NEW ENGLAND ARTS & THEATRE WEEKEND
Boston-Salem-Newport

sponsored by tdf




This 3 day 4 night cultural tour of New England includes the following: roundtrip motor coach New York (midtown)/Boston, 3 nights at 4-star Boston Radisson Hotel,3 breakfasts, 3 lunches, 2 dinners, 3 performances per itinerary, 3 museum visits and tours of “The Breakers” and Marble House in Newport.  
 
Trip price: $1441 (double occupancy), details below.  



Few U.S. cities have the historical, cultural and literary richness of Boston.  
The city played a central role in the evolution of American culture from colonial times to the present and today it offers a rich array of theatres and outstanding museums. Join tdf Travel on our extended New England Arts and Theatre Weekend where we attend world premieres of productions at two of Boston’s outstanding repertory theatres,  the Huntington Theatre and the American Repertory Theatre, and we enjoy a performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We include an exciting variety of museums. At the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem we see the award winning architecture and renowned Asian collections. At the Museum of Fine Arts we tour the exciting exhibit Degas to Picasso: Modern Masters. We visit the venerable collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. On our return trip to New York we visit Newport, Rhode Island for visits to two extravagant mansions, “The Breakers,” and Marble House.  






1.  Thursday, March 30     
We depart in the morning from New York (midtown) by private motor coach and travel directly to Boston where we spend three nights at the 4-star Hotel Boston Radisson, centrally-located in downtown Boston near theaters and just a block from the Boston Common. Facilities include an excellent restaurant, and a heated indoor pool and a fitness center.  
After lunch (included) we’re off on a journey unlike any you’ve had before, as we board a “DUCK,” an authentic, renovated World War II amphibious landing vehicle, for a panoramic tour of Boston by land and by sea. We pass by all the places that make Boston the birthplace of freedom and a city of “firsts,” from the golden-domed State House to Bunker Hill, Fleet Center, Boston Common, Copley Square, the “Big Dig,” Government Center, fashionable Newbury Street, Quincy Market, the Prudential Tower and more. And just when you think we’ve seen it all, the “DUCK” takes us into the Charles River for a breathtaking view of the Boston and Cambridge skylines, a view you won’t get anywhere else.  
Tonight we have a welcome dinner prior to our concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, featuring violinist Joshua Bell, at Symphony Hall, one of the most extraordinary concert halls in the country. The program includes works by Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Brahms.  



2.  Friday, March 31     
This morning we travel to Salem for a private tour of The Peabody-Essex Museum, America’s oldest continuously operating museum. It was founded in 1799, sixteen years after the establishment of the nation and nearly three-quarters of a century before the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The museum’s founders were among America's first global entrepreneurs, traveling the world in search of trade. The collections they amassed are exceptional for their provenance, age, quality, and significance and they are considered among the finest of their kind, exceeding 2.4 million works of art and culture. We tour the most recent architecture acquisition, Yin Yu Tang, the only complete Qing Dynasty house located outside China, and there is free time to explore other collections. Following our museum visit, we take a short walking tour of Salem, after which you may explore the village on your own before  we return to Boston. There is time to refresh before this evening’s program.  
Tonight we have tickets for a production of the Huntington Theatre Company at the Virginia Wimberly Theatre, a 360-seat brand new state-of-the-art proscenium theatre in the new Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts. Now in its 24th season as Boston’s leading professional theatre, the Huntington has received three Tony Award nominations for productions transferred to Broadway. We see The Road Home: Re-Membering America. As he drove home cross-country to New York City following 9/11, playwright and actor Marc Wolf interviewed his fellow Americans to create this profoundly moving and highly entertaining evening. This world premiere is a provocative portrait of the complexity and resilience of our nation. Marc Wolf is best known for his previous piece Another American: Asking and Telling, for which he received the OBIE, Helen Hayes, and Independent Reviewers of New England Awards for Best Solo Performance.  



3.  Saturday, April 1     
This morning we visit the Museum of Fine Arts, a Beaux Arts building, to which the West Wing, designed by I. M. Pei, was added in 1981. Among the museum’s strengths are its permanent collections of 19th- and early 20th-century American painting, a large representation of regional artists like Edward Hopper and John Singleton Copley, and European painting from the Renaissance to Impressionism. Among the decorative arts, collections range from colonial American furniture to English silver to costumes and textiles. We take a guided tour of the exhibit, Degas to Picasso: Modern Masters, surveying the MFA’s collection of European painting, sculpture, and graphic arts from 1900 through the 1960s. Beginning with the late works of the Impressionists (Degas, Monet, Cézanne) and post-Impressionists (Gauguin, Redon, Rodin, Maillol) the exhibition will explore clusters of works by major figures in 20th-century Europe.  
This afternoon we visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where the galleries are filled with paintings, sculpture, tapestries, furniture, and decorative arts from cultures spanning thirty centuries. Housed in a stunning 15th-century Venetian-style palace with three stories of galleries surrounding a sun- and flower-filled courtyard, the Museum provides an unusual backdrop for the viewing of art. The galleries house works by some of the most recognized artists in the world, including Titian, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Manet, Degas, Whistler and Sargent.  
In the late afternoon we travel to Cambridge for a visit to the Harvard University campus. After dinner in Cambridge, we attend a performance at the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) which occupies a unique place in American theatre as the only not-for-profit theatre in the country that maintains a resident acting company and an international training conservatory, and that operates in association with a major university. Over its twenty-two year history A.R.T. has welcomed many American and international theatre artists who have enriched the theatrical life of the whole nation, while garnering many of the nation’s most distinguished awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award and a Jujamcyn Award. Tonight’s production is Orpheus X, a contemporary retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend. After the wild success of Highway Ulysses, composer and performer Rinde Eckert and director Robert Woodruff are joining forces to create another world premiere. This new music-theatre piece will be designed by acclaimed video artist Denise Marika.  
DAY FOUR:  Sunday, April 2  



4.  Sunday, April 2     
This morning, after breakfast, we check out of our hotel and travel to Newport, Rhode Island, for a guided tour of “The Breakers,” the most impressive and the grandest of Newport’s summer “cottages.”  It was built for the Vanderbilts, one of America’s most prosperous families. In 1893 financier Cornelius Vanderbilt II commissioned architect Richard Morris Hunt to design a villa to replace the earlier wood-framed house which was destroyed by fire the previous year. Hunt directed an international team of craftsmen and artisans to create a 70-room Italian Renaissance-style palazzo, inspired by the 16th century palaces of Genoa and Turin. We enjoy lunch at one of the nation’s oldest taverns and a Newport favorite, the historic White Horse Tavern. Following lunch we take a guided tour of Marble House, built between 1888 and 1892 for Mr. & Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt. Inspired by the Petit Trianon at Versailles, Marble House was a social and architectural landmark that set the pace for Newport's subsequent transformation from a quiet summer colony of wooden houses to the legendary resort of opulent stone palaces.  
After the tour we return to New York City.  
 





This engaging experience includes:

  • Roundtrip motor coach New York (midtown)/Boston
  • 3 nights at 4-star Boston Radisson Hotel
  • 3 breakfast
  • 3 lunches
  • 2 dinners
  • Performance Boston Symphony with pre-concert discussion
  • Performance Huntington Theatre
  • Performance American Repertory Theatre
  • Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem
  • Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
  • Museum of Fine Arts
  • Tours of “The Breakers” and Marble House, Newport
PROGRAM PRICES  
Per person (double occupancy) from New York: $1441  
Single Supplement: $275