Earth Music Theater Live

Earth Music Theater Live Comes to Turners Falls May 31 with Astronaut Cady Coleman and NEPM’s Monte Belmonte

Immersive performance blends live music, space imagery, and storytelling at Shea Theater Arts Center

Turners Falls, MA — Earth Music Theater Live (EMTL) arrives at the Shea Theater Arts Center on Sunday, May 31 at 4 PM, bringing a powerful, immersive experience that fuses live music with stunning imagery of Earth captured by astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

Created by Northampton-based composer and guitarist Steve Thomas, EMTL is a genre-defying performance that combines cinematic soundscapes, spoken word, and astronaut perspectives to explore our planet from space—inviting audiences to reflect on the beauty, fragility, and interconnectedness of life on Earth.

The performance features a standout ensemble of Valley musicians including Chris Cheek (alto saxophone), Claire Arenius (drums and percussion), Josh Metz (acoustic bass), and Easthampton-based multi-instrumentalist Carl Clements (bansuri, flute, soprano saxophone). Together, they create dynamic, genre-spanning music that evolves in real time alongside breathtaking visual sequences from orbit.

The May 31 performance features special guest Cady Coleman, whose stories from her time aboard the International Space Station add a deeply personal and inspiring dimension to the program. Joining Coleman for a special appearance is radio host Monte Belmonte, creating a unique onstage dialogue that connects science, storytelling, and lived experience.

Following the performance, Coleman will host a book signing of her memoir, Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change, offering audiences an opportunity to engage more directly with her remarkable journey.

A scratch-built scale model of the International Space Station will also be on display, giving audiences an up-close look at the remarkable orbiting laboratory from where the stunning images in the performance were captured.

With support from community partners and sponsors, EMTL is committed to offering accessible, low-cost admission, ensuring that families, students, and community members throughout the region can experience this unique fusion of music, science, and storytelling.

About

Steve Thomas is a multifaceted musician and audio creative who enjoys engaging art and education projects that are out to do good in the world. With EMTL, Steve Thomas’ musicality as composer, guitarist and sound designer, whose career bridges music, film, and planetary storytelling, is on display. His partnership with Dan Barstow, Director of EarthMusicTheater.org, whose work has broken new ground with creative exploration of visually compelling views of Earth from space has resulted in more than a dozen Earth-themed films, featuring Thomas’ music with imagery captured by ISS astronauts. Their collaborations—designed to spark reflection on planetary stewardship—began in 2007 with Windows on Earth, commissioned for use on the ISS, and has recently expanded into the Earth Music Theater Live series.

Some of Steve’s art and education projects include work with Northampton-based producer Wade Wofford’ Happy Wasteland Studios feature-film Urban Ed about of a group of at-risk inner city students coming face-to-face with America’s broken education system; years of collaboration with New York Times Film Critic Pick composer/producer Ruth Mendelson, with groundbreaking multimedia museum exhibits, documentary films, humanitarian projects and works with the Jane Goodall Institute including the National Geographic docufilm The Hope, Dr. Goodall‘s Hopecast and the immersive unabridged, My Life with the Chimpanzees audio book featuring Dr. Jane Goodall in her own voice. Most recently Steve completed Mendelson's score mixes for the documentaries Leaving Angola by Andrew Kukura and Brainstorm inspired by the memoir of Sara Schley.

Cady Coleman is a former NASA astronaut and retired U.S. Air Force Colonel with more than 180 days in space, accumulated during two space shuttle missions and a six-month expedition to the International Space Station (ISS) as the Lead Robotics and Lead Science officer. Cady served in a variety of roles within the Astronaut Office, including Chief of Robotics, and lead astronaut for integration and operation of supply ships from NASA’s commercial partners. Before retiring from NASA, she led open-innovation and public-private partnership efforts for NASA’s Chief Technologist. Cady’s book, Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change is published by Penguin. She and her family were also recently featured in two documentaries, PBS’s Space: The Longest Goodbye, and The Wonderful: Stories from the Space Station.

Monte Belmonte is host and executive producer of NEPM's The Fabulous 413. He was born and raised in Massachusetts and has been a radio host in western Massachusetts for the last 20 years — the last 17 of them as host of Mornings with Monte on The River 93.9/WRSI

During his time as host of Mornings with Monte, he developed several local fundraising campaigns, including the annual pre-Thanksgiving “Monte’s March” for The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts.

Monte also serves as the volunteer president of the board of the nonprofit Shea Theater Arts Center in his hometown of Great Falls (Turners Falls), Massachusetts. He is married to Smith College Spanish lecturer Melissa Belmonte, and has three incredibly creative kids, Atticus, Enzo and Pax.

When Monte was 12, he went to Space Camp at The Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. He never did become an astronaut.