Coming Attractions
Our expert critics supply a guide to film, visual art, theater, author readings, television, and music. More offerings will be added as they come in.
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The Arts Fuse Currents
Music
Rossini’s epic arrives at the Emerson Colonial Theatre in a visually audacious, musically potent production that turns a familiar liberation story into a contemporary warning.
Visual Arts
The Cape Ann Museum’s revelatory exhibition shows how Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko turned the Gloucester shore into a language of abstraction.
Film
Lili Reinhart charms as a cancer-curing Stanford Ph.D. candidate, but Amazon’s uneven adaptation works best when it follows Olive’s friendship with Anh—not her contrived fake-dating romance.
Books
In this rich collection of essays and introductions, translator and writer Peter Wortsman considers language as an intimate, imperfect act of resurrection—and guides readers toward a varied company of German- and French-language authors.
Poetry at The Arts Fuse
This week’s poem: Wanda Phipps’s “other memory”
Dance
There is no question that this new volume will be the resource that all subsequent historians will turn to when they explore the trajectory of classical ballet’s slow — and not yet completed — choreography towards racial inclusion.
Theater
James Ijames’s funny, moving family fable receives an engaging New England premiere, but its comforts also raise questions about what local theater should risk in a moment of public crisis.
Television
HBO’s docuseries on the illegal reptile trade is less wild than its predecessors, but its sorrowful, criminal undertow makes it unsettling in a different way.
Podcasts
Guest host Jessica Khan talks to DJ and broadcaster Kwame Daniels about his immersive live musical performance, “North Star.”
Short Fuses
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
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About the Arts Fuse
The Arts Fuse was established in June, 2007 as a curated, independent online arts magazine dedicated to publishing in-depth criticism, along with high quality previews, interviews, and commentaries. The publication's over 70 freelance critics (many of them with decades of experience) cover dance, film, food, literature, music, television, theater, video games, and visual arts. Support arts coverage that believes that culture matters.
Arts Commentary: Trump’s War on the Kennedy Center Is a War on Culture Itself
His threatened destruction of the nation’s living memorial to John F. Kennedy exposes not merely an assault on a building, but the petty authoritarianism, civic vandalism, and cultural contempt driving his presidency.