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Poetry Review: “The Briar Patch” — Crafty Poems, Accomplished and Sly

February 12, 2013
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Poems of concise and precise description and philosophy find their way among poems of memory and daily life, money, art, love, and the oddities in giving names. J. Kates’s technique is alive and various throughout.

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Theater Review: A Hauntingly Beautiful “Glass Menagerie”

February 11, 2013
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The luminous physical beauty of the production staged by the American Repertory Theater, coupled with carefully crafted performances by its performers, makes this a Glass Menagerie to be cherished.

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Opera Review: An Uneven “Clemency” at the Boston Lyric Opera Annex

February 9, 2013
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Composer James MacMillan’s musical strategy in this opera is a stylistic patchwork that seems to mean to convey that each character inhabits a different, mutually misunderstood world.

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Short Fuse Interview: Susan Jacoby, Robert Ingersoll, and Keeping the Secular Tradition of American History Alive

February 8, 2013
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Robert Ingersoll is all but unknown in our time. Susan Jacoby sets out to answer why. One answer she proposes is that it was generally assumed that the reactionary expressions of religion Ingersoll contended against would simply fade away over time, to be replaced by education, broader culture and scientific reason.

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Theater Interview: Israeli Dramatist Joshua Sobol on the Shock of “Sinners”

February 6, 2013
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“As a white atheist male I am told it is none of my business to deal with what‘s going on in the so-called de-colonized societies enforcing their religious laws on their citizens.” — Joshua Sobol

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Rock Music Review: The Vaccines Grow Up, But It’s Not Easy

February 6, 2013
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While The Vaccines Come of Age is a very good album, I can’t listen to it without thinking that maybe the band grew up a little too fast.

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Concert Review: Renée Fleming and Susan Graham at Symphony Hall

February 6, 2013
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In an effort to give the proceedings an intimate, salon feel, the Symphony Hall stage was dotted with a couple of potted plants, three armchairs, and a pair of music stands; the cavernous environ of the space was still very much present, but one appreciated the effort to minimize it, even if only partially successful.

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Visual Arts/Book Review: Still Cagey at 100

February 5, 2013
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I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones. — John Cage to Richard Kostelanetz, 1988

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Theater Review: A Supremely Funny “Servant of Two Masters”

February 5, 2013
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Leaving aside the doctrinal issue of how much of a commedia dell’arte evening should be improvised and how much should be scripted, the Yale Repertory Theatre production, in terms of performance and design, sets a high standard.

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Book Interview: Sherwood Anderson — The American Bard of Inchoate Longings

February 4, 2013
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“What Sherwood Anderson knew and understood was the nature of inarticulate lives and what people do when they’re in the grip of strong feelings and words fail them.”

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