In the age of COVID-19, Arts Fuse critics have come up with a guide to film, dance, visual art, theater, and music — mostly available by streaming — for the coming weeks. More offerings will be added as they come in.
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Latest in Visual Arts
Visual Arts Commentary: Digital Media — Public Art Is a Bridge to Our New Normal
In a time when everyday seems like Wednesday, creative use of new media is a visual and experiential bridge to our new and hopefully innovative normal.
Latest in Music
Opera Album Review: Offenbach in a Spanish Mood, in a Top-notch First Recording
Bravo to the Bru Zane folks for this latest triumph! I encourage opera lovers to get to know this treasurable Spanish (or faux-Spanish) work by the pioneering master of nineteenth-century operetta
Latest in Dance
Dance Feature: The “Table of Silence Project 9/11” — Reimagined
“We will step to the edge of our humanity, expressing the commonalities that we all share, the threads that bind and connect us all.”
Latest in Television
Television Review: “Filthy Rich” — Crass Warfare
For fans of novellas, Filthy Rich will be a trashy guilty pleasure.
Latest Podcast
Short Fuse Podcast #29 — A Birthday Show, Recorded Before 2020 Really Sucked
No matter where our lives were at just nine months ago, most of us are now longing for those pre-pandemic days. Jump into this week’s jukebox of an episode for a trip back in time.
Latest in Books
Book Review: “Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong” — The King of All Kings
He may be extreme as a polemicist, but Ricky Riccardi shines when he sticks to jazz’s history.
Latest in Theater
Theater Review: Penny Arcade — Provincetown, Puritans, and the Pandemic
I’ve hated enough people,” Penny Arcade confessed, “I can’t hate anyone new until 2022.”
Latest in Film
Film Review: “I Carry You With Me” at NYFF — An Immigrant’s Epic Story of Sacrifice and Love
The delicious cheekiness of the film is to present a story about two gay immigrants as a swooning romantic epic spanning years.
Latest in Food
Food Commentary: The Chicken Sandwich Wars — Political Food Fight Revisited
I confess that I was one of those schmucks who tried (and failed) to stay vigilant in my high-minded refusal to eat at Chick-fil-A.
Read the Latest
Jazz Concert Review: The Lloyd-Hussain-Lage Trio — Live from Healdsburg
Charles Lloyd and Julian Lage and Zakir Hussain served a loose, flowing 65-minute set with complementary facility that belied the novel circumstances.
Poetry Remembrance: John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes” — Forever Young at 200
Keats is comfortable in that ambiguous space between reality and the imagination, and you will find no finer example of Romantic poetry when he fuses them in the language of an erotic dream.
Concert Review: Farm Aid 2020 — The Promise of the Real
When Willie dove into “On the Road Again” to close the set, singing of “making music with my friends,” one could envision the same hopes for Farm Aid to resume its annual trek to an amphitheater somewhere in America and stoke the communal cause.
Opera Album Review: A Terrific Recording of a Handel Pathbreaker — Powered by a Rock-Star Mezzo-Soprano
Agrippina (1709), an enormous hit at the Met this past season, proves, by turns, gripping, sardonic, and exquisite.
Film Review: “Cuties” — Girls Just Wanna Have Smartphones
The real problem is the obsessive engagement with social media platforms that encourages attention-seeking behavior, and rewards it.