The “innovative, clever and thoroughly professional” (Bachtrack) Berkshire Opera Festival continues its 2023 summer season with a mainstage production of La Bohème on August 26, August 29, and September 1 at The Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, MA. One of the most beloved operatic love stories of all time, La Bohème is based on Henri Murger’s 1851 novel, Scènes de la vie de…
The spirited and ambitious Berkshire Opera Festival opens its 2022 summer season with a compelling new production of Jake Heggie‘s intimate THREE DECEMBERS on July 21 and 23 at PS21 in Chatham, NY, conducted by Christopher James Ray and directed by Beth Greenberg. This contemporary American opera is based on Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally’s original script for Some Christmas Letters. It marks BOF’s 2nd Second Stage event, following Tom Cipullo’s…
by Barbara Waldinger Who would have believed that here in the Berkshires we would have our own opera festival showcasing talent from all over the world, including the MET and Italy’s La Scala? Thanks to co-founders Brian Garman (Artistic Director) and Jonathon Loy (Director of Production), Berkshire Opera Festival presented…
Clockwise from top left:Daniel Belcher, Caroline Worra, Maria Valdes, John Riesen Berkshire Opera Festival mounts its inaugural second stage production: GLORY DENIED by 2012 Guggenheim Fellow Tom Cipullo. A two-act opera scored for four singers and sung in English, Glory Denied tells the true story of Colonel Jim Thompson, America’s longest-held prisoner of war, and is based on the…
Top (L to R): Sebastian Catana, Tamara Wilson, Thomas GlassMiddle: Alissa Anderson, Jasmine Habersham, Jonas HackerBottom: Joanne Evans, Jeremy Harr, Lucas Levy Berkshire Opera Festival‘s mainstage show will be Giuseppe Verdi‘s brilliant comic opera FALSTAFF, which was adapted by Arrigo Boito from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV. One of only two comedies written…
by Fred Baumgarten Comedy, arguably one of the two greatest human gifts – the other being music – is a timeless art. Picture an arrow pointed on two sides, flying through spacetime, picking up a Greek comedy here, a courtly farce there, a Gilbert and Sullivan here, a Seinfeld there,…
