Saturday, July 13: Beloved won her the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, and her body of work was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In addition to being a writer for the ages, Morrison helped plenty of other black writers get published and taken seriously by critics during her 15 years at Random House, where she was the first black woman senior editor in the fiction department.
The musical adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved 1911 children’s novel by Lucy Simon (Carly’s sister)is varied in style and technically challenging. Elizabeth Thomas delivers a stunning vocal performance as Lily, whose death in childbirth led to her widower Archibald’s ban on anyone ever again entering the walled garden that was her favorite haunt in her lifetime.
As sure and as welcome a sign of summer as the appearance of lightning bugs after dark, outdoor Shakespeare performances have returned to our fair valley.
July 11-21: When the question is raised, “What was the worst song ever recorded?” among the most popular answers is an offkey lament for a lost cat titled “My Pal Foot Foot.” It appeared on the album Philosophy of the World, released in 1969 by the Shaggs. It’s said that only 1,000 copies of the LP were pressed, and that the band’s manager absconded with 900 of them. Their strange story inspired Joy Gregory and Gunnar Madsen to write an “unconventional musical” called The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, which premiered in Los Angeles in 2003 and is being performed at Catskills Bridge Street Theatre.
Fringe festivals, celebrating art whose nature falls far outside the mainstream, typically happen in large cities. The Village of Phoenicia would not seem a likely candidate, though it arguably lies at the outermost exurban fringe of the New York metropolitan area. Still, the Shandaken Theatrical Society has taken on the challenge of hosting its own such festival at the Phoenicia Playhouse for two weekends, July 5 through 7 and 12 through 14.
What does “home” really mean, at the core? What good is it to nurture a sense of place in a place that no longer makes it possible for us to feel welcome?
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was lauded as a genius by the likes of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, had already established a strong reputation in Europe as a composer and pianist before fleeing the rise of Nazism to work in Hollywood. He is credited as the first to bring lush orchestral scores to the silver screen. John Williams credits Korngold’s score for King’s Row as his major influence for the Star Wars scores.
Saturday, June 29: The first in a summer series of family-friendly movies shown on a big screen in Poughkeepsie’s Upper Landing Park, with the span of the Walkway over the Hudson as backdrop. Food trucks will be parked onsite, and there will be live music provided by Crash and Byrne (7 p.m.) and family activities before the show.
The rationale for a Toy Story 4 to happen had to be a good one – something beyond guaranteed great box office and merchandising potential. It went through several major rewrites over a period of more than five years, and perhaps it was in contemplating the need for this movie to exist at all that the writers hit on the idea that makes it work.
June 20-July 28: The storied theater lab inherits a complex, dual responsibility: to entertain, challenge and edify us as good theater does, and to serve as Petri dish for the cultivation of new growth in a time when biodiversity has been largely choked out of the biggest stages.