Tina Packer founded Shakespeare & Company in Lenox thirty-three years ago, and for more than twenty years, the well-known company was located at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home.   But in 1999 they had the opportunity to assume control of their own 63 acre campus, and they set to work converting an old gymnasium left over from the Lenox School for Boys into their "Founder’s Theatre."

Ten years later, that theater is the centerpiece of their campus as they celebrate its anniversary with "Richard III," "The Winter’s Tale," and  "The Taster."     In the Elaine Bernstein Theater, "The Comedy of Errors."

More information can be found HERE.

Hampton Terrace is located walking distance from Shakespeare & Company and we enjoy a special relationship with the company, having hosted many of their equity actors over the years, including Olympia Dukakis recently.     Her assessment of her stay here?   "Three thumbs up!"

You can find classical music of some variety just about every night at Tanglewood from mid-June until late August every year.   But on any given night in the Berkshires there are thousands of visitors and second homeowners who are willing to support music at other venues up and down the county.

The Concerts at Tannery Pond is a series of six or seven chamber music evenings held in an 1834 Shaker building in New Lebanon, New York from May through October.   Established in 1991 by photographer/pianist Christian Steiner, the annual series combines music with a serene setting that would be hard to beat anywhere.

Continuing in the chamber music genre, there is the South Mountain Concert Series, held on weekends in September each year.   Located just north of Lenox, the series has been presented since 1918 and is held in a hall built that specifically for chamber music.   Performers over the years have included Leonard Bernstein, Gary Graffman, Leontyne Price and Peter Serkin, and quartets have included the Borromeo, the Emerson, The Guarneri, the Tokyo, the Julliard, the Orion and the Vermeer. (more…)

In 1937, when the Depression and taxation caused the gild to come off the Gilded Age, the great mansions and estates of Lenox were largely abandoned.   Many became institutional:   schools, asylums or monasteries, and some spent more than half a century empty.   But luckily, one was donated to the Boston Symphony…and the rest, as they say, is history.

Over the decades, as the audiences who attended concerts at Tanglewood grew, more and more of these great estates and historic "cottages" were able to be put back into service:   Cranwell, Wheatleigh, Blantyre…and even Hampton Terrace, one of the original "Berkshire Cottages."   In fact, most of the Lenox inns are the former second homes of the turn-of-the-century’s rich and famous.   Tanglewood itself, one mile down the hill from Lenox town center, consists of multiple performance venues inhabiting a most embracing rural setting.   Lenonard Bernstein, a alum of the affiliated Tanglewood Institute always proclaimed that the Tanglewood property, and the Berkshires in general, had captured his soul. (more…)