Highlights include community partnerships, celebrations of Max Roach and James Baldwin
AMHERST, Mass. — The UMass Fine Arts Center announces a 2024-2025 performing arts season that features performances by a one-time Grateful Dead keyboardist, two of the greatest artists in world music, jazz celebrations of the lives and work of two internationally celebrated, UMass-associated artist-scholars, and one of the world’s most celebrated classical music ensembles.
Tickets for all events will be available to the general public starting Monday, July 29 at 10 a.m. Tickets for most events are sold through the Fine Arts Center Box Office. Tickets for Dropkick Murphys at the Mullins Center have been on sale since May through the Mullins Center Box Office.
The 2024-2025 performing arts season opens September 12 with a speaking event featuring interdisciplinary artist Yanira Castro, whose public art project, Exorcism = Liberation, will unfold across the region through election season. It closes on May 9, 2025 with a performance by singer-songwriter-pianist Bruce Hornsby and the inventive chamber quartet yMusic. Three-time Grammy winner Hornsby and yMusic, who have come together as BrhyM, will be touring in support of their album Deep Sea Vents, which pairs gorgeous sonic seascapes with lyrics that paint an unflinching portrait of an ever-worsening climate crisis.
In between those dates, the Fine Arts Center will present its most expansive and robust season of performing arts events since before the pandemic.
The Fine Arts Center will bring to campus stages events celebrating the lives and work of jazz drummer and bandleader Max Roach and writer James Baldwin — anchored by Makaya McCraven and Meshell Ndegeocello respectively. The Max Roach Centennial Celebration takes place October 25 in the Frederick C. Tillis Performance Hall of the Randolph W. Bromery Center for the arts. The event is part of a campus-wide celebration of Roach tied to the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Renowned as arguably the greatest jazz drummer of all time and as a tireless civil rights activist, Roach was one of the artist-scholars who, as a member of the UMass faculty, put the university on the map as a world center of jazz performance and education. Amherst native McCraven, who ranks among the most innovative artists and greatest drummers on the current jazz scene, will lead an all-star band in tribute to Roach, anchoring a week-long celebration organized jointly by the Fine Arts Center, College of Humanities & Fine Arts, Department of Music and Dance, and W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. Ndegeocello comes to Bowker Auditorium April 24 as part of a tour in support of her album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin (Blue Note, August 2024). Baldwin, the celebrated novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and civil rights and LGBTQ rights activist, found a home on the UMass Afro-American Studies department faculty late in life. Baldwin, like Roach, was born in 1924.
The Fine Arts Center also will welcome to UMass five-time Grammy winner and Afropop legend Angélique Kidjo; the world’s greatest living fado singer, Mariza; satirist Fran Lebowitz; a pairing of classical greats in the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and Bruce Liu; and stage and screen favorites Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp (original stars of RENT), and John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch). Performance artist, comedian, actor, and writer Kristina Wong will present an avant premiere of her new work #FoodBankInfluencer. Gayageum virtuoso Seo Jungmin will perform her latest work, One, My Utopia! Leading troupes A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham, the Limón Dance Company, and Complexions Contemporary Ballet will anchor the season’s dance series. Terence Blanchard, Endea Owens, Camille Thurman, and Etienne Charles will join McCraven and Ndegeocello for a spectacular jazz series. And Electric Root Presents: The Sound of (Black) Music will reimagine Rodgers and Hammerstein through the varied sounds of the African diaspora.
The 2024-2025 season also will see the Fine Arts Center launching new partnerships both on and off campus. The Fine Arts Center will present Boston’s Celtic punk superstars Dropkick Murphys along with support acts Pennywise and The Scratch at the Mullins Center October 27. Fall programming also will include a concerts featuring artist-activists Bia Ferreira and No-No Boy presented at The Drake in downtown Amherst. And in spring 2025, the Fine Arts Center will present a live performance by actor, writer and director John Cameron Mitchell, and Amherst Cinema will host a screening of Mitchell’s cult film sensation Hedwig and the Angry Inch with live commentary from the director/star.
On September 14, the Fine Arts Center will present an evening of Puerto Rican-themed music and dance. The Holyoke-based chamber ensemble Victory Players will perform El Puerto Rico, their program of new music by Puerto Rican composers in Tillis Performance Hall. And Bomba de Aquí will host a post-performance celebration of Puerto Rican culture featuring food and dance in the Bromery Center lobby. And on October 18, the Fine Arts Center and the Greenfield-based Pioneer Valley Symphony will come together to present Frankenstein Live. The event will feature a screening of the classic 1931adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, starring Boris Karloff as the monster, along with a live performance by the symphony of an original score by Michael Shapiro. The Frankenstein performance will be preceded by Enter Castle Frankenstein, a cosplay event featuring food, music, and activities for all ages.
A full performing arts schedule follows.
The Fine Arts Center’s visual arts season — which includes the continuation of Courtney M. Leonard’s popular BREACH: LOGBOOK 24 | STACCATO at the University Museum of Contemporary Art; and the new exhibitions Imaginary Homelands by Daisy Patton and Alicia Brown at Augusta Savage Gallery; and Gucci Forever by Miles Warner, and Last Sequoia on Earth by Kerry St. Laurent and Adam Michael Kozak at Hampden Gallery — will be formally announced in early August. Visual arts spaces resume operation in early September with opening receptions and artist talks schedule throughout the month.
Performing Arts Calendar, 2024-2025
Fall 2024
September 12, 6 p.m. — Yanira Castro: Exorcism = Liberation
September 14, 3 p.m. — Victory Players: El Puerto Rico with Bomba de Aquí
September 24, 7:30 p.m. — Bia Ferreira
September 26, 8 p.m. — Terence Blanchard: Flow
October 4, 8 p.m. — A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham
October 8, 8 p.m. — Mariza
October 10, 7:30 p.m. — Fran Lebowitz: A State of the Union Conversation
October 18, 7:30 p.m. — Frankenstein Live with the Pioneer Valley Symphony
October 25, 8 p.m. — Max Roach Centennial Celebration featuring Makaya McCraven
October 27, 7 p.m. — Dropkick Murphys with Pennywise and The Scratch
November 1, 7:30 p.m. — Nava Dance Theatre: Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies
November 14, 8 p.m. — Angélique Kidjo
November 16, 7:30 p.m. — ¡Guitarra! Drew Henderson
November 19, 8 p.m. — No-No Boy
November 22, 7:30 p.m. — Seo Jungmin: One, My Utopia!
December 4, 7:30 p.m. — Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre
December 8, 3 p.m. — Electric Root Presents: The Sound of (Black) Music
Spring 2025
January 31, 8 p.m. — Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp: Celebrating 30 Years of Friendship
February 7, 8 p.m. — Endea Owens and The Cookout
February 13, 7:30 p.m. — Limón Dance Company
February 22, 8 p.m. — The Power and the Glory with Fleur Barron and Kunal Lahiry
February 28, 8 p.m. — Kristina Wong, #FoodBankInfluencer
March 4, 7:30 p.m. — Academy of St Martin in the Fields with Bruce Liu
March 13, 7:30 p.m. — Camille Thurman with the Darrell Green Quartet
March 15, 7:30 p.m. — ¡Guitarra! Gabriele Leite
March 16, 3 p.m. —
April 5, 8 p.m. — Etienne Charles: Creole Soul
April 11, 8 p.m. — An Evening with John Cameron Mitchell featuring Amber Martin
April 17, 7:30 p.m. — Complexions Contemporary Ballet
April 24, 8 p.m. — Meshell Ndegeocello: No More Water — The Gospel of James Baldwin
May 9, 8 p.m. — Bruce Hornsby & yMusic present BrhyM