Month: March 2008
by Bill Marx “Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.” – Sarah Ruhl NPR as well as New York theater critics think playwright Sarah Ruhl, the “Golden Ruhl” with “The Midas Touch,” is sure money in the artistic bank. A winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 for…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb If you ask the British public who the foremost actors of the 20th century were, you will likely get the names of Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir Laurence Olivier (later Lord Olivier), and Sir Alec Guinness. You are not likely to hear the name of Paul Scofield, who died last…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx Shining City, by Conor McPherson. Directed by Robert Falls. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company, through April 6 at the Boston University Theatre. John Judd and Jay Whittaker gas on about a pesky ghost At their best, ghost stories frolic in the freedom of the imagination: the writer generates his or her…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh “But the trouble continued to spread over the country, and there were reports of big concerns, and even banks, in trouble.” — Upton Sinclair, Oil! (1927) No doubt there are still those who think economics is a dull, plodding technical field, akin to accounting, which pale men in green eyeshades practice somewhere…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx Television offers so little discussion of local stages that I had to check out WGBH’s Greater Boston segment on the state (artistic and financial) of the city’s theater, which aired last week. Of course, I wasn’t expecting much, but I was surprised that – in a predictable effort to assuage the anxieties…
Read MoreBy Gary Schwartz Israeli-Dutch Artist Joseph Semah’s Full Moon Project Five years ago next month I ran into a buddy of mine at Café Luxembourg in Amsterdam. The Israeli-Dutch artist Joseph Semah and I had been through challenging times together. In 2001 he had challenged me to come up with an adjunct to his performance…
Read Moreby Bill Marx Avenue Q, though March 23 at the Colonial Theatre, Boston, MA. Music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, book by Jeff Whitty. Based on an original concept by Lopez and Marx. Directed by Jason Moore. Puppets and people warbling up a storm in the touring production of Avenue Q Where…
Read Moreby Bill Marx A recent study in Editor & Publisher delivers the lowdown; with its circulation down about 20% in four years, The Boston Globe is in free fall. Two major investors in The New York Times, which owns the Globe, are “challenging the company’s investment decisions, including its commitment to the struggling newspaper industry…
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by Bill Marx In a New York Times article I wrote about earlier this week, dramatist Marsha Norman suggests ways to soften nasty stage reviews, which she claims chase audiences away from the glories of theater and into the decadent arms of television. But how would she discipline a successful homegrown dramatist, Neil LaBute, when…
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Music Commentary: New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest versus French Quarter Fest