Bill Marx
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of my students at Boston University, Kyle Clauss, has a program on the school’s station WTBU. He had me on to talk about The Arts Fuse, teaching, and translation, among other issues. Here is the conversation, for those who are interested ….
Arts Commentary: Critical Rule #1 — Don’t Write Like a Publicist
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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