Berkshire Links

Article updated August 30, 2018 by Dave Read

Spirits were yet scurrying back to their haunting places when Christopher Eisenbach took to the podium less than fifteen hours after the Bernstein Centennial Celebration to lead the Boston Symphony and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in the program that would conclude the BSO’s Summer of Lenny in the Berkshires.

Like wedding guests who meet for lunch the day after before resuming the routine of their lives, the audience today couldn’t stop talking about what they’d witnessed yesterday.

So, let’s get on with it, let’s play the program and put the season to bed. A routine rendition of that splendid chestnut – Beethoven’s Ninth, although never expected here in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, may have been acceptable – just this once.

What Maestro Eisenbach and his charges delivered, however, was anything but routine, it was outstanding, so brilliant that it cut room for itself in memory, rather than settle for being an appendage to the events of the preceding eight weeks. We can attribute that to the two Bernstein works prefacing today’s program; traditionally, Beethoven has the season-ending concert to himself.

Something else added to my enjoyment – two silences, lacunae less than a second in length, but of profound depth – a tremendous bit of artistry, accomplished by a visiting conductor, orchestra, and amateur chorus. Bravo!

It was my uncanny luck to be seated adjacent to a woman who sang in the Berkshire Chorus, antecedent to the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, in the news this summer because of policies instituted by director James Burton, in the wake of founder John Oliver’s 45 year tenure. Before the concert, she told me that she sees merit on both sides of the re-audition issue; later, she said that they had never sounded so good. Charles Munch conducted the last program she was part of; and she sang at Maestro Koussevitsky’s funeral!

August 25, 2012 matinee performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Terry Teachout’s Satchmo at the Waldorf at Shakespeare and Co. is a STUNNING production, one of the most exciting new plays to have premiered in a challenging Berkshire summer season. John Douglas Thompson, the play begins as solo performance. The time is March 1971 and Louis Armstrong, greatest jazz musician of the 20th century, is backstage at the Waldorf preparing for what may be his last performance. The man is aged and ill. As he sinks into a chair, he puts reaches not for his golden horn but gropes for his oxygen inhaler. Gradually, talking to himself he copes with his infirmities.

Thompson is Armstrong. And then, without warning he becomes Joe Glaser, his mob-connected manager, and tone and especially language with the F word entangled in most sentences and his over-bearing personality smashing through, rule the stage. Thompson is suddenly taller, dominating.

Then just as suddenly Glaser is gone. But one has feeling of two men on stzage. Yet on the stage is only Armstrong, limping, pill taking, trying to cope with the costume change required for the next Waldorf “set” for which he must leave at the end of this ninety minute play, which no longer seems just a play but an action in which we are involved. And to further complicate, but clearly easy to follow, a third character, Miles Davis appears on stage, briefly.

Armstrong does not play his golden horn. This is not a musical play in that sense, although it is a very musical play. One that manages to sweep us into Armstrong and the music with which he dominated his generation.

The simple set on which this magic takes place is the thrust stage, the only scenery the long back-wall mirror, the light bulbs that define it indicating character shifts. Various little groups of furniture compose the acting area. Simple but striking.

Thompson is so dynamically each character he assumes, one is at loss to find magic words to define his talent. Whatever it is, it is so mesmerizing that even if some audience members may feel shocked by language, or feel they should be, the final applause was so rapid that the audience was standing by the time the lights were back on.

This is an unusual play. About Louis Armstong. Some come because they at least remember he recorded Hello Dolly. Some come because they admire Thompson the actor. Whatever, the stage is steeped in talent. Love it or hate it. The experience is well worth it.

July 28, 2012 Matinee reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

It is with joy that one can cheer Olympia Dukakis’ and Tony Simotes’ version of The Tempest now playing at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox. They have taken risks that could have been disastrous. These included not least the changing of the sex of the leading character, the time in which the events in the play occur moved to the 20th century, and the locale changed to a Mediterranean island. None of this mattered. Instead, for the play, it added only joy and deliverance. Anyone not familiar with Shakespeare’s original version could well have believed that the play was exactly as written and originally played.

As staged in its current version, the magic words are still there, the marvelously limned characters still speak them and the stage is awash with discovery and a strange joy. The setting is simple, the stage relatively bare, one tall bare tree sufficing for many glorious opportunities. Other slight bits were effortlessly risen from the floor or whirled in by the actors. Stage-filling musical numbers whirled in opposing groups with their agenda—demanding changes or plotting to recover territory lost.

In the midst of it all, the innocence of the juvenile love scene between Miranda (Merritt Janson) and Ferdinand (Ryan Winkles) was played with such naivete that one could literally feel behind it the will of Prospera (Olympia Dukakis) hoping it to evolve into the daughter she loved becoming Queen of Naples.

In costuming one delights in that of the anemic Caliban, (Rocco Sisto) his skin washed to baby-like contrast to that of any other on stage. Shakespeare gave him the (at times) the innocence of those marvelous lines, the isle full of noises of which he cried to dream again. Director Tony Simotes gave him the stage location from which to deliver them. Of such moments is a beautiful play made.

Music seemed to wash over the whole play, and the stage again and again was filled with groups of valiant women abetting Prospera or other groups plotting conquest and ruin.

Every actor could, and should be mentioned and praised and is so in this brief hurrah as is praise for those in the theatrical arts contributing to this inspired joyous production. Each could be singled out such as Ariel (Kristin Wold, light as a feather) or Gonzalo (Apollo Dukakis ever ready with sane, calm observation) or Jonathan Epstein as the uproarious Stephano, butler to the King of Naples (Thomas A. Rindge, a deserving loser.) These and more deserve mention.

As for Olympia Dukakis, she knew what she wanted the play to say and saw that the play and her lines said it with controlled intensity. Her mother love in which she told her daughter of her previous life vibrated through the play in all the scenes that followed. Musing on the play as he drove me home, my son remarked, “And to think that when it was played in Shakespeare’s day, if the character had been changed to Prospera, it would have been played by a man.” And that boggles the mind. Rejoice that in the current production we have Olivia Dukakis playing it.

February 10, 2002 performance reviewed by Dave Read

The Blind Boys of Alabama and The Holmes Brothers inaugurated the W.E.B. DuBois concert series with thrilling shows in the Mahaiwe Theatre on February 10, 2002. Whether or not the town of Great Barrington ever decides to embrace the memory of its native son DuBois, it owes kudos to Club Helsinki for producing a concert that moved the town to the epicenter of the Gospel and Rhythm and Blues world, if only for one evening.

When you enter the Mahaiwe, the slick of modernity slips away and you’re in a place with no straight lines, no shiny surfaces, almost no separation between the performing space and the audience. It’s small enough for whispers, but big enough to hold a whole lotta music; and it has electricity too, which was put to good use by The Holmes Brothers, three masterful blues rockers whose express purpose is to “make a joyful noise to the rock of their salvation.”

Led by Wendell Holmes’s raspy ecstatic vocals and fanciful electric piano, kicked along by the sharp drumming of Popsy Dixon and throbbing bass of Sherman Holmes, who also harmonize to such effect that you’re thinking there must be a choir offstage, the Holmes Brothers opened with King Jesus Will Roll All Burdens Away, setting the tone for an evening of music that would reach unimaginable heights.

That song was one of several they played from “Speaking in Tongues,” widely regarded as one of the best albums of 2001. After three numbers at the keyboard, Wendell played electric guitar the rest of the way, delivering a little country twang, some straight ahead rock, and some searing, eccentric riffs of his own creation.

On the third tune, “one from our youth, called Precious Lord,” Popsy Dixon stepped away from his drumkit, donned his sports jacket, and took the vocal lead with a haunting voice and a penetrating gaze.

Wendell’s big brother Sherman also contributed nicely to the verbal mix in addition to maintaining a tastefully varied electric pulse throughout, especially on “Thank You Jesus,” where he and Wendell swapped lines back and forth.

The oddest thing of the night was that during intermission, while the Holmes Brothers were mingling and signing autographs in the crowded lobby, I was rueing the fate of the group that had to follow such an exciting and satisfying set. I soon learned though, that relative to a performance by the Blind Boys of Alabama, there is no opening act, everything theretofore is prologue.

Their performance centered on their latest release, the Grammy-nominated “Spirit of the Century.” “Run On For a Long Time” was the energetic opener, with leader Clarence Fountain belting out the verses and the others harmonizing on the chorus over a driving rhythm section. About sixty minutes later, Fountain introduced the a capella finale: “One mo’- one mo’- the Rolling Stones cut it, but it wasn’t a Rolling Stones song, it’s my song. Listen as I tell you… ‘This May Be The Last Time’…”

Fountain was an entertaining leader throughout, displaying an impish side when he would rise from his usual seated position, shrug his jacket off one shoulder, put his hand on his hip and mimic an Elvis move or two. He delighted in mentioning Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and reminded the audience to watch the group on the upcoming Grammy telecast. Introducing one number, he said, “I didn’t come all the way from Alabama looking for Jesus, I brought Him along.”

twenty minutes of ecstatic singing

The most stunning part of this astounding concert was Jimmy Carter’s twenty minutes of ecstatic singing, testifying, and witnessing among the audience, having been guided down from the stage by one of the sighted band members. It was a breathtaking, spellbinding performance by Carter, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Lateshow bandleader Paul Shaffer. His facial expressions showed the range of human emotions and his singing included holding a single note for what seemed to be as long as some entire pop tunes.

Meanwhile, the other Blind Boys were fully engaged with him in their own vocal ecstasy and the band was rocking ever more fervently, and loud enough to get the attention of sinners many miles away. Another highlight was the group’s Amazing Grace, set to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. (The popular arrangement of House of the Rising Sun has been credited to Dave Van Ronk, who passed away the day of this concert. Here is our 1999 interview with Dave Van Ronk.)

founder of sociology…

The evening began with a presentation in celebration of the life and work of Great Barrington native W.E.B. DuBois by children from the Jubilee School of Philadelphia, an alternative community school that grew out of a neighborhood reading program. In addition to reading their own tributes and poems, as well as some Langston Hughes poetry, the students talked about their own social studies research project; DuBois is recognized as a founder of sociology for his study of urban blacks in Philadelphia in 1896 and 1897. The children ended their presentation with a stirring rendition of Amazing Grace.