Bill Marx
Helen Constantine’s new translation of Balzac’s “The Wild Ass’s Skin” serves this wonderful and weird book well. It is one of the great, black comic fables in world literature, a dazzlingly demented exploration of a society’s lack of imagination.
Read MoreThere are plenty of amusing moments when dramatist Charles Busch makes effective use of his gift for exaggerated wit and whimsy — no dramatist can drop the word ‘canasta’ with as much hilarious finesse.
Read MoreShakespeare’s “Coriolanus” deals with the difficultly of recognizing superiority at a time of radical social breakdown, specifically when it is democracy that is in extremis.
Read MoreDiscard the empty rhetoric about “amplifying the arts,” follow the money and you will eventually find, winding your way through all the obfuscation and spin, WGBH’s thrifty corporate character.
Read MoreBased on Public Editor Arthur S. Brisbane’s recent New York Times column on arts criticism, he and others at the newspaper haven’t much of a clue regarding what a serious arts review is supposed to be.
Read MoreNorthrop Frye, inspired by the poet William Blake, demands that the critic be a warrior in a “mental fight,” articulating the liberating value of literature as a source of imaginative energy that generates possibilities.
Read MoreWGBH is not even attempting to make any excuses, not bothering to put in the energy to explain why the station isn’t using funding from its supporters to hire first-class journalists or to create news programming that builds community and educates because it challenges, investigates, and digs deeper.
Read MoreJazz is dying on WGBH — long live the arts, and let us all eat cake financed by Citizens Bank at the upcoming Arts Weekend, created by WGBH and The Boston Globe
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Theater Commentary/Review: A Not So Dumb “Month in The Country”
Given the Russian writer’s modernist pedigree, should director/playwright Richard Nelson and translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky be punished for putting some “unevenesses” into their staging of Turgenev’s finest play, “A Month in the Country”? I think not.
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