Month: September 2011

Theater Review: A Fabulous “Candide”

September 22, 2011
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In this delightful production of “Candide,” director Mary Zimmerman imaginatively reworks and mischievously augments the musical. Her deliciously blowzy approach embraces, with charming lyrical fervor, the sheer preposterousness of Voltaire’s sardonic fable.

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Classicial Music Review: The Lexington Symphony — A Standout Among Boston’s Community Orchestras

September 19, 2011
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The Lexington Symphony is a far more professional orchestra than the typical community orchestras around Boston (Newton Symphony, Waltham Symphony, Brookline Symphony, the Longwood Symphony) and the level of playing was high indeed.

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Theater Review: How Much Is Enough — A Gentle Conversation between Theater Company and Audience

September 19, 2011
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The audience, seated at tables in semi-darkness, responded to TV talk-show style questions. At first, we raised our hands to vote on generic, consensus-building questions: Who believes in private, public or charter schools? Who wants significant change in their lives?

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Visual Arts Review: The Strange Beauty of “Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge”

September 18, 2011
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The astonishing exhibition “Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge” has the strange beauty and density of a scientific diagram or star chart. You can’t examine it deeply all at once. It is best to take a certain reading, see what questions arise, and go off to your lair to think.

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Film Review: Take a “Drive,” She Says

September 16, 2011
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In “Drive,” director Nicolas Winding Refn crafts a cool, tight and stylish film that gets away with a lot. He managed to make a movie that works as some kind of bizarre but wonderful Michael Mann/Jean-Pierre Melville/Quentin Tarantino mash-up, helmed by star Ryan Gosling, who described it as a “violent John Hughes movie.”

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Theater Review: “The Lady With All the Answers” Makes for Predictable Drama

September 15, 2011
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“The Lady With All the Answers” presents the columnist Ann Landers as a person who just might write a letter to Ann herself. Her faith in herself and her work is unquestioned, even as her own life takes a bump or two. Well, really, only one bump.

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Music Feature: Fervent Prayer — Galeet Dardashti crafts new rituals from the old

September 13, 2011
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Galeet Dardashti is a trailblazing musician: she is the first woman in her celebrated family to perform Persian Jewish music

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Book Review: In Alberto Moravia’s Creative Laboratory — “Two Friends”

September 13, 2011
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The brilliance of Alberto Moravia’s cool diagnostic vision — sleek, clear, cruel, and existential no matter how emotional the conflict — puts us off. His male protagonists often self-consciously analyze their puerility to the point of comic masochism.

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Theater Review: An Enjoyable If Unmemorable Trip Down the “Big River”

September 12, 2011
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The impressive cast and lovely, atmospheric design of the Lyric Stage production cannot completely overcome the flaws of “Big River,” but they make the trip a scenic, often amusing, and enjoyable theatrical journey.

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Book Review: A Memoir That Gives Solace to Us All

September 11, 2011
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A best-seller in France, Emmanuel Carrère’s quirky, but ultimately compelling memoir examines the effects of two disasters on very separate groups of people to whom the writer is connected, at the beginning, quite peripherally.

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