Review
Liz Duffy Adams’ affectionate look at Aphra Behn’s rise to public prominence, despite prejudice against her gender, comes off as a sort of farcical love letter to an ink-stained ancestor that at times suggests a Shavian talk fest in a minor key.
Read MoreIn “Train Dreams” the world of beauty and terror is balanced as only our best writers have been able to balance those things.
Read MoreDespite some interpretive shortcomings, Sean Newhouse, the orchestra’s 30-year-old assistant conductor has solid technique, and a major orchestra whose players, management, and audience believe in him.
Read MoreMust age diminish a great poet’s strengths? If I grant that age has such power, I’m left to ponder the truly strange fact that death does not.
Read MoreIn this delightful production of “Candide,” director Mary Zimmerman imaginatively reworks and mischievously augments the musical. Her deliciously blowzy approach embraces, with charming lyrical fervor, the sheer preposterousness of Voltaire’s sardonic fable.
Read More“The Lady With All the Answers” presents the columnist Ann Landers as a person who just might write a letter to Ann herself. Her faith in herself and her work is unquestioned, even as her own life takes a bump or two. Well, really, only one bump.
Read MoreThe impressive cast and lovely, atmospheric design of the Lyric Stage production cannot completely overcome the flaws of “Big River,” but they make the trip a scenic, often amusing, and enjoyable theatrical journey.
Read MoreThe American Repertory Theater’s juggling/removal of the operatic elements in “Porgy and Bess” is clumsy, but the goal is to create a compelling entertainment for contemporary audiences, smoothing out the melodramatic story’s edges and cutting its length.
Read MoreI wouldn’t be writing this review or asking you to read this book if I didn’t believe that McLane were up to something far more radical and also far more difficult to reckon with—something I am not even sure I can account for. The most significant quality of the poetry in “World Enough” is a profound and unapologetic ambiguity.
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