by Bill Marx The newspaper “Haaretz” recently reported that the family of George Khoury, an Israeli Arab student killed in a 2004 terrorist attack in Jerusalem, responded to his death with a generous gesture – it has helped finance a translation into Arabic of Israeli writer Amos Oz’s powerful 2003 memoir A Tale of Love […]
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Theater Review: Schiller’s “Don Carlos”
By Caldwell Titcomb Some plays are so long that they drive people to despair. In the standard theatrical canon the palm goes to Goethe’s “Faust,” Part I of which runs 4612 lines, and Part II takes the total to 12,111 lines. Next comes Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt.” The playwright did not intend this to be staged […]
Book Commentary: Together Again — C.K. Stead and Janet Frame
Another neglected master from New Zealand — writer C.K. Stead by Bill Marx I just noticed that a week before Janet Frame’s previously unpublished story “Gorse is not People” appeared in “The New Yorker” the magazine published a poem by another fine New Zealand author, C.K. Stead. He not only knew Frame at the time […]
Music Review: Patricia Barber’s `The Cole Porter Mix’
by J.R. Carroll “Singer/songwriter” is not a description often applied to jazz musicians, and generally with good reason: Jazz instrumentalists have demonstrated again and again that as wordsmiths they are, well, outstanding instrumentalists. At best, the typically after-the-fact lyrics strive uneasily for either social uplift or hipster knowingness; at worst, they are just embarrassingly lame. […]
Book Commentary: New Zealand’s Janet Frame — Invasion of the Mind Snatchers
by Bill Marx Posthumous publication of a book by a great but grievously neglected writer gives posterity a chance to either rectify its mistake or compound it. The recent appearance in the “New Yorker” of a previously unpublished Janet Frame short story, which was deemed to be “too painful” for print in 1954, has generated […]
Short Fuse: The Art of Chess in Chinatown Park
By Harvey Blume Whether you are seriously hooked on chess or casually intrigued by it, you probably think of the tables in Cambridge’s Holyoke Center as the Boston area’s one big outdoor chess venue. That’s, after all, where the Chess Master sets out his board a few tables down from his counterpart, the redoubtable Chess […]
Visual Arts: Sanitizing Black Is Beautiful
By Gary Schwartz One in so many Western works of art contains an image of a person we would call black. The phenomenon attracts relatively little attention in art history. The Menil Foundation went after it seriously, in a project now inherited by the Warburg Institute. An exhibition in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam offers […]
Theater Review: A Mild FeverFest 08
By Bill Marx Now in its third year under the watchful eye of the admirable Whistler in the Dark Theatre, FeverFest presents a selection of Boston’s fringe groups in an evening of short performances, a sort of theatrical tasting event billed as a round up of “explosive work by vital young companies.” Tonight will be […]
Theater Review: Playtime for Terrorism
by Bill Marx “The way of the Samurai is a natural way of the Universe, Ma, and to learn it, one must live one’s life from first to last in self-control. I know all about that stuff now.” — Wynne in Adam Rapp’s “Stone Cold Dead Serious” Just how far are American playwrights from dramatizing […]
Classical CD Review: Victor Rosenbaum & Schubert
By Caldwell Titcomb Luckily the Boston area is home to a considerable number of world-class pianists. Among them is Victor Rosenbaum. An honors graduate of Brandeis University, he was chair of the piano faculty at the New England Conservatory before heading the Longy School of Music for 16 years. He currently is on the Conservatory […]