Books
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the Foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. — To a Nightingale, John Keats, 1819 GRIMM: The Brothers’ Tales Remixed & Re-imagined . . . Written by Gregory Maguire, Kristen Greenidge, Melinda Lopez, Marcus Gardley, Lydia R. Diamond, John Kuntz, and John ADEkoje. Directed by Summer L. Williams and…
Read MoreLast Train to Nibroc by Arlene Hutton. Staged by the Chester Theater Company, Chester, MA, through July 25. Reviewed By Helen Epstein I drove back to Chester Theater Company(CTC) last night expecting another engrossing evening and got it. I love making the trip to the village (pop. 1000) and the makeshift theater in its small…
Read MoreWith the establishment of Wordfest, a celebration of writing in America with talks, interviews, panels, and book signings, The Mount seems to be coming into its own in ways that make it more alive than ever before. By Roberta Silman When we first built our home in the Berkshires in the early 70s, I remember…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx In English, Polish novelist, playwright, short story writer, and brazen, metaphysical gadfly Witold Gombrowicz remains under appreciated, a modernist who was never pulled into the highbrow bandwagon. Part of that neglect is thanks to bad translations that, in some cases, bowdlerized the Polish text or were translated from a French version of…
Read MoreReviewed By Helen Epstein Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel. Directed by Michael Dowling. Staged by the Chester Theatre Company, Chester, MA, through July 11. This summer Chester Theatre Company (CTC) Artistic Director Byam Stevens is exhorting theatergoers to “free the inner audience” within them. Theatergoers, he says, have become like critics, losing a sense of…
Read MorePoetry’s secret, it seems to me, consists of two ingredients: a love of this world and a curiosity about metaphysics. – Durs Grünbein, The Bars of Atlantis I resist the idea that books for the beach have to go down as easy as piña coladas. My eccentric and eclectic list of fiction and non-fiction in…
Read MoreThe narrative turns out to have the blandly cheerful tone and slightly stilted prose of an official biography: the sort of thing with the CEO’s picture on the cover, given out at stockholders meetings. Chuck Close: Life, by Christopher Finch. Prestel, 352 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by Peter Walsh In these media-saturated, image-obsessed times, every public…
Read MoreWorking with Bernstein: A Memoir by Jack Gottlieb. Amadeus Press, 370 pages, $24.99. Reviewed by Caldwell Titcomb A strong case can be made that the late Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was the all-round greatest musician our country has produced—virtuoso pianist, composer of both classical and popular music, the most charismatic conductor of his century, acclaimed educator…
Read MoreAs a theatrical event, The American Stage anthology would have to be classified as a rousing vaudeville show: there are literary routines for all brows—high, middle, and low. The American Stage: Writings on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner, edited by Laurence Senelick, Library of America, 867 pages, $40. By Bill Marx “There is…
Read MorePerhaps independent music’s biggest “it” band right now, The National have recently released their fifth album, and appear on the brink of crossing the threshold from well-kept secret to mainstream sensation, if their recent back-to-back sold out shows at Boston’s House of Blues are any indication. By Justin Marble In college, I took a comparative…
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