From the Williamstown Theater Festival to New York Stage and Film, theatergoers can experience world premieres, concerts and more.
Most summers, as tourists pour into New York City to see theater, New Yorkers pour out to see theater elsewhere. This summer, though, they may do so with extra ardor. As the pandemic lifts, the pent-up demand for live, in-person theater is first being met in the Berkshires and in the mid-Hudson region, where companies are putting up tents, arranging outdoor immersive experiences and welcoming audiences to buildings that have been empty for too long. Some of those companies are old and some new: The Williamstown Theater Festival has been at it since 1955, but Great Barrington Public Theater just started in 2019. Shakespeare & Company, as its name implies, goes heavy on classics — starting July 2, Christopher Lloyd plays King Lear — while Barrington Stage Company focuses on musicals and new plays. For mainstream fare (if “The Importance of Being Earnest,” opening next week, counts as mainstream), look to the Berkshire Theater Group. For something more experimental, try Bard SummerScape or New York Stage and Film. Wherever you go — below, our critics highlight five possibilities — you will still find pandemic precautions in place. (Check each theater’s website for specific safety policies.) Even so, after a dark time, these summer shows and festivals truly offer something to celebrate. Audiences have always been drawn to the Williamstown Theater Festival for its artistry, which is strong, and its geography, which is sublime. Tucked amid the Berkshires on the campus of Williams College, in a corner of western Massachusetts that’s just a meander away from Vermont, it seems like the kind of spot that would have an open-air stage or two. In an ordinary summer, no such luck. But this year, Williamstown is taking its slate of world premieres outside. The first stop is the front lawn, where the season starts with “ Celebrating the Black Radical Imagination: Nine Solo Plays.” Curated by Robert O’Hara, a current Tony Award nominee for his direction of “Slave Play,” the production offers three separate programs, each made up of three 30-minute plays: by Guadalís Del Carmen, France‑Luce Benson and NSangou Njikam (July 6 to 10); J. Nicole Brooks, Terry Guest and Ike Holter (July 13 to 18); and Charly Evon Simpson, Ngozi Anyanwu and Zora Howard (July 20 to 25). Down the road at the Clark Art Institute, from July 13 to Aug.8, the museum’s vast reflecting pool will become the stage for “ Row,” Daniel Goldstein and Dawn Landes’s musical, starring the singer-songwriter Grace McLean, part of the original Broadway cast of “ Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. ” Directed by Tyne Rafaeli, “Row” is inspired by Tori Murden McClure’s memoir, “A Pearl in the Storm,” about rowing solo across the Atlantic Ocean. And from July 20 to Aug.8 around the town of Williamstown, audiences can experience the immersive performance “ Alien/Nation ” on foot or by car. The director Michael Arden and his company, the Forest of Arden, who made last summer’s immersive “ American Dream Study ” in the Hudson Valley, teamed up with the playwrights Jen Silverman and Eric Berryman for this one, which uses local history from 1969 as a starting point. ( wtfestival.org) LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES The Frank Loesser musical “The Most Happy Fella” boasts one of the most wondrous scores of the 1950s — a decade filled with stiff competition. The show is packed with songs whose styles are mixed and matched with formidable agility, going from operatic arias to dance romps to jazzy croons and back again.
