Month: May 2008
By Caldwell Titcomb The Cambridge Community Chorus (CCC) was founded in 1990, and has in the past 18 years grown in size and skill under the leadership of William Ethaniel Thomas. Thomas is retiring from his post and led his farewell concert in Sanders Theatre on May 25 before an enthusiastic audience. For his final…
Read MoreThose who think that accolades should go to the fresh or the marginal — work in Boston that could use the recognition rather than the usual suspects — will have a long wait.
Read MoreBy Bill Marx and Wen Huang Dissident Chinese writer Liao Yiwu lives near the epicenter of the earthquake in Sichuan province. His home is about 17 miles from the school where hundreds of students were trapped. Miraculously, his building survived, though there are several giant cracks in the concrete stairway. In his immediate area more…
Read Moreby Bill Marx A quiet but insistent source of frustration among some of the authors at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York turned out to be the amount of attention garnered by China and its brutal treatment of writers. All agreed that PEN’s petition to free imprisoned dissenting authors in the country was…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb A concert in memory of composer-teacher Edward Cohen (1940-2002) took place in the Kresge Auditorium of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on April 27. The participants included instrumentalists, vocal soloists, and the M.I.T. Chamber Chorus, led by Dr. William Cutter, director of choral programs at the Institute. Eddie Cohen
Read MoreBy Gary Schwartz I would not go as far as my travel companion and say that I am sorry that I ever saw the exhibition. But it comes close. In December, at the Sackler Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we went to “Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity.” To shock and awe you unprepared,…
Read Moreby Bill Marx Who would have guessed that a writer who proudly earned the reputation as the Oscar the Grouch of contemporary literature would have so many loving fans? But there were few empty seats two nights ago at New York’s Austrian Cultural Forum, which hosted a PEN panel, proudly entitled “The Art of Failure,”…
Read Moreby Bill Marx I’m down in New York for PEN American’s annual Festival of International Literature, five days of readings, panels, and discussions on writing around the globe that emphasizes the plight of imperiled authors, particularly those that write in languages other than English. Chinese dissident writer Ma Jian
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Theater Commentary: George Jean Nathan — The Divine Devil of American Theater Criticism
“The best of the regular theater critics … the brightest America ever had.” – Eric Bentley “Intelligent play-goer number one.” – George Bernard Shaw “The truth is that Mr. Nathan is both a theatrical storehouse, full of the most voluminous and astonishing information, and a whole theatre in himself. He maintains an impetus and lustre…
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