Bill Marx
by Bill Marx In a New York Times article I wrote about earlier this week, dramatist Marsha Norman suggests ways to soften nasty stage reviews, which she claims chase audiences away from the glories of theater and into the decadent arms of television. But how would she discipline a successful homegrown dramatist, Neil LaBute, when…
by Bill Marx Has anyone actually read the recent Boston Foundation Arts Report? A column in Boston.com suggests that the sputtering economy is essentially to blame for what The Boston Foundation sees as an increasingly tough time for nonprofit theaters. The solution for Boston’s theaters, suggests the starstruck observer, boils down to new and improved…
By Bill Marx The war over critics-as-bullies is over, but some diehards keep fighting the same old battles to the point of arthritic absurdity, like Lee Marvin and Toshirô Mifune as old and forgotten American and Japanese veterans of WWII slugging it out in the 1968 movie Hell in the Pacific.The latest retread salvo comes…
By Bill Marx For any self-respecting Shavian, the major attraction of Canada’s Shaw Festival is the chance to see first-rate productions of plays by GBS and his contemporaries, especially the opportunity to take in ace stagings of scripts that fall outside of the greatest hits list. But during the `80s a close second was the…
by Bill Marx A recent report from the Boston Foundation helpfully advises that if a small arts group’s vision “either dissipated or lost its resonance with its audience or supporters” the troupe should either die quietly or merge with other struggling companies, apparently so they can vanish in bulk more efficiently. But what about larger…
ArtsFuse editor Bill Marx speaks with Gail Pool, the author of Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, about the slow decline of literary criticism in the United States.
by Bill Marx What particularly disappointed Boston Globe theater critic Louise Kennedy about the Huntington Theatre Company’s recent production of David Rabe’s Streamers was that it lacked the emotional impact of the 1976 staging of the script. She found it “painful because that earlier production clearly resonated with its audiences as a powerful antiwar statement,…
Death, starvation, futility, revolution, exploitation — no wonder The Weavers is never produced in the land of plenty.
War is hell, as the Boston Phoenix theater critic Carolyn Clay would have it, but she doesn’t seem to realize that the inferno is a moving target. And it is the diminishing capacity of contemporary American theater to imagine violence and its effects that interests me most about the Huntington Theater Company’s current revival of…
By Bill Marx and Harvey Blume I was asked by National Public Radio’s Morning Edition to write an appreciation of the late Norman Mailer. I have posted an unabridged version of this necessarily short piece. After that, I have placed an interview Harvey Blume had with Mailer after the publication of his 1995 book Oswald’s…
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