Fort Worth native Peter More is a polymath of roots rock, ultra-competent, fluent in regional dialects and sensitive to sound of the eras, observationally astute and emotionally anchored. He rocks, grooves, swoons, waltzes and whispers with the kind of offhand authority that his genre reveres. He can even turn a tune with a wonderfully rustic Samba or Afro-Cuban flair.
Michael Lang tossed in the towel on his Woodstock 50 dream on July 31 after a tumultuous week in which he was turned down for permits at Vernon Downs Racetrack & Casino in central New York, announced a move to the 52-year old Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C, then said the festival would be free, and finally saw most of the engaged artists pull out.
In the seven years since Sevan Melikyan opened Wired Gallery in High Falls, he’s become known in these parts as
The Phoenicia Library is home to the Jerry Bartlett Memorial Angling Collection, an impressive inventory of books about fishing and fly-tying. “It could be hyperbole, but we like to say we have the largest circulating collection in the Northeast,” says Library Board member Beth Waterman.
July 26-Aug.4: An allegorical tale about the destruction of a dictatorship by a woman, with a libretto by Hans Müller-Einigen inspired by an Expressionist mystery play by Hans Kaltneker, The Miracle of Heliane is set in an unnamed totalitarian state where an intricate erotic triangle develops among a ruthless despot, the Ruler; his beautiful wife Heliane, with whom he has yet to consummate his marriage; and a young, messianic Stranger.
When the call for original short plays went out, the Theatre received 49 submissions and selected ten. These are fully staged productions, not mere readings, and are collectively dubbed “The Love/ Death Plays.”
Mounting some of the Bard’s more obscure, rarely seen plays seems to be trending among our region’s purveyors of summertime Shakespeare. The latest to jump on the repertoire-expansion bandwagon is the Bird-on-a-Cliff Theatre Company, whose offering for this 24th season of the Woodstock Shakespeare Festival is a true outlier: Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
On rare occasions, a documentary film tells a story so engaging at the heart level that it could have been a folk song. In the case of Alex Holmes’ Maiden — currently screening at Upstate Films, and coming to the Rosendale Theatre August 9 — it’s a variant on the classic tale of a bold English lass who runs away to sea to escape a wicked stepparent. Only this time, instead of cutting off her lovely locks and disguising herself as a cabin boy, this “female rambling sailor” acquires her own ship and recruits a whole crew of similarly adventurous young women to beat the lads at their own game.
Aug. 2-4: This year’s Festival will host internationally acclaimed performers and composers in a series of open-air summer concerts at seven venues conveniently within walking distance.
On view through August: Ever since she was a child, when she would go on summer road trips with her family, Mary Anne Erickson has been photographing roadside attractions and collecting souvenirs and memorabilia from the motels, restaurants and mom-andpop tourist sites she visited.