Review

Book Review: Denis Johnson’s Beautiful, Haunting “Train Dreams”

October 15, 2011
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In “Train Dreams” the world of beauty and terror is balanced as only our best writers have been able to balance those things.

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Classical Concert Review: Sean Newhouse Conducts the BSO

October 9, 2011
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Despite 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.

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Poetry Review: Heaney Still

October 7, 2011
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Must 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.

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Theater Review: An Unimpressive “Next Fall”

September 25, 2011
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“Next Fall” is so anxious not to polarize or offend that it ends up as little more than well meaning. Something serious seems to be happening on stage, but for all intents and purposes the conflicts that make for genuine drama fall by the wayside.

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Theater Review: A Fabulous “Candide”

September 22, 2011
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In 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.

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Theater Review: “The Lady With All the Answers” Makes for Predictable Drama

September 15, 2011
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“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.

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Theater Review: An Enjoyable If Unmemorable Trip Down the “Big River”

September 12, 2011
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The 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.

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Theater Review: A “Porgy and Bess” Made For Broadway

September 3, 2011
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The 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.

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Poetry Review: Portrait of a Predicament

August 26, 2011
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I 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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Film Review: Should We Fear Miranda July’s “Future”?

August 12, 2011
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THE FUTURE, director/actor Miranda July’s followup to 2005’s ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW is brave, unexpectedly poignant and devastatingly sad.

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