Year: 2009
Dead Man’s Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Carmel O’Reilly. Produced by the the Lyric Stage Company at the YWCA Building on the corner of Clarendon Street and Stuart Street, Boston, MA, through November 14. Reviewed by Helen Epstein Improbable though it seems these days with multiple requests to turn off electronics before performances,…
Read Moreby Bill Marx The Boston Book Festival, which kicks off its existence this Saturday, is an inevitability that for some puzzling reason wasn’t a reality. Boston is a determinedly readerish town, yet it is the only one of America’s major cities that doesn’t have a book festival. Thankfully, BBF organizer Deborah Z. Porter remedies the…
Read MoreIt cannot be said that the average Omani was waiting for an exhibition of Rembrandt etchings. By Gary Schwartz “Frankincense from Oman and paintings by Rembrandt were both part of the good life in the 17th century.” That unlikely quotation is from the script of a film that I wrote and presented this summer to…
Read MoreWhen discussing Friedrich Engels’s lament for lobster salad, Tristram Hunt dubs him “the original champagne communist,” but his biography is far from a damning portrayal. Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt. Henry Holt & Company, Metropolitan Books, 448 pages, $32. Reviewed by Harvey Blume Among the most memorable words Karl…
Read MoreBy Helen Epstein Oct-8-13 Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich Symphony Hall Boston, MA Vasily Petrenko, conductor Audiences as well as composers project their emotions and fantasies onto every piece of art with which they engage, but I think this is particularly true of instrumental music, whose non-verbal, non-visual yet powerfully emotional expressiveness is as open to…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Three works by major composers made up the free concert presented by the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble on October 10 at the Midway Studios in South Boston. On the podium was Eric Hewitt, who holds a bachelor’s in saxophone performance and a master’s in conducting – both from the New England Conservatory…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx A number of new pieces on World Books since the last update in September, including my podcast interview with Benjamin Moser about his biography of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) entitled “Why This World” from Oxford University Press. The Brazilian writer’s challenging stream-of-consciousness technique, lack of political bite, physical beauty and, Moser argues, her…
Read MoreThe governing idea of “A New Literary History of America” is that it is about a made-up nation and a made-up literature. That means every time an author, a thinker, an actor in our national story sets out to do something that person discovers America for the first time. Each actor in the drama of…
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Design Review: A Singular Art Nouveau Shop Front in Harvard Square