“The simplest aspect of farce is you need a lot of doors, and you need people running in and out of them,” celebrated comedic playwright Neil Simon once said. “Generally speaking, in a farce, people are trying to withhold information from other people. Everybody in the play has to be in trouble.” That sums up about all you need to know about Simon’s 1988 play Rumors, which opens on Friday, January 10 at the Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck and runs through January 19th, in a new production by the Rhinebeck Theatre Society.

Tuesday/Wednesday, Jan. 14/15: Bruce’s heralded new album is turned into a concert film experience, which Rolling Stone called a “collection of songs about road warriors and B-movie actors, beat-up stuntmen and places where truckers and bikers drink together.”

With a Star Wars movie, one may quibble all day long about where they went astray. Or one may sit back and enjoy the ride, which is spectacularly shot and excitingly paced and pushes all the right buttons that we’ve been wearing for so many years.

Wednesday, Jan. 1: The six-hour event will feature more than 100 performers – poets, writers and musicians – drawn from the Hudson Valley region.

They’re back again, most of them: those fascinating English kids first introduced to us in the 1964 Granada Television documentary 7 Up and brought back to our attention at seven-year intervals ever since, in what is probably the best-known, most influential longitudinal study of human sociology ever captured onscreen.

The world’s favorite ballet will be performed on three local stages this weekend.

Saturday-Sunday, Dec. 14/15: This unique holiday production celebrates imagination and multicultural traditions. It’s set in a Northern country where Lucia loses her inner light as the Sun’s light diminishes with the winter season.