Coming Attractions
By Bill Marx The coming month offers some unusual examples of theater. Finished with “exploding” Shakespeare, the American Repertory Theater has decided to present the American classics unabridged. Produced by the Elevator Repair Service, “Gatz” is an evening of drama that revolves around a complete reading of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Political…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Jan. 6,7,8,9,12: The Boston Symphony is led by Ton Koopman (b. 1944), Dutch keyboardist, conductor, and specialist in early music, knighted in 2003 in the Netherlands. With a bow to Haydn, the bicentennial of whose death occurred in 2009, there are two works: Symphony No. 98 in B-flat Major (1792), and Cello…
Read MoreBy Justin Marble Various Films at Stuart Street Playhouse This isn’t so much a ringing endorsement of the current offerings, the biopic Coco Before Chanel or the British comedy Pirate Radio, as much as it is a plug for the brand-new Stuart Street Playhouse. Located in the heart of the city, the fantastic new venue…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx The prospect of holiday cheer on stage is pretty depressing to contemplate after the soporific treacle of Paula Vogel’s PC-crazed “A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration,” which culminates in the unintentionally eye-popping vision of Walt Whitman, dressed as Kris Kringle, visiting a dying Jewish soldier. For those reluctant to take…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Dec. 1: The Tufts Early Music Ensemble, including singers and instrumentalists, will present a free concert of secular music by the great 15th-century composer Guillaume Dufay and his contemporaries, whom we rarely get to hear in live performance. Distler Performance Hall, Granoff Music Center, Tufts University, 8 p.m.
Read MoreBy Justin Marble November begins the yearly onslaught of studio-groomed Oscar bait, and the amount of coverage that these films will get will probably kill off several small forests. Yet the art house theaters in Boston have, as always, put together a varied and compelling dose of counter programming. These films probably won’t hear their…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx Somewhere an enterprising graduate student is working on a trenchant study of the correlation between holiday stage entertainment and the American economy. When things were looking bright and profitable the shows became cynical and comic, with mischievous elves placing whoopee cushions under our delusions of good cheer. Now that unemployment is high…
Read MoreBy Helen Epstein 1) Nov 2: This Monday’s free concert at Jordan Hall celebrates Eastern European composers and players. The unusual musical line-up includes the Haydn Piano Trio in E minor, the Boston premiere of Kati Agócs’s “Awakening Galatea,” Bacewicz’s “Suite for Two Violins,” and Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A Major, Opus 81. Performance starts…
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