Performing Arts in Massachusetts

From the concert halls of Boston, MA in the east to the summer stock theaters in the western Berkshires and all points north and south, Massachusetts is home to world-class performing arts venues.

Live theater, from Broadway-caliber musical theater to deliberately rustic Shakespearean-style stages, will quench your thirst for in-person theater performance. In the summer, the unique Jacob’s Pillow dance festival brings weeks of dance innovation and delight to the Berkshires. The Boston Pops and other world-class performers of classical and pop music thrill visitors every summer at the Pops’s summer home of Tanglewood in Lenox, MA.

Love the beach in summer? Who doesn’t? Come to a concert set near a traditional beach boardwalk at Salisbury, MA on Cape Ann. More southward, the vacation destination of Cape Cod brings summer-long music and delight at the Cape Cod Melody Tent and the neighboring South Shore Music Circus.

New England people love their old places, so they put on musical and stage performances in places like Boarding House Park in Lowell, MA, north of Boston. The historic old whaling town of New Bedford, MA is where you find the restored Zeiterion Performing Arts Center, hosting theater and musical acts of high caliber. If you like seeing other people take risks, live comedy is done in theaters around the state, often in charmingly cozy clubs. One-to-four-day performing arts festivals, often featuring a particular musical genre, are scattered like applause across the landscape in Massachusetts.