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On August 1st a group of dedicated Melvilleans gathered at the author’s Arrowhead home in the morning to commemorate his 191st birthday by hiking to Monument Mountain. This trip is meant to reenact the hike Melville took on August 5, 1850, which led to his meeting Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose short story collection Mosses from an…
Read MoreShakespeare’s tragic characters, on the other hand, suffer from the Christian sin of pride: knowing you aren’t God, but trying to become Him—a sin of which any of us is capable. — W. H. Auden on Othello in Lectures on Shakespeare Othello by William Shakespeare. Directed by Steven Maler. Staged by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company…
Read MoreIf you want to know what’s for dinner in the Middle East or Africa, look no further than this marvelous book. Here a Persian dish of eggplant with saffron and yogurt, there a Ghanaian soup of chicken and ground nuts scooped up with a dumpling called fufu, there a Lebanese stuffed grape leaf from Arnold…
Read MoreWhat is a Judicial Review? It is a fresh approach to creating a conversational, critical space about the arts. The aim is to combine editorial integrity with the community—making power of interactivity. This is our second session. Hear Ye! Hear Ye! For dance critic Debra Cash, Serenade/The Proposition, the first of Bill T. Jones’s investigations…
Read MoreBy J. R. Carroll Now that we’ve reached the midpoint of the festival season, the early summer festivals have wrapped up or are in their final weeks, and some of the late summer festivals have firmed up their rosters. Photo by 18 Brumaire The ageless Newport Jazz Festival returns to Rhode Island the weekend of…
Read MoreBy Helen Epstein After the Revolution by Amy Herzog. Directed by Carolyn Cantor. Staged by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, MA, July 21 through August 1 (closed). Long before the invention of psychotherapy, long before writer William Faulkner wrote “The past is never dead. It is not even past,” the Greeks mined family history for…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx In my other life, as editor of World Books for The World, BBC/PRI’s national radio program dedicated to international news, I write and edit book reviews as well commentaries and interviews. I also host a monthly podcast dedicated to global literature, which is available through ITunes. The most recent pieces posted on…
Read MoreBy Justin Marble August 4, “Best of the Oughts” at the Brattle: Putting together a list of the best films of the decade is quite difficult, and putting together a film series might be even tougher. But the Brattle appears to have done a good job, pulling in a mix of Hollywood and indie films…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Stephen Sondheim, the greatest genius in the history of musicals, has turned 80 this year, and there have been celebrations of all sorts to mark this milestone. London joined the hoopla by devoting its BBC Prom 19 on July 31 to a full evening drawn from Sondheim’s achievements and presented in the…
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