Arts & Entertainment

Old Sturbridge Village voted unanimously to extend the contract of president and CEO James Donahue through June 2017, the museum announced Wednesday.

Developers announced the soft opening of a $25-million baseball complex at the junction of Route 20 and Route 9 in Northborough this summer, which will be home to the New England Ruffnecks Baseball program.

Less than three months after the Higgins Armory closed its doors for good, the Worcester Art Museum will host its first exhibit featuring the arms and armory collection from the Higgins.

The catering business that recently announced plans to build in Devens is a harbinger of more economic activity to come, according to Steve Catalano, owner of Dolce Brands, which specializes in serving the film industry. Catalano said he's in talks with other businesses interested in leasing space at the site of the former Hodges Theatre, which Catalano bought with the intention of razing it in the spring to rebuild a state-of-the-art catering facility adjacent to New England Studios. The four-stage studio facility opened this fall, and Hodges scooped up the theater -- which closed along with the former Fort Devens military base in the mid-1990s -- and its 3-acre parcel in anticipation of the start of filming next year.

In 2005, with her children grown, Mary DeFeudis found herself in a transitional phase. In what she...

By a two-to-one margin, fans voted to name Worcester's new baseball team the Bravehearts.

Leave it to Devens to become the destination of the much-anticipated film studios that economic development leaders had hoped would come when Massachusetts implemented tax credits designed to lure the film industry. Developers floated plans for other locations, perhaps most notably a $500-million filming facility proposed for Plymouth, known as Plymouth Rock Studios. Unable to come up with the financial backing to move ahead with construction, that plan failed, while others never got off the ground.

First Night Worcester launched a fundraising campaign Monday to cover a $25,000 budget shortfall stemming from declining corporate support.

Massachusetts has come to be known as the Hollywood of the East, but it's been lacking one crucial element: a professional film studio where crews can shoot indoor scenes with all the necessary equipment on hand. That changed this fall when New England Studios finally launched in Devens. A project six years in the making, New England Studios may be the key to acheiving what Massachusetts economic development leaders hoped for when they designed film tax credits to lure the industry here: a new destination for the film industry.

Worcester Baseball, operator of the new Worcester-based Futures League collegiate baseball, announced five finalists in its Name Your Team contest, which launched Sept. 30.