egg, Albany, 7/27 Thursday, 8 PM

  Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man is about a con-man who ultimately does good by a community. Harold Hill's heart opens up through the course of one of America's most beloved musicals.

Berkshire Theatre Group is currently presenting the Tony Award-winning musical at The Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield, MA through August 6th.

Directed by Travis G. Daly with music direction by Mark Gionfriddo, the BTG production of The Music Man features over 100 talented Berkshire youth along with Rylan Morsbach as neck-or-nothing, rip-roarin', every-time-a bull's-eye salesman Harold Hill and Haley Aguero as Marian “Madam Librarian” Paroo.

We are joined this morning at The Linda by the aforementioned Rylan Morsbach, Haley Aguero, Mark Gionfriddo, and Travis G. Daly.

This summer SculptureNow and The Mount are proud to present NEXUS a new, juried exhibition featuring 30 large-scale, outdoor sculptures placed throughout the grounds of The Mount.

The exhibition is on display now through Halloween.

The show includes regionally, nationally and internationally recognized artists. To tell us more we welcome Ann Jon, Executive Director of SculptureNow and for all things at Edith Wharton, we welcome Susan Wissler, Executive Director at Edith Wharton’s The Mount. 

Vassar College and New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Theatre’s second mainstage show this summer is Good Men Wanted. The new play is about women who - for varied reasons and to varied ends - disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War.

The drama punctuated by explosive dance sequences - choreographed by Ani Taj and set to contemporary pop music. They play is written by Kevin Armento and directed by Jaki Bradley who joins us.

  Mourning the loss of her elder son Myles, Bethea tries to help her younger son Gideon through his grief. But as revelations surrounding Myles’ incarceration and death emerge, both mother and son must decide whether to fight or let go.

Where Storms Are Born is a new play by Harrison David Rivers having its world premiere on the Nikos Stage at The Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, MA through July 23rd. Rivers was the Williamstown Theatre Festival Playwright-in-Residence in 2016.

The play is directed by Saheem Ali and stars Myra Lucretia Taylor as Bethea Solomon - a woman living in grief and demonstrating love and resilience.

Vassar College and New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Theater Training Program challenges young theatre artists to look at their art in new and meaningful ways while they explore boundaries by living, breathing, and creating theater with peers and professionals alike. To learn more we are joined by Max Reuben and Emily Mendelsohn.

Reuben is a playwright, director, sometimes-actor, and founding member of AGGROCRAG – a Brooklyn-based theater company dedicated to creating original plays. At Vassar he directs and composes Soundpainting -- which is performed Thursdays in July in The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

Mendelsohn is a Brooklyn-based director who is adapting and directing William Shakespeare's Hamlet which is running July 14-16 in the Environmental Cooperative at The Vassar Barns.

Bobby Conte Thornton plays Calogero in A Bronx Tale: The Musical at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway. Based on Chazz Palminteri’s life and one-man show, the musical is co-directed by Robert De Niro, who directed the original film, and Jerry Zaks, who directed the one man show on Broadway in 2007.

The show features a book by Palminteri and original music by Alan Menken, and lyrics by Glenn Slater. The cast album is available from Ghostlight Records. A Bronx Tale is Bobby Conte Thornton’s Broadway debut and we spoke with him about working with the show's creative team and what's it's like when your dreams come true.

In 1917, New York State was one of the first to grant women the right to vote. With the support of a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, Hudson River Bank and Trust Foundation, and private donations, Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon is celebrating that important anniversary with its newest exhibition, Break Every Yoke: Shakers, gender equality, and women’s suffrage. The exhibition is on view in the historic 1829 Brethren’s Workshop via guided tour through October 9.

The exhibition draws on more than 75 artifacts from Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon’s collections and we went there recently to discuss the exhibition with Shaker Museum Executive Director Lacy Schutz.

  New York Stage and Film and Vassar College’s Powerhouse Theatre presents an Inside Look Workshop of Lauren Yee’s new play, The Great Leap July 7-9.

The play is set in San Francisco in the Spring of 1989.  Manford Lum, locally renowned on the sidewalk basketball courts of Chinatown, talks his way onto a college team, just before they travel to Beijing for a "friendship" game.  His background is a mystery, but he can sink 100 free throws in a row, so who cares?  When they arrive, China is in the throes of the post-Cultural Revolution era, and Manford must juggle international politics and his own personal history.

Designer Russel Wright’s home, studio, and woodland garden - collectively called Manitoga - are located in Garrison, NY and will have a Member's Summer Celebration on Saturday, July 8.

Manitoga’s Artist Residency program was initiated in 2014 to foster creative responses to Manitoga that invoke Russel Wright's legacy of creative experimentation and celebration of place. For this year’s Residency, Master of Architecture Students at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design have designed, built and installed a full-scale, site-specific pavilion which will be on view through November 13.

Last year's residency artist, Peter Bynum, also has work on display in the home. (An interview with him can be found here. 

Executive Director Allison Cross joins us to talk about this season’s plans.