Books

Coming Attractions in Theater: June 2010

May 31, 2010
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By Bill Marx Summer has never been a time for theaters taking chances and the sluggish economy only encourages the hot weather drift to safety. But there’s some funky activity around the margins as well as encouraging news about Shakespeare & Company’s finances. Also, the Gloucester Stage Company has forsaken last year’s geriatric lineup and…

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Theater Review: A Timely ‘Timon of Athens’

May 28, 2010
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This Shakespearean drama is savage and sour, its astringent vision of anger as the sole motive for living anticipating the death’s head satire of Swift, Céline, Thomas Bernhard, and Samuel Beckett. Timon of Athens, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Bill Barclay. Presented by Actors’ Shakespeare Project at the Midway Studio, Boston, MA, through June 13,…

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Book Review: Getting Closer To Walt Whitman

May 26, 2010
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Walt Whitman is an exuberant poet, and fellow versifier C. K. Williams is exuberant about Whitman in this wonderfully perceptive introduction to his poetry. On Whitman (Writers on Writers) by C. K. Williams. Princeton University Press, 208 pages, $19.95 Reviewed by Anthony Wallace On Whitman is a meditation on the life and work of the…

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Culture Vulture: Tracking the Transcendentalists

May 25, 2010
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There are dozens of excellent books about the Alcotts, Emersons, Thoreau, and Hawthorne but reading them can’t beat actually walking through the places where the people actually lived. By Helen Epstein “We are all going to be made perfect,” wrote ten-year-old Louisa May Alcott in June of 1843, “This day we left Concord in the…

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Short Fuse: Who Hates Yeats?

May 24, 2010
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Critic Paul Berman’s problem with the arts plays too significant a role in his work to be written off as but the tin ear of an historian and social thinker with weightier matters on his mind; his misreading of the arts is a fulcrum of his social thinking. The Flight of the Intellectuals, by Paul…

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Music Review: Boston Pops Salutes Our Heroes

May 20, 2010
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Reviewed By Caldwell Titcomb The Boston Pops, celebrating its 125th anniversary, is devoting its third week of programs (May 18-22) to “American Heroes”—both living and dead. The most newsworthy feature is a new cantata entitled “The Dream Lives On: A Portrait of the Kennedy Brothers.” Pops conductor Keith Lockhart addressed brief remarks to the audience…

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Book Review: The Need to Expand the Mind

May 20, 2010
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I have contributed a piece to The Public Humanist, a Mass Humanities blog posted on The Valley Advocate. It is a review of Martha C. Nussbaum’s new book (Not for Profit) , which argues that the arts and humanities are under threat because educational institutions, frightened by economic hard times, are moving toward a more…

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Theater Review: Superb American Bunraku

May 15, 2010
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. . . these plays in their various modes approach the theater as a means of knowing and not merely as a means of expression. — Richard Gilman, “The Drama is Coming Now.” Disfarmer conceived, directed, and designed by Dan Hurlin. Original music by Dan Moses Scheier. Text by Sally Oswald. Part of the Emerging…

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Book Review: Mamet’s Minimal-Minded ‘Theatre’

May 13, 2010
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Theatre by David Mamet. Faber and Faber, 157 pages, $22 Reviewed By Joann Green Breuer David Mamet’s concise and consistently frustrating book, Theatre, informs even while it infuriates, arguing for throwing out babes with the bath water as if theatre could, or should, make a splash without them. Get your towels out. But as you…

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Book Review: Traveling Down ‘Paradise Road’

May 8, 2010
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Paradise Road: Jack Kerouac’s Lost Highway and My Search for America by Jay Atkinson, Wiley and Sons, 250 pages, $25.95 Reviewed By Nancye Tuttle I’m ready to pack my bag and hit the road. But it isn’t Jack Kerouac’s iconic 1957 novel On the Road that’s fueling my wanderlust. It’s Jay Atkinson’s compelling, new memoir…

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