Arts Fuse critics select the best in film, dance, visual art, theater, music, and author events for the coming weeks.
Main Content
Latest in Visual Arts
Visual Arts Review: “Toulouse Lautrec and the Stars of Paris”
This crowd-pleaser of an exhibition, dedicated to an accessible, beloved artist, is a gift to the citizens of Boston and Everett, as well as to the general public.
Latest in Music
Jazz CD Review/Commentary: Holly Cole — Sticking to the Standards
I did want to use this CD as a springboard to engage with the question of how using material of a certain age tends to pre-select — and limit — listenership.
Latest in Dance
Book Review: Dancer Ray Bolger — America’s Animated Cubist
Via Ray Bolger’s trajectory we traverse the boards of Broadway and the silver screen of Hollywood — as well as the smaller, but equally thrilling, milieux of nightclubs and television studios.
Latest in Television
Television Review: “Crashing” — The Power of Being Earnest
Crashing shows us how Holmes’s innate sweetness and affability carries him through the awkwardness and indignities of being a working comedian.
Latest in Books
Book Review: “The Ruins of Ani” — Into the Mystic
The Ruins of Ani illuminates one of those rare places that leaves visitors feeling they might have to dust off the word mystical to describe the experience.
Latest in Theater
Theater Interview: Playwright Paula Vogel on “Indecent” and a Love of Yiddish
“Yiddish is above all a language of yearning, a language of anxiety.”
Latest in Film
Film Review: “The Chaperone” — Smothered in the Spiffy
The Chaperone plays like a sanitized look at female independence and sexual desire for the prudish over-50s crowd.
Latest in Food
Book Feature: Joan Nathan — Sitting at “King Solomon’s Table”
There are 170 recipes in King Solomon’s Table . Joan Nathan, a sort of culinary archeologist, tracks down the details of their origins to Biblical times.
Read the Latest
Film Review: “High Life” — Messy, Earthy Existentialism, In Outer Space
In space, no one can hear you go extinct.
Book Review: “In Search of Stonewall” — Illuminating Queer History
The essays here give readers an eyewitness glimpse into mid-century queer life will intrigue (if not shock) younger LGBT+ people.
Book Review: “The Club” — When One Lived for Good Conversation
The Club is an entertaining and absorbing journey to another century, when the art of communication and the spirit of thoughtful engagement attracted men and women of acute sensibilities.
Classical Music Interview: Cellist Steven Isserlis
The cellist is a member of a tribe of fabulous players/singers who are funny, thoughtful, opinionated, brilliant, and irreverent.
Book Review: “The Ideas That Made America” — Not Made in America
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America provides an exciting, if quicksilver, tour through intellectual history.