Plenty of Arts and Music Festivals in Westchester This Summer

America's most entertaining summer festivals in music, dance, theatre and the arts come in all shapes, sizes and locations, near and far.

Aficionados willing to take their entertainment quest on the road will find the best music festivals include Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., Ravenna in Chicago and Glimmerglass in Cooperstown.

Festive dramas range from the Berkshires Theatre Festival in Stockbridge to the Shakespeare Festival at The Old Globe in Balboa Park in San Diego. For the best in dance, there is Jacobs Pillow, for jazz there's Newport and for sculpture gardens there is Storm King Mountain.

But for Rye residents looking to experience summer festivals closer to home, five of America's very best–including a sculpture garden that rivals anything in Europe—are within driving distance.

That exotic, artistic "Staycation" quintet includes:

Bard SummerScape (music, dance, drama, theatre, film, cabaret, more); Annandale-on-Hudson; the Caramoor International Music Festival, Katonah; the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival at Boscobel in Garrison; The Powerhouse Theater on the Vassar campus in Poughkeepsie and Purchase's Donald. M. Kendall Sculpture Garden, virtually across the street from the SUNY Purchase campus with its Neuberger Museum of Art and outdoor Moore statues.

Here is a closer look at the top nearby five:

1. BardSummerScape presents several weeks of opera, dance, music, drama, film, cabaret and the 21st annual Bard Music Festival through Aug. 22. This year SummerScape will explore the works and world of composer Alban Berg. SummerScape takes place on Bard College's sprawling Mid-Hudson River Valley campus in Red Hook, Duchess County, in the Poughkeepsie-Newburgh area across the Hudson River from Kingston.

Most of the performances take place in the architecturally bold and dynamically revolutionary Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts designed by Frank Gehry, with a second futuristic showplace designed by Yucheda Toyota.

Bard festival highlights range from opera ("The Distant Sound" featuring the American Symphony Orchestra" playing the music and libretto by Franz Schreker on Aug. 1, 4 and 6, and Oscar Strauss' "The Chocolate Soldier" Aug. 5-15) to films ranging from Weimar expressionism to 1920s modernism and Hollywood's film noir Thursdays and Sundays through Aug. 19.

The 21st Bard Music Festival features two weekends of concerts swirling around Berg and His World during Aug. 13-15 and Aug. 20-22. The programming is filled with concerts, panels, and other events that bring Alban Berg and his music to life from his Vienna days to his European finishing school experience. The noteworthy program is fleshed out with the works of other contemporary composers as well.

For more information: Fischercenter.bard.edu; phone: 845-758-7900.

2. The Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, 149 Girdle Ridge Rd., Katonah, is home to the Caramoor International Music Festival, rated one of the top five outdoor festivals in the nation with good reason. Upcoming events, for example, range from Christopher O'Riley performing "Extreme Chamber Music" featuring the music of Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Nirvana, Ravel and Shostakovich on July 30 to the Caramoor Jazz Festival Aug. 6-8 featuring what is billed as the "World Vibraphone Summit," as well as Chick Corea's Freedom Band. There also will be "Family Fun: Dancing at Dusk" July 28 and on Aug. 11. Children of all ages can picnic and dance to live music, interact with the musicians and get to know their instruments.

Two outdoor theatres also resonate with great music created by the world's finest classical, opera and jazz artists. Several noteworthy theme gardens open early for pre-performance picnics.

The Rosen House, a Mediterranean-style mansion, is a national and state historic site where the festival began with amateur musicians gathering for impromptu sessions more than 25 years ago in the home of financier/musician Albert Rosen and his musician wife, Lucy. The mansion features a collection of Renaissance and Eastern decorative and fine art and is open at select hours for touring.

The music moves indoors to the Music Room during the fall and spring with programs including the second annual Fall Festival September 24-26, with Yo-Yo-Ma and the Knights chamber orchestra headlining on the last day.

For further information: www.Caramoor.org; phone: 914-232-1252.

3. The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival at Boscobel Restoration in Garrison is going into its 24th season of performing accessible Shakespeare with a difference that utilizes the grounds and vistas of the historical site so that strolling players seem to come out of the banks of the Hudson River with West Point looming in the background.

That difference also includes placing modern touches in the unlikeliest places in this season's rotating repertory of "Taming of the Shrew," "Troilus and Cressida" and "The Bomb-itty of Errors" (billed as a jazzed up "ad-rap-tion" of "The Comedy of Errors").

For example, the battle of the sexes that is "The Taming of the Shrew" features a bra-burning Kate snapping her brassiere like a whip over potential suitors while her potential husband enters "Easy Rider"-movie-style on a motorcycle and the cast of characters strolls into the tented theatre to the music of Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass with a little Frank Zappa thrown in to add to the 1960s flavor.

"Troilus and Cressida" underlines the anti-war theme by portraying the warriors fighting in the Trojan War as posturing pseudo-macho perennial adolescents –from sulking Achilles to vain Ajax to pandering Pandarus –while the title characters come across as the anti-Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, when Cressida sleeps with Troilus for the first time, she wakes up the next day lip synching to Beyonce's "Single Girls (Put a Ring on It)" while pretty boy Paris and his stolen mistress Helen ("The Face that Launched a 1,000 Ships") prance around like they are Hollywood wannabes auditioning for People Magazine instead of being the cause for an Iraq-like war that just keeps dragging on and on, with the warriors breaking into disco moves and no Trojan Horse in sight.

And "Bomb-itty" is one of those Shakespeare abridged comic versions that use hip hop culture and graffiti art to create a theatrical experience shuffling two sets of twins through various cases of mistaken identity to music played by a DJ on stage. Almost every performer belongs to Actors Equity, so the acting is professional up and down the line.

Further information: www.hvshakespeare.org; phone: (845) 265-7858.

4. Vassar and New York Stage and Film's Powerhouse Theatre, 124 Raymond Ave., Poughkeepsie, features mostly young actors on the verge of being discovered performing new and experimental works as well as revivals on the Vassar college campus.

Performances range from Sarah LaDuke discussing "Bonfire Night" with Justin Levine and Alex Timber through Aug. 1 to the premiere of Oscar, Tony and Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright/screenwriter John Patrick Shanley's "Pirate," with Shanley (of "Doubt" and "Moonstruck" fame) directing his own work on the Powerhouse main stage through Aug. 1.

Other highlights include the Vineyard Theatre's concert reading of the off-Broadway-bound revival of "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" (July 1  to Aug. 1) to the Readings Festival 2 (July 9 to Aug.1) offering world premieres by Eve Ensler, Romulus Linney and Eleanor Cooney, Steven Saer and Duncan Sheik, Kate Walbert and Patricia Wettig. The Powerhouse Apprentice Company is also performing "Romeo and Juliet" in the outdoor Amphitheater. And pre-and-post performance light dining is available at Café on the Quad.

For further information: Powerhouse.Vassar.edu; phone (845) 437-5599.

5. Purchase's Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Garden on Anderson Hill Road, virtually across the street from SUNY Purchase, consists of more than 152 acres of sprawling lawns seemingly growing out of a lake with a fountain in the middle, the geyser splashing like a watery figure pointing to 45 major pieces of sculpture, including works by Moore, Nevelson, Calder and others.

There are free maps available at the main information booth that make self-guided tours easy, with the huge bear and totem poles as favorite spots to pose for pictures. The garden is open daily year round from 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Memorial Day to Labor Day; 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on other days.

The Neuberger Museum of Art, 735 Anderson Hill Road, on the nearby SUNY Purchase campus is one of the region's finest cultural resources with the county's only permanent exhibition of African art as well as about 12 rotating exhibitions every year of modern, contemporary and emerging artists. Moore statues seem to rise from the most unlikely nearby sites.

In addition to Neuberger, the nearby Performing Arts Center (PAC) is as close to Lincoln Center as Westchester can come with more than 50 performances yearly of dance, classical music, jazz, theatre, film and family events.

Further information: 914: 253-2001 for the Kendall Sculpture Garden; www. Neuberger.org for the museum; phone: 914-251-6100 and www.artscenter.org for PAC; phone: 914-251-6200.