Bill Marx
By Bill Marx I have neglected to point out the recent postings at my other gig, the online feature World Books at BBC/PRI’s The World. I just completed my April podcast, a departure for the series because I focus on a classic American author rather than a writer in translation. But this April 21st marks…
“Musicians take all the liberties they can.” — Ludwig Von Beethoven Opus by Michael Hollinger. Directed by Jim Petosa. Staged by the New Repertory Theatre at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown, MA, through April 17. Reviewed by Bill Marx In Opus, dramatist Michael Hollinger belies Beethoven’s frustrated observation about the free-wheeling nature of…
There is now an eighth Judicial Review, with the panel deliberating on 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. Below: background on…
By Bill Marx Critic Debra Cash’s excellent writings on dance can be found on The Arts Fuse. She has new book of poetry out, timed perfectly for the upcoming Jewish holiday. The lyrics in the volume Who Knows One are “based on stories, language, and associations connected to the Passover Haggadah.” Those who have admired…
I am not sure that men at present think more profoundly than half a century ago, but beyond question they think with more rapidity, with more skill, with more tact, with more method and less of excrescence in the thought. Besides all this, they have a vast increase in the thinking material; they have more…
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.— Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus Adding Machine: A Musical. Based on the play The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice. Original Music by Joshua Schmidt. Libretto by Schmidt and Jason Loewith. Directed by Paul Melone. Steve Bergman, Music Director. David Connolly, Choreographer. Susan Zeeman Rogers, Set Design.…
Artists should “no longer huddle in the confines of a painted box set” but instead join together to “find visible and audible expression for the tempo and psychology of our time” and dramatize “the search of the average American today for knowledge about his country and his world.” – Hallie Flanagan, Federal Theatre Project Stick…
by Bill Marx On his way to the Cologne literature festival earlier this week, dissident Chinese writer Liao Yiwu was escorted off the plane by the Chinese authorities and handed over to the police for interrogation. He has sent an open letter to the world, available in English, asking for help.
By Bill Marx Saudi Arabian author Abdo Khal won the $60,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arab Booker) for his novel Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles, which is also known as She Throws Sparks. Taleb Alrefai, who served as chair for this year’s panel of judges, said, “The winning novel is a brilliant…
The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll at Mid-Year: Warming Up a Riff — How It Happened, and Why It Matters