Back in February of 2024 I began to write a weekly column for the newsletter on Substack. A few readers have asked that I post these opinion pieces in the magazine.

Here is a selection of Favorite Columns of 2024

Here is a selection of  Favorite Columns of 2025

Below is a selection of my top picks of 2026.

—Bill Marx, Editor-in-Chief

January 7, 2026

When it comes to reflecting on what is happening around us, Boston-area theaters have hermetically sealed — aside from advising us to “be kind,” boldly staging Broadway hits, and bringing back, by popular demand, Joy Behar’s My First Ex-Husband. Few companies have dared to confront our ongoing American meltdown; those who do should be saluted. Of course, Boston’s critics should be demanding a slowdown in theatrical business as usual, but they are content to keep their heads buried in the confetti of happy talk. The Boston Globe stage critic assumes that it is dandy that Boston theaters stick with domestic matters — no one along the ideological spectrum will be bothered if the drama is kept all in the family.

So, kudos to the Writers for Democratic Action Theater Project for yesterday’s stirring January 6: A Day Forever, a staged reading directed by Jeff Zinn at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre. Co-writers James Carroll and Rachel DeWoskin adapted material from the Congressional Record of the second impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump. More low-hanging doc-u-drama fruit for a local troupe: former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, defending his investigations into Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling of classified documents. Smith asserted he had strong evidence of Trump’s culpability, that the Jan. 6 attack wouldn’t have happened without Trump.

I have my eye out for other stage efforts that tackle authoritarian chicanery or shows that acknowledge internationally uncomfortable realities. In March, Company One will be presenting, in partnership with the Boston Public Library, You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World, a comedy about the climate emergency that a trusted authority informs me speaks, with humor and poignancy, “to the very real stakes of climate anxiety and grief without dwelling in hopelessness.” Serious theatergoers should support this as well as other productions that engage with the crises around us. Dramatist Dan O’Brien posits that a political play takes up “a problem that is ignored, denied,maligned. A political play is, by definition, unpopular.” Let us prove him wrong.

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of the Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and the Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created the Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.