The swami and Stone Ridge
Whenever Vivekananda went on one of his exhausting lecture tours in the US, the Leggetts would offer their guru the use of their home, Ridgely Manor, as a country refuge for a period of rest and quiet.
All posts by Frances Marion Platt
Spotted lanternfly: New York’s newest insect invasion
While spotted lanternflies like tree of heaven best, they also like to eat almost everything else. They are known to feed on the sap of more than 70 plant species. Fruit trees and grapevines are being especially hard-hit in Pennsylvania. Hops are also a favored host, as are nut trees. So this creature’s imminent arrival in the Hudson Valley, with its agricultural economy, is cause for serious concern.
Oscar of the Waldorf: New Paltz farmer, Manhattan maître d’ to millionaires
He was a rich man by 1910, with a house on Lexington Avenue in addition to his thousand-acre spread in New Paltz. He farmed the land and enjoyed throwing fancy picnics for friends that featured produce grown on his own property. Yes, Oscar of the Waldorf was doing farm-to-table cuisine long before it got trendy.
Bethel Woods marks Woodstock festival’s 50th anniversary
In case you missed it, the Generation Gap is back with a vengeance. Maybe what we all need to facilitate intergenerational communication is to take some field trips together to the Museum at Bethel Woods.
Shadowland’s theater lineup in Ellenville
The first play of Shadowland’s season is a new drama by D. W. Gregory, Memoirs of a Forgotten Man. Based on true events, it chronicles the tale of Alexei S., a Soviet journalist with perfect memory who is seen as a threat by Stalin’s propaganda machine and targeted by a government censor.
Cyrano, Cymbeline, Much Ado and Into the Woods at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival
It’s always tough to decide which shows to catch at any new summer season of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, but 2019 – its 33rd year – is shaping up to be tougher than most.
“Madness in Vegetables” at Dorsky Museum in New Paltz
The title “Madness in Vegetables” references a poem by Francis Jammes, a French writer born in 1868, who is best-known for his turn away from the Symbolist movement and toward inspiration drawn from the natural world and a rustic life far from Parisian literary circles. “Madness in Vegetables: Hudson Valley Artists 2019” shares Jammes’ interest in our otherworldly entanglements with vegetal life and the endless potential for imagination that is found in the darkness of the underbrush and lightness of the overstory.
Bard SummerScape 2019 celebrates Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Among the most anticipated summer pleasures of the mid-Hudson Valley is Bard SummerScape, which uses a celebration of a different particular composer each year as an excuse to unlock a treasure chest full of cultural delights that look both backwards and forwards in time. This SummerScape will focus on a composer best-remembered for his film scores: Erich Wolfgang Korngold. An Austrian Jew and child prodigy who was lauded as a genius by the likes of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, John Williams credits Korngold’s score for King’s Row as his major influence for the Star Wars scores.
Powerhouse Theater season begins at Vassar
If you’re not gifted with precognition, the surest way to anticipate what stage hit is in the making is simply to attend plenty of each summer’s offerings on the Vassar College campus. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit show Hamilton got its start at Powerhouse Theater at Vassar.
Opus 40 ushers in a season of performances, walks & workshops
The international experimental theater Dzieci returns to Opus 40 on June 22 and 23, presenting “the greatest (and only) East Molvanian circus in the world,” a Cirkus Luna! performance and workshop at 1 p.m. on Saturday and its visceral, innovative approach to Shakespeare’s Scottish play, Makbet, at 6 p.m. on Sunday.