Bill Marx

The Arts Fuse Turns 5: The Future of Arts Journalism is Now. Help Us Make it Happen.

June 24, 2012
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As a long time arts critic for print, broadcast, and the Web, the potential for cultural coverage online strikes me then and now as exhilarating. The challenge for The Arts Fuse is to foster dialogue that articulates the value of the arts in our lives.

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Fuse Commentary: WGBH’s Radio Theater of the Absurd

June 22, 2012
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WGBH is exploring an interesting question — how little can you invest in arts coverage and still have the chutzpah to ask for money from supporters who mistake crumbs for a loaf?

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Arts Commentary: Critical Rule #1 — Don’t Write Like a Publicist

June 17, 2012
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Early on I was given these words of wisdom by my friend, the late theater critic Arthur Friedman: “Criticism should not read as if it had been written by a publicist.

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Theater Review: A Spectacular Showbiz “Totem” from Cirque du Soleil

June 15, 2012
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Director Robert Lepage’s spectacular projections, aided by a savvy use of sound effects and lighting, move the dramatic focus of Cirque du Soleil’s Totem with ease, opening up the imaginative boundaries of the stage.

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Arts Commentary: What Makes a Critic Tick? Harvard Business School Hasn’t a Clue

May 30, 2012
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I have read the Harvard Business School study about critics and it is clueless on so many levels about the craft and mechanics of reviewing that it is astonishing that major newspapers and magazines have taken it seriously.

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Author Interview: Jay Atkinson’s Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man — Remembrance of Punches Past

May 26, 2012
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If Wordsworth was right in saying that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, than a rugby memoir is a punch in the face reconsidered from a hospital bed.

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Book Interview: Damion Searls on “Amsterdam Stories”

May 17, 2012
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Written by a man who spent most of his life in a bourgeois harness, Amsterdam Stories focuses on the fleeting thrills of refusal, the chemical and philosphical rush that comes from floating free of responsibility.

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Theater Review: Boxed In — “Yesterday Happened: Remembering H. M.”

May 9, 2012
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Dramatist and director Wesley Savick faces a number of fascinating but formidable theatrical challenges, and the generally compelling Yesterday Happened (how could it not be, given its story?) takes an honorable, visually striking swipe at the problems.

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Judicial Review # 8: Making Sense of the “Assassins”

May 8, 2012
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What is a Judicial Review? It is a fresh approach to creating a conversational, critical space about the arts and culture. This is our eighth session, a discussion about the Boston University College of Fine Arts production of the 1990 Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical Assassins, which looks at the lives and sensibilities of men and women who attempted (successfully or otherwise) to kill the President of the United States.

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Theater Review: An Earnest “Troilus and Cressida”

May 4, 2012
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We are a long way from the love-destroyed-by-hostility pieties of Romeo and Juliet, but Actors’ Shakespeare Project director Tina Packer wants to make Troilus and Cressida fit into that reassuring and earnest mold.

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