Clarinet Legend Sailing to Vineyard

In June, when the New York Times announced clarinetist Stanley Drucker’s retirement from the New York Philharmonic, the paper said he was entering “something bigger than folklore. Legend maybe? History? He is retiring from the Philharmonic after 60 years, the longest tenure of any player in the orchestra’s existence.”

“I was a musician before I was a physician,” says Jay Segel, discussing the songwriting class he offers at Featherstone Center for the Arts. “My long-term goal is to create a place of creativity where songwriters have a chance to critique in a warmhearted way.”

The musical Summer of ’42 will open Thursday, July 16, at the Katharine Cornell Theatre on Spring street in Vineyard Haven.

Based on the novel and screenplay by Herman Raucher, the story takes place on a small island in New England in the infamous summer of 1942. America is at war, and 15-year-old Hermie and his buddies experience hilarious adolescent adventures in a summer they’ll never forget. Along the way Hermie learns about life, love and the scope of human compassion.

An Island of Women, an original musical, looks at life on the Vineyard between 1850 and 1852 when much of the male population was off whaling. In response to the many requests for another performance by people who missed the original shows, it is being revived on Sunday, August 23 at 7:30 p.m. at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown. If you miss this performance, you will have to travel off-Island to Woods Hole or Fall River where the production will be performed the first weekend in October as a fundraiser for The Coalition for Social Justice.

As spring cracks open our winter stillness, the natural world appears to speak one unified, coherent command: Dance!

This summer season on the Vineyard, dance will break off the stage, with performances in the field at the Farm Institute, at Polly Hill Arboretum, and even on Main street, Vineyard Haven. The season will feature fusions of dance with video projections, puppetry and elements of circus in an exploration of dance’s natural affiliation with other fields of visual arts.

A new piano quintet by composer Gernot Wolfgang, New England Travelogue, will have its world premiere on Monday, July 27, at the Old Whaling Church and again on Tuesday, July 28, at the Chilmark Community Center, as part of a program presented by pianist Delores Stevens, artistic director of the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society, and the Eclipse String Quartet.

The 31st annual Arts and Society Bloomsday Celebration — of music and drama based on the text of James Joyce — will be performed Tuesday, June 16, at the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven. Curtain time is 8 p.m.

A concert of new work by Michelle Mola and Dudley Brooks, two innovative choreographers chosen from an international pool of over 100 applicants, opens this weekend at the Yard on Middle Road in Chilmark.

Mr. Brooks’ work has a sense of the ridiculous; he’s funny. This weekend, Brooks will premiere D was a Dancer, featuring Edward Lear nonsense poems set to music, and A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Dance — the dance world will never be the same!

Despite being a part of one of the most famous musical families in America, “Sister Kate” Taylor has had a career uniquely her own. After recording three albums and going out on nation-wide tours in the 1970s, Ms. Taylor decided to settle into a quieter life on Vineyard, where she spent several summers in a teepee with husband Charlie Witham and their growing family.

The Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School Minnesingers are in rehearsal mode for a very busy spring performance season. On April 4, they will participate in the Massachusetts Instrumental and Choral Conductors’ Association festival at Algonquin Regional High School. Competing against set performance standards, they will be judged in several categories including tone quality, balance and blend, expression, rhythmic and intonation precision, and style. This is their first trip to a MICCA festival in 10 years.