Silent film screening with live music

Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity in Florence will host a screening of the silent film “The Ancient Law” (“Das alte Gesetz”) with live musical accompaniment on Saturday, March 22, at 7 p.m.

The movie, which premiered in 1923, is about a young Jewish man, the son of a rabbi, who leaves his shtetl to pursue an acting career in Vienna. An archduchess falls in love with him and becomes his patron, but he struggles with homesickness and the difficulty of reconciling secularism and religious traditions.

Silent film pianist Donald Sosin and violinist Alicia Svigals will provide the music.

Tickets are $18 in advance via bombyx.live or $25 at the door. Card to Culture tickets are available.

Julian Gerstin Sextet’s jazz concert/workshop

The jazz group The Julian Gerstin Sextet will bring an afternoon and evening of jazz education and music to CitySpace in Easthampton on Sunday, March 30.

From 4 to 5:30 p.m., Gerstin will teach a Creativity in Rhythm Workshop, where participants can learn how to play percussion instruments (provided). The workshop is for people ages 16 and up.

At 7:30 p.m., the Sextet will perform a concert, or, as the press release puts it, “unfold a soundscape woven from soulful clarinet, expressive trumpet, resonant piano, and intricate layers of percussion. Feel the rhythm as it transcends borders, blending time-honored jazz with global influences to create an experience that is as profound as it is stirring.”

Tickets are $15 for the workshop, $20 for the concert, or $30 for both at cityspaceeasthampton.org.

The music of Paul McCartney, live

Multi-instrumentalist Yuri Pool will bring Paul McCartney’s famous hits, including “Hey Jude,” “Maybe I’m Amazed,” “Lady Madonna,” and “Live and Let Die,” to the Academy of Music on Friday, March 21, at 8 p.m, for “The McCartney Years,” the world’s longest-running and most celebrated production dedicated to McCartney’s legendary music.

Pool, who sings and plays bass, piano and guitar, performs with his wife Jennifer (as Linda McCartney) on keyboard and harmonies, as well as the rest of their six-piece band, which prides itself on using the same make and model of instruments that McCartney and his musicians used in the 1970s.

The show, according to the event description, is “more than just a concert; it’s an intergenerational celebration” that “guarantees an audio-visual feast that fans of The Beatles and Wings won’t want to miss.”

Tickets are $15 to $52.50, not including fees, via aomtheatre.com, at the box office, or by phone at 413-584-9032 ext. 105. Card to Culture tickets are $10.

Short performances about social justice

The nonprofit World and Eye Arts Center will host “Bite Size Blends,” a show of four short works about social justice, at CitySpace in Easthampton on Saturday, March 22, at 7 p.m.

The four performances will be: poetry from 2019-2021 Springfield Poet Laureate Magdalena Gomez, winner of the International Latino Book Awards; “The Velveteen,” by Amy Dawn Kotel, “a true story told through voice, dance, song, and puppetry, about a bunny rabbit and intergenerational trauma and love” (note: this performance contains themes of domestic violence); “American Stink Bug Flies Again,” by Jean Minuchin, in which a “charming and prickly bug clown persona takes on race, war and the cosmos, provoking with grotesque humor, whimsy, and confrontation“; and “Mother Tongue” by The Performance Project, a Springfield-based theater ensemble of BIPOC, immigrant, and refugee young adults, whose show includes themes of “language, culture, identity, diaspora, hypermasculinity, transphobia, racism, the school to prison pipeline and revolution.” (All quotes come from the event description.)

Tickets are $16 for general admission, $25 for supporters, and $5 for Card to Culture tickets via wande.betterworld.org/events/bite-size-blends-2025.

Book about lesser-known abolitionists

The book “In Defiance: 20 Abolitionists You Were Never Taught in School,” written by two local authors, will be released on Tuesday, April 1.

The 248-page book profiles lesser-known figures in the history of abolition, including John Gregg Fee, who founded Berea College, the first interracial and coeducational school in Kentucky; Mary Ellen Pleasant, a Black millionaire who funded John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry; Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first Black woman to vote in a national election in the U.S. and the second Black American female lawyer; and Belinda X, a formerly enslaved woman who, in 1775, wrote a petition demanding reparations from her enslaver.

Its authors, Tom Weiner and Amilcar Shabazz, are both local educators who have been involved with reparations efforts in the Pioneer Valley.

The book will retail for $25.

Live storytelling with the theme ‘Elementary’

The live storytelling event Valley Voices Story Slam will return this month with the theme “Elementary” on Thursday, March 20, at 7:30 p.m. at Shea Theater in Turners Falls.

At a Story Slam, Pioneer Valley locals take the stage to share true stories from their own lives within the theme, and the audience chooses the winner.

To learn more, watch past Valley Voices stories, or audition for a future Valley Voices show, visit nepm.org/valley-voices. The next show will be a “Best Of” night at the Academy of Music on Saturday, April 26.

Tickets are $17 via aomtheatre.com, at the box office, or by phone at 413-584-9032 ext. 105. Card to Culture tickets are $10.

Youth actors: audition for ‘Hercules’

Local students in grades K-12 are invited to a group audition for Amherst Community Theater/Missoula Children’s Theatre’s touring production of “Hercules” at Amherst Regional Middle School on Monday, March 24, from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Amherst Regional Middle School cafeteria. The audition will be “fun and non-threatening,” according to the rehearsal flier, and will not require any advance preparation.

The show rehearses daily from Monday, March 24, through Friday, March 28, though not every performer will be called for each day. The two performances are on Saturday, March 29, at 1:30 p.m. and 4 p.m.

Each child who is cast will need to provide a registration fee, but fee waivers and reductions are available on request.

Tickets to the performances will be $10 for adults or $5 for students and available only at the door. One ticket is valid for both performances.

For more information, visit amherstacts.org/childrens-theater.