Commentary

Book Review: “Dinners With Ruth” — Always Nice But Rarely Incisive

September 30, 2022
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Like a Hallmark movie, Dinners with Ruth is an engaging and entertaining story, with episodes of great pathos. It is an upbeat, easy-to-read gift book, which is undoubtedly what its publisher intended.

Book Review: Colette’s “Chéri” and “The End of Chéri” — Tales of Love and Morality

September 19, 2022
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A superb new translation in one volume of the two Chéri novellas, regarded as Colette’s masterwork.

WATCH CLOSELY: Post-Emmy Recommendations

September 14, 2022
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Television is the new art cinema, chock full of superb examples of storytelling across multiple genres.

Television Review: “The U.S. and the Holocaust” — Vital Questions Left Unanswered

September 12, 2022
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The U.S. and the Holocaust leaves a vital question unanswered: Is this the kind of nation we want to live and worship in?

Cultural Feature: Boston’s “Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide” — Still Going Strong After Three Decades

September 4, 2022
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More than 1,400 writers have been featured in G&LR’s uninterrupted run over the last three decades.

Arts Commentary: Arts Criticism — Stuck in the Bunker

August 21, 2022
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Arts critics are not expected to take the cultural temperature; they are there to reinforce the assumption that the business of the arts in America is … business.

Book Review: “As It Turns Out” — Not Enough About Edie and Andy

August 16, 2022
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Alice Sedgwick Wohl has a disturbing tendency throughout the book to back away from her points even as she makes them, as if afraid she will find herself trapped in some politically incorrect cul de sac or just a bad neighborhood.

Theater Commentary: Maine’s Hackmatack Playhouse — After 50 Years, a Fond Adieu

August 12, 2022
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When Hackmatack Playhouse closes, that will leave, by my count, just one non-equity, professional summer resident theater in Maine: Acadia Rep (founded in 1973) located in Somesville, near Bar Harbor.

Theater Commentary: January 6 — What About the Children?

August 9, 2022
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Despite a seven-year record of artistic, social, educational, and organizational success, Junior Programs has, until now, been a forgotten chapter in the history of America’s children’s theater. And we desperately need to remember that chapter now. 

Book Review: “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon” — A New Chapter in the American Story?

August 7, 2022
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What a cruel hoax: the middle class suburban lifestyle, a proud achievement of postwar America and the envy of peoples throughout the world (in no small part due to Mad Men glamorization), contains the very seeds of our demise. If demise is where this is heading.

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