Bill Marx
There are laughs in this production of Twelfth Night, but the romantic payoffs are scarce, perhaps because the sit-com rhythms tend to swamp all else (including some of the poetry).
A major regional theater is turning itself into a launching pad for Broadway/Las Vegas blockbusters, with Hollywood pouring cash and advice into the pipeline. .
Until now, the powerful economic reality spotlighted by The Arts Factor has generally been ignored or dismissed as anecdotal.
We have lots of plans to expand our readership and reach, to build new ways for our readers to read our online arts magazine. But we need some more resources and support to make this happen.
Critic Eric Bentley valued the theater of audacity above all, and that is just what is on glorious display in Trinity Rep’s marvelously nervy A Lie of the Mind.
Lydia R. Diamond’s Smart People is an amusing takedown of our “post-racial” world, and it is receiving a snappy, well-acted production via the Huntington Theatre Company.
We do it for the joy and communitas of making theater together much as we do for responding to the world around us through art.
Tadeusz Różewicz’s best poems are blunt hammer strokes that pound at the impossibility of crafting poetry true to the sins of history.
Is it the Bard or a magic show? The prestidigitation wins out given the wanness of the dramatic proceedings.
Dramatically speaking, Sontag: Reborn fails to treat a flawed iconoclast with the necessary creative playfulness. Hush, Saint Susan Aborning!
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