Summer Preview 2025! - #10
A brief and biased guide to some of the things I'm excited to see this summer in (and around) the Berkshires
There is nothing like summer in the Berkshires, when we make the jump overnight from “it’s too gray and rainy” to “it’s too hot and humid.” All the drawbacks that come with life during the high season in “America’s Premiere Cultural Resort” — traffic, feeling unwelcome at Guido’s on weekends — are more than offset by having such an abundance of things to do until September. Unfortunately, as usual I’ll be away for a good bit of the summer, but here's a list I came up with of things I’m looking forward to. It’s entirely incomplete and biased, and who knows how much I’ll get to, but I hope to see you around!
On the wall
Our museums always step up for the season. At the Clark Art Institute, the big show of the season is “A Room of Her Own,” about women creators from the late 19th and early 20th centuries who took Virginia Woolf’s admonition to claim some space seriously, with a collection of “paintings, drawings, prints, stained glass, embroidery, and other decorative arts.” Could be an interesting counterbalance to last summer’s heavy-duty effort to remind you about the existence of one of the most prominent and conventional painters of the French early 19th century.
I’m also curious to see the show about the polymathic Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi, who was an era-spanning sculptor, landscape architect, furniture designer, and stage decorator. His signature stone biomorphic works are often harmonious and meditative, although a lot depends on astute curating to bring some kind of order to his prolific production. “Sometimes I think I’m part of this world today,” he once said. “Sometimes I feel that maybe I belong in history or in prehistory, or that there’s no such thing as time.”
Over at Mass MoCA, a retrospective of work by Vincent Valdez opened Memorial Day weekend and is perfectly timed for this moment. Valdez is a Texan artist who is serious about exploring boundaries and and asking difficult questions, especially about how the past lives within the present. As he explained in The Art Newspaper: “It's always been my quest to try to enable people to further examine what is right in front of our very noses, but in many ways, Americans choose to remain painfully trapped in their own mythology — denial.”
On Stage
There’s nothing I’ll regret missing like Dinosaur Jr at the Tree House Brewery’s Summer Stage in Deerfield (July 15). I haven’t made it this venue yet but have heard great things from friends who have. They are also hosting Taj Mahal, and Lucius (July 22), and in this non-Solid Sound summer will also host a local appearance by Jeff Tweedy from Wilco (July 24). I’d also mention an appearance by 90s college radio tunesmiths the Gin Blossoms, who will be there June 5 the day after appearing for free at “Belmont on Broadway” in downtown Saratoga Springs. I wrote about the band a few years ago, and discovered they are more interesting than I expected.
There are a bunch of other events as well, Bousquet Mountain hosts several concerts and a series of genre-festivals in August. The Green River Festival in Greenfield continues to grow and come in to its own. Mass MoCA seems a bit quiet but welcomes Guster and the Mountain Goats (July 26), and their always anticipated Bang on a Can LOUD weekend July 31 to Aug. 2, and Roomful of Teeth’s 16th annual appearance will be Aug. 16.
And to get it out of the way, James Taylor’s Tanglewood shows are on July 3 and 4. A great way to mark the beginning of summer is when JT shows up on the cover of various publications. This year, The B magazine has pushed the boundary of pointless nepo baby coverage by featuring two of his sons on the summer cover. Why? You won’t find out from the article.
Speaking of Tanglewood, I any time spent on the Lawn with a nice picnic and a bottle of wine is a perfect Berkshire summer day. It almost doesn’t matter what’s playing — I’m completely immune to the classical music world’s snooty marketing conventions, with their glamour shots of one prodigy or another. If I had to pick, the Sibelius program on July 12 looks great, as does the French program of Debussy and Ravel on July 13. But what I’m really holding out for is the Boston Early Music Festival production of Telemann’s Pimpinone at the Mahaiwe June 27 & 28. This 1725 comic opera is a true two-hander about a scheming chambermaid named Vespetta who connives to marry her horny old goat of an employer.
On other kinds of stages
Last year The Williamstown Theatre Festival continued its long road back, in a season that was promised to “get smaller before it can get bigger.” It sure was — by accident of history I caught most of last summer’s shows, two one-person shows and four players, most in the modest black box CenterStage at Williams. They were great, but the resounding takeaway is that WTF just isn’t what it used to be.
Of course, what it used to was in no way sustainable. As reported in painful detail by the Los Angeles Times in 2021, it relied on a “broken” work environment that took advantage of energetic and privileged theater kids hoping the hazing was a growth opportunity. Repositioning the festival has been an astonishingly difficult task, but they seem now to have settled on a vision of becoming a trendy downtown happening, with Jeremy O. Harris’ eagerly awaited Spirit of the People July 17 to Aug. 3. There is so much Williamstown isn’t anymore — you won’t see Michelle Williams at the produce section at Stop n’ Shop, although maybe you might spot Pamela Anderson.
Of course, there are many other stages and productions to look forward to, but I don’t have it in me. The prices for these events are not of this earth, and one look around the audience tells you more than you can possibly imagine about the state of the arts in the Berkshires. An enduring memory for me was last summer, when we went to see the remarkable La Cage Aux Folles at Barrington Stage in Pittsfield in June. It was a lively and exciting excuse to have a Drag show, and while I am by no means young, I was probably at least 20 years below the median age of the audience. I’ll always remember that was the same night as Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance, and catching up with the real-time reaction on social media during intermission was really the first moment I realized we are truly screwed.
But it’s important to laugh about it… and one interesting wrinkle I notice this summer is that comedy seems to have fully arrived as the big performance craft boom. Mass MoCA will feature Sarah Sherman (July 19), who has come a long way from her weird Twitter start, as well as Julio Torres (Aug. 8), whose delightful weirdness is a fun challenge to mainstream ideas of funny. On a bigger stage, John Mulaney will be at Tanglewood (June 29), and even smaller venues are putting things together, like the Images Cinema fundraiser on Aug. 14, and a show at the Bright Ideas Brewery on July 12. If you like your humor with less or no edge whatsoever, former public radio warhorse A Prairie Home Companion returns from the dead to Tanglewood on June 21. If the likes of Andrew Cuomo and Louis CK aren’t going to stay canceled, it was inevitable that Garrison Keillor would reanimate at some point. Whatever he’s up to probably won’t be worth the pointless Culture War squabbling in Facebook comments.
