Tanglewood concerts and Berkshires theatre reviews

With a deafening absence of musical, theatrical, and dance performance underway in the Berkshires, we hope to add to the growing roster of of arts-related outlets promoting material from the archives and vaults of favorite and otherwise especially memorable concerts and plays that it has been our honor and privilege to cover across the decades.

Tanglewood and nearby concert reviews

• Christopher Eisenbach leads BSO and TFC in stunning Beethoven’s Ninth at Tanglewood
  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 ...
• Satchmo at the Waldorf at Shakespeare and Co.
  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 ...
• Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma at Tanglewood
  Aug. 7, 2016 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read The Silk Road Ensemble, with Yo-Yo Ma, used the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood like a high school during their Aug. 7, 2016 performance, presenting both lessons in social studies and the senior assembly. Eighteen years since being co-founded by Yo-yo Ma at Ozawa Hall, the Ensemble ...
• Review of The Tempest at Shakespeare and Company
  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 ...
• Bob Dylan at Tanglewood July 2, 2016
  July 2, 2016 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read It was a night of biblical proportions at Tanglewood, a concert by Bob Dylan that was a revelation, following a set by Mavis Staples that was a revival. The revelation is that some 55 years into his career, by remaining true and not wavering from his original ...
• A Thousand Clowns at Berkshire Theatre Festival
  July 21, 2012 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall Rarely can one say of a play that includes a cast of six that each character is perfectly cast and that zany as each role was, tore through the antics on stage with such brio that one loves him and is moved by his antics and his ...
• Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Wynton Marsalis at Tanglewood
  Review of July 14, 2015 concert by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, in Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in the Berkshires.
• 2015 A Prairie Home Companion at Tanglewood
  June 19, 2015 performance reviewed by Dave Read The sixteenth Tanglewood broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, with Garrison Keillor, took place Saturday June 27, 2015; it was the penultimate show of their 2014-15 season, and probably the penultimate show in the series that began in 2000 when Keillor instituted an instant Tanglewood tradition at the ...
• Blind Boys of Alabama, The Holmes Brothers in concert at the Mahaiwe in the Berkshires.
  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 ...
• Dave Brubeck at 2002 Tanglewood Jazz Festival
  September 1, 2002 performance review by Dave Read Three tunes into his 2½ hour 2002 Tanglewood Jazz Festival concert, Dave Brubeck said, “I like to introduce new stuff when I play here because the audience is so kind.” Makes you wonder if “here” referred to the seven year old Ozawa Hall where tonight’s gig was, or ...

Berkshires area theatre reviews

For about fifteen years, Frances Benn Hall (1918 – 2014) reviewed nearly every play produced by the principal theatre companies in the Berkshires. Franny Hall was the doyenne of the local theatre scene long before the arrival of the upstarts at Shakespeare and Co. In fact, it wasn’t long after Tina Packer arrived from England that Franny delivered a cache of books to her, remainders from her previous employer, the Windsor Mountain school (presently Boston University Tanglewood Institute).

• A Thousand Clowns at Berkshire Theatre Festival
  July 21, 2012 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall Rarely can one say of a play that includes a cast of six that each character is perfectly cast and that zany as each role was, tore through the antics on stage with such brio that one loves him and is moved by his antics and his ...
• Mother Courage and her Children at Shakespeare & Co.
  Aug. 2, 2013 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children now playing at Tina Packer’s Shakespeare and Co. theatre under the insightful direction of Tony Simotes, is one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. The play is set in central Europe in the 17th century during the Thirty Years’ ...
• Heroes at Shakespeare & Co. review
  June 23, 2013 matinee performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall Heroes, the translation by Tom Stoppard of Le Vent Des Peupliers by Gérald Sibleyras, was enough to lure me to a matinee at Shakespeare and Company’s Bernstein theatre on a rainy afternoon. I knew nothing about the play except that several friends whose opinions I ...
• The 39 Steps at Shakespeare and Co.
  September 30, 2012 matinee performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall The plot of this play now gracing the stage of the Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare and Co. is one of hectic chase and pursuit, mayhem and madness. Four actors, abetted by three stage hands (honorably invisible in black) weave in and about playing dozens of ...
• A Chorus Line at BTF
  July 7, 2012 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall Berkshire Theatre Festival‘s production of A Chorus Line is a dynamic reenactment of its original performance that involves so many specialists, in the fields of orchestra, choreography, lights, sound, and costumes that we can merely list them and aver that they are all deserving of high praise. ...
• Review of The Importance of Being Earnest at Williamstown Theatre Festival
  June 30, 2012 matinee reviewed by Frances Benn Hall Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest now playing at Williamstown Theatre Festival is a smashing success. Director David Hyde Pierce’s weaving the joys of Wilde’s one-liners with the accents of Damon Runyan’s mobsters in a delightful English setting (where in 1932 mob members have migrated ...
• Review of King Lear at Shakespeare & Co.
  June 24, 2012 2PM performance of King Lear at Shakespeare & Co. reviewed by Frances Benn Hall
• Memory of Water at Shakespeare and Co.
  August 7, 2011 matinee performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall. Shakespeare and Co’s riveting production of Shelagh Stephenson’s Memory of Water, has been playing to rapt audiences at the Bernstein Theatre for the past month, and praise for the script, the six talented actors, the direction and all aspects of the play have been deservedly ...
• In The Mood at Berkshire Theatre Festival
  August 6, 2011 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall Theatre Festival has presented the world premier of Kathleen Clark’s In the Mood. The play is described as a comedy but viewing the magnificent set as one awaits the play to begin, it is apparent the action will spill over into farce. Because there before our ...
• Sylvia at Berkshire Theatre Festival
  July 16, 2011 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall. Sitting in audience of the Fitzpatrick stage at the Berkshire Theatre Festival for the opening of A. R. Gurney’s Sylvia, I found myself remembering an evening many years ago when Gurney a yet untried playwright came to see what our little play-reading group would do in a ...