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By any other name: becoming Lena Hall
Natalia Zukerman
May 06, 2026
In “Your Friends and Neighbors,” Lena Hall’s character is also a musician.
Courtesy Apple TV
At a certain point you stop asking who people want you to be and start figuring out who you already are.
— Lena Hall
There is a moment in conversation with actress and musician Lena Hall when the question of identity lands with unusual force.
“Well,” she said, pausing to consider it, “who am I really?”
Born Celina Consuela Gabriella Carvajal into a San Francisco family steeped in performance — her father a choreographer, her mother a prima ballerina — Hall was, by her own account, “born to be onstage.”
“Like a show pony,” she joked.
She trained first as a ballet dancer, studying in France on scholarship before abandoning that path for musical theater after seeing her sister perform in “42nd Street.”
Even then, identity was something inherited before it was chosen.
The Tony Award-winning, Grammy-nominated performer has spent much of her career moving between worlds: Broadway and television, rock clubs and film sets, musical theater precision and raw, unvarnished songwriting. Her latest solo album, “Lullabies for the End of the World,” is an intimate, autobiographical work that explores co-dependency, heartbreak and self-reckoning.
But for Hall, whose career includes a Tony-winning turn in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” a starring role on Apple TV+’s “Your Friends and Neighbors,” and acclaimed performances in film and television, the search for artistic identity has been unfolding for decades.
The record’s central themes — identity, authenticity, reinvention — are the same ones Hall has been sorting through for much of her adult life.
“It wasn’t until later that I started asking those questions,” she said from New York City, which she splits her time between and West Cornwall, Connecticut. “What do I want to represent? Who do I want to be? I was trying to find the authentic self instead of just going with the flow.”
The search began, in part, with an unlikely catalyst: a tonsillectomy.
When Hall was 26, surgery altered her voice just as she had joined the rock band The Deafening. “They would just play really loud and never change the key,” she said, laughing.
At the same time, Hall found herself confronting larger questions about purpose and artistic direction.
“I was going through that moment of, what do I really want out of this industry?” she said. “If I’m going to keep doing this, I need to have a purpose.”
Until then, Hall said, she had largely been defined by external expectations.
“I was always who I was told to be,” she said.
The surgery became a kind of reset, both vocally and personally. It also coincided with another form of reinvention: the decision to change her professional name.
“My real name is a lot,” she said.
People stumbled over its pronunciation. It was harder to remember, harder to place. “Lena Hall” felt streamlined, memorable. “It also just sounds like a rock star,” she laughed.
Hall, who is one-quarter Filipino with Spanish and Swedish ancestry, later grappled with whether changing her name obscured an important part of who she is. At one point, she said, she was advised that reverting to her birth name might improve her casting prospects as representation standards shifted.
She declined.
“That didn’t feel authentic,” she said.
Instead, Hall came to see the name change as less a departure than a continuation.
After making the change, she discovered that Carvajal itself was a family alteration, adopted generations ago in the Philippines.
“I’m still honoring my family, even in the name change,” she said. “I’m continuing that tradition.”
Her Filipino heritage remains central to how she understands herself, even as some parts of that history remain difficult to trace.
“I’m very curious to keep searching,” Hall said. “That side of my family is where all the artistry came from.”
Hall’s refusal to flatten herself into a single story or cultural identity is mirrored in her journey as a multi-hyphenate artist. She is, depending on the moment, a Broadway belter, a screen actor, a rock frontwoman, a conceptual songwriter.
Her current side project, the all-female Radiohead tribute band Labiahead, gleefully complicates the picture further, reframing familiar songs through a new lens.
“When women perform something written and performed by men, it changes it completely,” she said. “Nothing even needs to be said. It just happens.”
The same could be said of Hall’s own work.
Across mediums, she is an artist interested less in performance as display than performance as revelation.
Onscreen, she said, that often means doing less.
“The camera is literally on your nose,” she said. “You just have to think, and it picks it up.”
Between Celina Carvajal and Lena Hall, between ballet and rock, Broadway and Cornwall, Hall is making peace with multiplicity.
“At a certain point,” she said, “you stop asking who people want you to be and start figuring out who you already are.”
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Remembering Todd Snider at The Colonial Theatre
Natalia Zukerman
May 06, 2026
“A Love Letter to Handsome John” screens at The Colonial Theatre on May 8.
Provided
Fans of the late singer-songwriter Todd Snider will have a rare opportunity to gather in celebration of his life and music when “A Love Letter to Handsome John,” a documentary by Otis Gibbs, screens for one night only at The Colonial Theatre in North Canaan on Friday, May 8.
Presented by Wilder House Berkshires and The Colonial Theatre, the 54-minute film began as a tribute to Snider’s friend and mentor, folk legend John Prine. Instead, following Snider’s death last November at age 59, it became something more intimate: a portrait of the alt-country pioneer during the final year of his life.
What began as a simple gesture of gratitude evolved into a poignant meditation on friendship, artistic influence and loss, offering viewers an unusually personal glimpse of Snider at home in his quietest moments.
For Brad Sanzenbacher of Wilder House Berkshires, bringing the film to the Northwest Corner has been deeply personal.
“I’ve been a huge fan of Todd Snider and John Prine for 20 years,” he said. “I lived in the Bay Area before I moved here, and I would see Todd live probably at least four times a year — sometimes back-to-back nights. I was that kind of super Dead Head-type fan that was on tour.”
Sanzenbacher said he had the chance to meet Snider several times and attended the musician’s Catskills retreats.
“He was just one of those people that I really connected with strongly,” he said. “Like a lot of people, when he passed away, I was really shocked and devastated.”
When he learned screenings of the film were beginning to pop up around the country, he wanted to bring that communal experience here.
“I know there are a lot of Todd Snider fans everywhere who want closure on his life and maybe a chance to feel like they’re in the room with him again,” he said. “I thought it would be a really cool experience to bring the film to the community.”
The screening is part of what Sanzenbacher calls the film’s organic, fan-driven momentum.
“I love the grassroots movement of the film,” he said. “They were going to do two screenings and that was going to be it, and now they’re showing it all over the country because fans have reached out to say, ‘How can I bring a screening to my town?’ I feel really lucky we’re able to show it.”
He hopes the evening captures some of the camaraderie that defined the Todd Snider fan experience.
“One of my favorite things about being a Todd Snider fan was when you’d go to two or three shows in a row, you’d turn into a little caravan and make friends with strangers and become this community,” he said. “That’s kind of something I’m hoping happens at the film.”
The screening begins at 7 p.m. Friday, May 8, at The Colonial Theatre, 27 Railroad St., North Canaan. Run time is 54 minutes, with time afterward for audience members to gather and connect.
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Sharon Playhouse debuts new logoahead of 2026 season
Matthew Kreta
May 06, 2026
New Sharon Playhouse logo designed by Christina D’Angelo.
Provided
The Sharon Playhouse has unveiled a new brand identity for its 2026 season, reimagining its logo around the silhouette of the historic barn that has long defined the theater.
Sharon Playhouse leadership — Carl Andress, Megan Flanagan and Michael Baldwin — revealed the new logo and website ahead of the 2026 season. The change reflects leadership’s desire to embrace both the Playhouse’s history and future, capturing its nostalgia while reinventing its image.
After attending the closing performance of the Playhouse’s production of The Mousetrap last September, Christina D’Angelo told Playhouse leadership she was “completely changing her design direction” for the new logo after experiencing the work and atmosphere of the Sharon Playhouse firsthand. She incorporated the barn silhouette to capture the theater campus’s history and evoke the warmth and magic of the Playhouse.
“The barn gives a fixed image of how we all feel about the Playhouse,” said Megan Flanagan, managing director. “The new branding presents the story of the great history of Sharon Playhouse — who we were, who we are today, who we are becoming — and the barn is that unifying element.”
The design was one of several options presented and was selected unanimously by Playhouse leadership. D’Angelo also designed this season’s branding, creating a visual throughline for the 2026 season.
The Playhouse remains committed to its taglines and mission statements, “Create. Community. Together.” and “Your destination for the arts.” While those phrases are no longer reflected in the logo itself, Carl Andress, artistic director, said the organization is not moving away from them and that they will continue to appear in publications and on the updated website.
“The refreshed brand aims to shift the narrative in the community, reinforcing the Playhouse’s role not only as a theater but as a vibrant gathering place and artistic home,” Playhouse leadership said in a press release.
For more information, including a video about the updated logo and details on the upcoming 2026 season, visit sharonplayhouse.org
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A Tangled First Foray to New York in 2026
Patrick L. Sullivan
May 06, 2026
Gary Dodson demonstrated the two-handed switch rod cast on the Schoharie Creek on April 18. The author failed to learn said cast.
Patrick L. Sullivan
The last time I tried fishing in the Catskills, in the fall of 2025, I had to stop pretty abruptly when it became apparent my hip was not going to cooperate.
So it was with considerable trepidation that I waded across a stretch of the “Little Esopus” that turned out to be a little bit deeper and a tad more robust than I thought.
This was on Thursday, April 16.
The Esopus is a tailwater, meaning cold water comes out of a dam and supplies the river with regular infusions of cold water that is good for trout.
But it is an unusual tailwater, in that the added flow comes out of the Schoharie Reservoir in Greene County and travels 18 miles through a pipe running under a considerable chunk of mountains and empties into the Esopus in the hamlet of Allaben.
This is officially known as “Diversion from Schoharie Reservoir” or the “Shandaken Tunnel.” In practice it is called “the Portal.”
Between the Portal and the Ashokan Reservoir about 13 miles downstream the Esopus is a big brawling trout river, roughly the same size as the Housatonic. Upstream of the Portal the Esopus is a medium-sized to small freestone stream. Hence “Little Esopus.”
My compatriot Gary Dodson and I were messing around on the “Little” section a couple weeks ago.
The weather was summery. The water temperature was 58 degrees F, about ideal.
The forsythia was blooming everywhere, and that usually means the first significant mayfly hatch of the year, the one imitated by the Hendrickson fly, is going on.
And I did see some Hendricksons floating around here and there.
But mostly I saw zip, except for when I spooked a couple of suckers.
Old joke: Suckers are often mistaken for brown trout. They tend to dive and tug like browns when hooked, adding to the illusion.
It’s only when one comes to the net that the angler feels like a sucker for being taken in. Again.
The day before, with high winds complementing the summer feel, we tried the Batavia Kill impoundment in Windham, where I attempted to crack the code on the two-handed rod cast.
I failed there and blamed it on the wind. So we went to the Schoharie, where legions of recently-stocked trout should have been eager to eat anything, and the wind wasn’t quite as bad.
I failed there too. This is going to take a while.
Meanwhile the usual Harry Homeowner opening up experience included a highly satisfactory lack of mice and their droppings, and a leaky hot water heater.
We’ve had the thing for about 50 years, so it’s hard to complain too much. Phil the Plumber installed a new one and we’re good for another 50 years.
The wading adventure described above felt a little hairy but I managed, and I found an easier place to cross on the return trip.
The new hip didn’t bother me at all. My thigh muscles were pretty sore the next day, though. Too much couch time over the bleak winter.
And while our rabbit population seems to have moved on, the resident deer were messing around on the lawn in the evenings. I like to sit outside reading and occasionally chirrup to them. They like to ignore me until they take fright for a mysterious deer reason and go bounding off into the woods.
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Mahaiwe’s ‘100 Years of Movies’ returns
Brian Gersten
May 06, 2026
The Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington.
Kevin Sprague
The Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center will light up the silver screen this summer with the return of “100 Years of Movies,” a beloved film series celebrating the enduring legacy of American cinema.
Now in its third consecutive year, the program blends entertainment with insight, as director and film scholar Deborah Reinisch introduces each screening with historical context, behind-the-scenes anecdotes and a deep appreciation for the craft of filmmaking.
This year’s series carries added resonance, aligning with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It also pays tribute to iconic performers whose careers shaped generations of moviegoers, including the late Robert Redford, Diane Keaton, Gene Hackman, Rob Reiner and Robert Duvall.
The series opens May 15 with “Bringing Up Baby” (1938), the quintessential screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. A week later, audiences can dive into the shadowy intrigue of “The Big Sleep” (1946), featuring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
Additional highlights include “All About Eve” (1950), starring Bette Davis; “North by Northwest” (1959), directed by Alfred Hitchcock; and the Oscar-winning thriller “The French Connection” (1971). Later in the summer, the series continues its journey through decades of filmmaking with canonical works such as “The Godfather” (1972) and “All the President’s Men” (1976).
With a thoughtfully curated lineup, “100 Years of Movies” offers both longtime cinephiles and casual viewers a chance to experience the films that have helped define American culture. As Reinisch notes, the series provides “a splendid way to explore our American experience,” one frame at a time.
Tickets are available at mahaiwe.org or through the Mahaiwe box office at 413-528-0100.
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A savory onion pie recipe from Dugazon
Bobby Graham & Matthew Marden
May 06, 2026
Savory onion pie
Bobby Graham
Each month, Dugazon owners Bobby Graham and Matthew Marden share a recipe inspired by the traditions, stories and sense of welcome at the heart of their shop in Sharon, Connecticut. Visit Dugazon at 19 W. Main St. Wednesday-Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and online at dugazonshop.com.
This savory pie is a delicious alternative to quiche or tomato pie (which we’ll share in the future). Bobby’s mother made a similar recipe, and it was a huge hit.
Ideal for breakfast, brunch or lunch entertaining. Serve hot with a crisp white wine and a crispy green salad. Great for groups. Yum!
Savory Onion Pie
Inspired by a recipe from Barbara Dugazon Graham
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Ingredients
For the crust:
•1 cup crushed saltine crackers
•1/4 cup salted butter, melted
For the filling:
•2 cups thinly sliced onions
•1 clove garlic, finely chopped (optional)
•2 tablespoons salted butter
•1 cup milk
•2 large eggs
•1/2 teaspoon black pepper
•1 1/2 cups grated cheddar and Parmesan cheese
•5 dashes Tabasco sauce
•1/2 teaspoon Tony Chachere’s Cajun seasoning
•Leaves from 1 fresh thyme sprig, or 1/2 teaspoon Italian seasoning
•1 to 2 green onions, finely chopped, for garnish
Preparation
•Heat oven to 350 degrees. Place rack in center of oven.
•Make the crust: Combine cracker crumbs and melted butter. Press firmly into a 9-inch metal pie pan to form an even crust.
•In a skillet over low heat, melt 2 tablespoons butter. Add onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and lightly caramelized, about 5 to 7 minutes. Add garlic, if using. Let cool slightly, then spread evenly over crust.
•In a large bowl, whisk together milk, eggs, black pepper, Tabasco, Cajun seasoning and thyme. Stir in cheese until well combined. Pour mixture over onions.
•Bake uncovered until golden and set, 45 to 60 minutes. Watch closely during final baking.
•Let cool 5 minutes. Sprinkle with green onions, slice and serve hot or at room temperature.
Notes: Pie can be frozen after assembly and baked later. A metal pie pan is recommended for best results.
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