Author Archives: L. Beck

Career trumps marriage in a gripping production of Three Hotels at the Williamstown Theatre Festival

Three Hotels

By Jon Robin Baitz

Directed by Robert Falls

Cast: Maura Tierney as Barbara Hoyle and Steven Weber as Kenneth Hoyle

Reviewed by Lesley Ann Beck

[WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.]—The Williamstown Theatre Festival Main Stage season opener, the Jon Robin Baitz drama Three Hotels, is a series of three illuminating monologues recounting the unraveling of a married couple’s outwardly successful life, superbly performed by Steven Weber and Maura Tierney under the sure-handed direction of Tony Award-winner Robert Falls. The show runs through July 24.

The play begins in an elegant hotel room in Tangier, Morocco; titled “The Halt & the Lame,” part one introduces us to Ken Hoyle, an upper-level executive for an international corporation that sells substandard baby formula in poor African countries, using manipulative and dishonest sales techniques. Hoyle is tasked with firing employees who are no longer useful, and he boasts that he’s very good at it. The trick, he says, is to do it quickly. “They go quietly when I do it,” he says. Weber’s portrayal is nuanced, beautifully calibrated, and persuasive: his Hoyle speaks directly, companionably, to the audience, explaining his job in a calm manner, even when he likens the firing process to “railroad tracks to the ovens.”
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Karen Allen directs the poignant Moonchildren at Berkshire Theatre Festival

Reviewed by Lesley Ann Beck

[STOCKBRIDGE, Mass.]—Michael Weller’s Moonchildren follows a group of college students through their last bittersweet year of school, all the more poignant for taking place in 1965 and 1966, in the shadow of the war in Vietnam. The Berkshire Theatre Festival production, featuring Karen Allen’s deft direction of a fine cast, runs in the Unicorn Theatre through July 16.

The entire play unfolds in the one large space that serves the roommates as living room, dining area, and kitchen. The apartment, from the dingy, faded-beyond-recognition wallpaper to the outdated (even for 1965) refrigerator to the worn beige settee draped in the ubiquitous Indian-print bedspread of the sixties, is eerily familiar; how many of us lived in very similar digs in our college years? Most, judging by the murmurs of recognition from the audience.
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A riveting production of the two-character drama Going to St. Ives is now at Barrington Stage Company

Going to St. Ives

By Lee Blessing

Directed by Tyler Marchant

Cast: Gretchen Egolf as Dr. Cora Gage and Myra Lucretia Taylor as May N’Kame

Reviewed by Lesley Ann Beck

[PITTSFIELD, Mass.]—Lee Blessing’s gripping psychological drama Going to St. Ives is being given a passionate, powerful production, skillfully directed by Tyler Marchant, at Barrington Stage Company’s Stage 2, now through July 9. Gretchen Egolf and Myra Lucretia Taylor deliver compelling performances as two women who would seem to have little in common but find themselves sharing a shocking secret.
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The Memory of Water at Shakespeare & Company features splendid performances from a skilled ensemble of seasoned actors

The Memory of Water

By Shelagh Stephenson

Directed by Kevin Coleman

CAST: Elizabeth Aspenlieder as Catherine; Jason Asprey as Frank; Nigel Gore as Mike; Corinna May as Mary; Annette Miller as Vi; and Kristin Wold as Teresa

Reviewed by Lesley Ann Beck

[LENOX, Mass.] – A bitterly comic, heartbreakingly funny production of The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson, notable for outstanding performances from the fine ensemble cast, is running at Shakespeare & Company in the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre through September 4.

Three sisters—Teresa, Mary, and Catherine—have gathered for the funeral of their mother, Vi, at their family home in the north of England. These characters have quite a history together, and watching this ensemble of gifted actresses, Corinna May, Kristin Wold, and Elizabeth Aspenlieder, share the family stories, the family arguments, the family tragedies is eerily reminiscent of spending time with one’s own difficult, albeit beloved, relatives.
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House Proud: Local author Gladys Montgomery publishes two books on architecture

[WEST STOCKBRIDGE, MA]—Berkshire-based writer Gladys Montgomery has authored two new books about architecture, which are being published this year: Storybook Cottages: America’s Carpenter Gothic Style (Rizzoli) and An Elegant Wilderness: Great Camps and Grand Lodges of the Adirondacks, 1855-1935 (Acanthus Press, in collaboration with The Adirondack Museum).

Weaving together contemporary color photography, illustrations from historic pattern books, and photographs, drawings and floor plans from the Historic American Buildings Survey, Storybook Cottages tells the story of America’s Gothic Revival and the houses trimmed with decorative “gingerbread” scrollwork, a style that we now call Carpenter Gothic.
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A stellar cast delivers an exuberant Guys and Dolls at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield

Reviewed by Lesley Ann Beck

[PITTSFIELD, Mass.]—Mythic mid-century New York, as envisioned by Damon Runyon, bursts onstage with exuberance in the spectacular new production, directed by John Rando, of the iconic American musical Guys and Dolls on the Mainstage at Barrington Stage Company, now through July 16. The outstanding cast of accomplished singers, actors, and dancers delivers this classic show with a fresh sense of fun and joy.
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Pissarro’s People is an insightful, illuminating exhibition of works by Impressionist great Camille Pissarro

Reviewed by Lesley Ann Beck

[WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.] – A poignant portrait of a little girl in a rose garden, a graceful trio of young women picking apples, and a gardener harvesting brilliant green cabbages are among the many marvelous paintings in Pissarro’s People, the fascinating exhibition of works by Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), that opened Saturday and will be on view at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute through October 2.

Pissarro’s People, curated by Richard R. Brettell, is the first major exhibition to explore the philosophy and political outlook of the painter relative to his portrayal of the human figure, in approximately forty paintings and fifty works on paper.

Pissarro’s People begins in the first floor Manton Gallery with an enormous black and white photograph of Pissarro and his family, sitting together out-of-doors, on a haystack. The image is emblematic of the show, which portrays the artist’s devotion and dedication to his family, his appreciation of and engagement with the agricultural community and rural life, and his philosophy of a better world to come, one where people were respected for the work they did, whether they were farmers or servants or artists.
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Tony Award winner John Rando directs Guys and Dolls at Barrington Stage

By Lesley Ann Beck

[PITTSFIELD, Mass.] — Tony Award-winner John Rando promises “a funny, wonderful, moving, heartfelt night in the theater,” when Guys and Dolls, the iconic Broadway musical he’s directing at Barrington Stage Company, opens this week. Rando is a huge fan of the show, one he agrees is “one of the great American musicals.” Now in previews, Guys and Dolls opens on Sunday, June 19, and runs through July 16.

“The piece is really well-crafted. … The book is one of the funniest books I’ve worked with,” Rando said in a recent phone interview. “Much of the storytelling, much of the romance, is in the music. The playwriting is so firm.” That the show is so well-written makes the director’s job easier. “It’s a well-executed show and it’s a comfort that it’s all there on the page and in the score.”
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Magnificent contemporary sculptures by acclaimed African artist El Anatsui now on view at the Clark

Reviewed by Lesley Ann Beck
Three extraordinary sculptures by celebrated African artist El Anatsui are on view in two galleries in the Clark’s Stone Hill Center through October 16. Pissarro’s People, a major exhibition of works by Impressionist master Camille Pissarro and Spaces: Photographs by Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth are also on view at the Clark this summer.
The sculptures by El Anatsui resemble enormous fluid tapestries, draped and pleated against the gallery walls, but they are not textiles at all; rather, they are made of small pieces of aluminum, cut from discarded bottle caps and linked together with tiny twists of copper wire.
The sculptures are of exceptional beauty, made up of swaths of articulated matte aluminum fragments in brass or silver punctuated with strips or clusters of rich reds, yellows, and blues. Continue reading

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Tina Packer shares a lifetime of knowledge in her Women of Will series

Reviewed by Lesley Ann Beck

[LENOX, Mass.]—The absolutely riveting Tina Packer plays Petruchio’s Kate, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Beatrice, Margaret of Anjou, and Juliet, among many, many others, in Women of Will, The Complete Journey: Parts I-V, her extraordinary master class in the works of William Shakespeare, running now through July 10 in the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare & Company. Part performance, part lecture, part debate, part exposition, Women of Will, written by Packer and performed by Packer and actor Nigel Gore, is based on her decades-long immersion, as actor and director, in the works of the Bard.
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