Berkshires, Summer 2024—“Pipe Dream” at Berkshire Theatre Group, Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood

Pipe Dream

Music by Richard Rodgers, book & lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

Directed by Kat Yen, choreography by Isadora Wolfe

Performances through August 31, 2024

Unicorn Theatre, 6 East Street, Stockbridge, Massachusetts

berkshiretheatregroup.org

Boston Symphony Orchestra

Performances through August 31, 2024

Tanglewood, Lenox, Massachusetts

tanglewood.org

Ah, summer in the Berkshires—beautiful weather (usually!), bucolic landscapes, great museums, concerts and theater. It’s pretty much been an annual tradition for us for three decades. This summer, we saw the wonderful Mad magazine exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge and the Clark Art Institute’s revelatory exhibition of Caribbean artist Guillaume Lethière, along with a couple concerts at Tanglewood and a Rodgers & Hammerstein revival at the Berkshire Theatre Group.

Joe Joseph and Noa Luz Barenblat in Pipe Dream (photo: Caelan Carlough)

Pipe Dream, one of R&H’s more bizarre items—based on John Steinbeck’s novels Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday—is set among the populace of seaside Monterey, California, and centers around Doc, a marine biologist, and Suzy, a new gal who becomes a prostitute in the local brothel. They fall in love, but take awhile to admit it. The show hasn’t been on Broadway since its disastrous 1955 premiere; it was last in New York in a beautifully sung 2012 Encores revival with Laura Osnes, Will Chase and Leslie Uggams that nevertheless could do nothing with the dramatically diffuse romance.

The tunes are there, of course, but several sound like outtakes or discarded versions of other, better-known R&H tunes, like Suzy’s first number, “Everybody’s Got a Home But Me,” which is similar to “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” And a large ensemble—there are more than a dozen singing roles—dilutes any emotional or dramatic impact, since we keep bouncing around among Monterey’s many outcasts, male and female.

Since the Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge is a tiny jewel box, director Kat Yen and choreographer Isadora Wolfe seem hamstrung about what they can accomplish. Jimmy Stubbs’ movable sets help, although a pivotal scene between Doc and Suzy in an abandoned boiler is nearly impossible to see from all the seats. 

The six-piece ensemble, led by pianist and music director Jacob Kerzner, acquits itself well, although we lose the sumptuous orchestral sound Rodgers’ tunes need. Noa Luz Barenblat’s Suzy, though a bit standoffish, has a gleaming singing voice (although the incandescent Laura Osnes at Encores was pitch perfect in the role). The rest of the accomplished cast is led by Joe Joseph’s Doc and Sharone Sayregh’s madam Fauna. Too bad it might be a pipe dream to hope for a perfect Pipe Dream production.

Leila Josefowicz (standing, left) playing Stravinsky's Violin Concerto (photo: Hilary Scott)

Tanglewood has been the go-to summer destination for outdoor classical performances for decades; the Boston Symphony Orchestra has made its summer home there since 1936. Spending a day on the grounds is to immerse oneself in the history of outdoor music making, even if our first performance was indoors, in the Linde Center for Music and Learning, which opened in 2019, and where several Tanglewood Music Center Fellows—students who come from around the world every summer to perform and study—played a lovely chamber recital.

Music by Debussy (sonata for flute, viola and harp) and Ravel (piano trio) bookended Jessie Montgomery’s new Concerto Grosso, which the composer—who spoke before the performance—described as “a contemporary take on the baroque dynamic of solo against ripeno” in a program note. The Fellows played with enthusiasm and precision, bringing out Debussy’s elegance, Montgomery’s spontaneity and Ravel’s ravishment.

Our Tanglewood evening culminated with a marvelous BSO concert in the venerable Koussevitzky Music Shed. Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska led an adventurous summer program, opening with fellow Finn Jean Sibelius’ Canzonetta, in an arrangement by Igor Stravinsky for clarinets, horns, harp and double bass. Then came Stravinsky’s own Violin Concerto, a rare enough appearance on any program, which was played with exuberance by the brilliant Leila Josefowicz, who didn't need a score: she was so focused that she nearly bumped into the BSO violinists behind her—they pulled their music stand back to give her more room.

After intermission, Stasevska corralled her forces for a nimble reading of Sibelius’ brooding Symphony No. 5, whose rousing finale left the audience sated.

Musical Theater Review—“Cabaret” at Barrington Stage

Cabaret

Book by Joe Masteroff, from the play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood

Music by John Kander; lyrics by Fred Ebb

Directed by Alan Paul; choreographed by Katie Spelman

Performances through July 8, 2023

Boyd-Quinson Stage, 30 Union Street, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

barringtonstageco.org

Krysta Rodriguez, center, in Cabaret (photo: Daniel Rader)

The Barrington Stage production of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret is, despite some provocative window dressing, a staging of this still disturbing, groundbreaking musical that’s close in spirit to the 1998 Sam Mendes restaging that took Broadway by storm. After I read the typically imperceptive and shrilly clever New York Times review, I was expecting an out-there interpretation (“OMG, a genderqueer Cabaret—run for your lives!”), but director Alan Paul has stayed pretty faithful to the book and songs, with the notable exception of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” which is sung by a trio of non-binary and trans performers as part of the renamed Kit Kat Ensemble.

Paul’s decision to do away with the Kit Kat Girls further underlines the notion that the immorality and decadence of Weimer-era Berlin will soon be comprehensively stifled quite brutally by the thuggish Nazis. But aside from that—and the amusing squirming of some audience members pre-show and post-intermission as the ensemble wanders among the seats to flirt or dance with the paying customers—there’s nothing here that screams, “Look! We’re making Cabaret relevant to our time!” Paul doesn’t have to make obvious the parallels to today’s wannabe fascists as they viciously fight a more progressive society—it’s already there in the show.

Paul and his able choreographer, Katie Spelman, use the small stage—which features a terrific small orchestra, led by music director Angela Steiner—to their advantage, as the song and dance interludes and dramatic scenes rub against each other effectively and, often, almost inevitably.

As the proudly amoral heroine, club chanteuse Sally Bowles, the always wonderful Krysta Rodriguez turns on her natural charm—along with a beguiling, if erratic, British accent—to complement her lithe movements and powerhouse voice. Her stirringly emotional rendition of the title tune is the very definition of a showstopper; maybe Rodriguez will finally get the Broadway starring role she deserves if this production makes it to New York.

Other cast members are accomplished, at times even inspired, although Dan Amboyer’s portrayal of Cliff Bradshaw—the naïve American writer who falls in love with Sally after coming to Berlin to start a novel—is more lackadaisical than it should be, even for such a passive character. As Cliff’s spinster landlady Fräulein Schneider, Candy Buckley has a lovely but sad presence; as her paramour, the elderly Herr Schulz, Richard Kline gives a noble performance as a German Jew who can’t comprehend what the Nazis have in store for him.

The Emcee has become a touchstone role, not only because of Joel Grey’s sinister Tony- and Oscar-winning portrayal but also because of Alan Cumming’s flamboyant, Tony-winning reinterpretation in Mendes’ revival. Nik Alexander mischievously combines both of them in a slyly uninhibited, subtly menacing performance. That Alexander occasionally swallows his lines doesn’t mitigate his idiosyncratic stage presence, which is the ominous center of this Cabaret. 

Weekend in the Berkshires—The Clark, The Mount, Barrington Stage Company & Tanglewood

Clark Art Institute

Williamstown, Massachusetts

clarkart.edu

The Mount

Lenox, Massachusetts

edithwharton.org

The Royal Family of Broadway

The Cake

Barrington Stage Company, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

barringtonstageco.org

On the Town

Tanglewood, Lenox, Massachusetts

bso.org

There’s no better summer jaunt than western Massachusetts’ bucolic Berkshires, especially since it’s just three or so hours from Manhattan. It’s easy to cram a lot into a whirlwind weekend: music at Tanglewood, new musical and play at the Barrington Stage Company, tour of novelist Edith Wharton’s century-old mansion, The Mount, and a visit to the world-renowned and—since our last visit—beautifully expanded Clark Art Institute.

Let’s start from the top…literally. Williamstown, only minutes from the Vermont border, is home to Williams College and boasts the Clark Art Institute, whose original white marble building houses one of the best small-museum collections in the country, including one of the largest number of Renoirs outside of France.

The Clark’s expansion four years ago brought about the modern and sleek Clark Center, which features lots of new exhibition space. Currently, through September are two French-related exhibits. The Art of Iron brings a few dozen pieces of exquisitely wrought ironworks from the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles in Rouen. Seeing them out of the context of the Musée’s gothic church housing the collection was initially jarring (we visited it in Rouen in 2009), but the works are so marvelously detailed that they keep their luster in their new digs.

Berthe Morisot's The Sisters at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown

Even more impressive is Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900, which not only brought out the usual suspects like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot (whose The Sisters is a stunning portrait), but also other European and American painters who worked with acute sensitivity on subject matter ranging from mothers and children to history and landscapes. 

If the Clark is a must-see Berkshires attraction, so is the grounds and house encompassing The Mount in Lenox, especially on a warm summer day when one can stroll the lovely manicured gardens as well as tour the mansion which Wharton and her husband called home for the first decade of the 1900s. (That their marriage ended badly and Edith lived most of the rest of her life in Paris doesn’t take away from the place’s genuine serenity.) 

Edith Wharton's The Mount in Lenox (photo: Kevin Filipski)

During a Sunday-only Backstairs Tour, visitors experience the house as it was while the Whartons lived there: interpreters portray people in their employ like the cook, butler and Edith’s own governess and lifelong confidant, who each provide enlightening accounts of what it was like to work for the Mount’s most famous residents.

Pittsfield—about halfway between Lenox and Williamstown—is home to the Barrington Stage Company. While there, we caught two shows at the company’s two stages: the new musical The Royal Family of Broadway by veteran composer William Finn, and a topical new play by This Is Us producer Bekah Brunstetter, The Cake.

The cast of Barrington Stage Company's The Royal Family of Broadway (photo: Daniel Rader)

An overly frenetic attempt at an old-fashioned entertainment, The Royal Family of Broadway (based on George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s 1927 play The Royal Family) is certainly entertaining, even if its “fun” quotient peters out before its two-hour running time ends. Finn’s songs are tuneful if spotty, John Rando’s direction and Joshua Bergasse’s choreography consist of as much onstage busyness onstage as simultaneously possible, and the cast—led by Harriet Harris’s hilarious theatrical matriarch, Laura Michelle Kelly’s lovely-voiced daughter and the indefatigable Will Swenson’s scene-stealing Barrymore-esque son—gives the show enough fuel to soldier on while spending its time down in the dumps of easy jokes and cackling pastiche.

Debra Jo Rapp (left) in Barrington Stage Company's The Cake (photo: Carolyn Brown)

The Cake is set in North Carolina, where an ultra-religious baker who’s a whiz at cakes wrestles with the dilemma of baking the wedding cake for her late best friend’s beloved daughter, who is marrying a black, liberal, foul-mouthed atheist woman from Brooklyn. Brunstetter’s play is as blunt as it sounds, with an occasional nugget of insight to go along with funny lines and a final cop-out. Serious and deep it’s not, but The Cake—helped by an hilarious lead performance by Debra Jo Rupp—may make a dent with audiences that something more reasoned and subtle would not. 

Barrington Stage Company’s summer season includes an August run of West Side Story, de rigeur for the Leonard Bernstein Centennial year. Tanglewood—that glorious Lenox outdoor venue—is also hosting its own series of Bernstein-related events; after all, he taught and performed there for half a century. The culminating event, an August 25 gala concert featuring singers Susan Graham, Audra MacDonald, Isabel Leonard and Nadine Sierra in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, will be broadcast on PBS’s Great Performances December 28.)

The sailors of Tanglewood's On the Town (photo: Hilary Scott)

We caught a wonderful concert version of Bernstein’s first stage work, the still-delightful 1944 musical On the Town, crammed with hummable tunes, amusing if sometimes dated dialogue and book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Kathleen Marshall’s zesty direction and choreography did wonders on the Shed’s smallish stage space, Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops swung deliciously in Bernstein’s classic songs, and the cast was unbeatable. The three sailors (Brandon Victor Dixon, Christian Dante White and Andy Karl) were a delight; Andrea Martin was funny as soon as she stepped onstage; Georgina Pazcoguin, a remarkably agile dancer and performer, was a highlight of the last Broadway production; Marc Kudisch perfectly juggled even the most cringeworthy bits; and Laura Osnes never sounded lovelier as Claire, especially in her signature duet, “Carried Away,” with the equally charming Karl.

It was a very special night of singing, dancing and Bernstein in the Berkshires.