The venerable Priscilla Beach Theatre was in danger of crumbling away — but it has been fully restored and is swinging into a summertime season of musicals.
MA
Visual Arts Feature: Cambridge’s Magazine Beach — A Fascinating View of Its History
As is the case with all public spaces, Magazine Beach reflects the sensibilities and desires of its users, who ruined, abandoned, embraced, and transformed the area.
Fuse Music Commentary: The 15th Annual New England Metalfest — Blunt Over Pretty
I was curious to see how the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent events would filter into the fest. It began with my Facebook newsfeed displaying “Going to Worcester to blow off steam”-type messages.
Music Photos: The Dropkick Murphys Drive the Snakes out of Lowell
The Dropkick Murphys shipped up to Lowell for their 2012 St. Patrick’s Day concert, and the Arts Fuse was there.
Concert Review: Yeol Eum Son at Mechanics Hall, Worcester, MA
Ms. Son’s performance of Debussy’s Preludes nos. 3 – 8, while mostly note-perfect, was marked by a tentativeness that kept any of them from really blossoming.
Concert Review: Concord Chamber Players and Jessica Zhou
In a nice twist, no piece on the Concord Chamber Players program was written before 1907, and that oldest piece came from a fine composer, Camille Saint-Saëns, whose music has fallen somewhat by the wayside since his death in 1922.
Fuse Opera Review: A New Virtual Opera House in Town
This is shorter, no-frills Opera as Cinema than the Met HD supplies: without long intermissions, star interviews and audience preludes and postludes from Lincoln Center, it’s almost an hour shorter.
Visual Arts Review: Get to Know Pissarro’s People at The Clark
Camille Pissarro lived to be 73. As he aged, he looked more and more like the prototype of a Sephardic Jew. Anti-Semitic rioting accompanied the Dreyfus Affair; the painter found it prudent to stay inside his hotel room in Paris.
Opera Review: “Nixon in China” at The Shalin Liu Performance Center
Although its interior says 21st century, the Shalin Liu Performance Center has a homespun, American 19th-century facade that made me think of Mark Twain and the provincial opera houses of the California Gold Rush. Care was taken to reference the original Haskins Building that once housed a clothing store called Madras and the local yacht […]
Fuse Flash: Melville Matters — A Pit-Stop in Pittsfield
On August 1st a group of dedicated Melvilleans gathered at the author’s Arrowhead home in the morning to commemorate his 191st birthday by hiking to Monument Mountain. This trip is meant to reenact the hike Melville took on August 5, 1850, which led to his meeting Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose short story collection Mosses from an […]