Month: November 2010
Was Sunday, November 7th some sort of equinox? Were there sunspots? Whatever the cause, six poems, to my delight and surprise, appeared in the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times as a feature called “Falling Back.” I’d like to take this opportunity to editorialize about these six poems, five of which were penned by…
Read MoreIn less than an hour, there had been enough substance to send the first set crowd into the Cambridge night shaking their heads in amazement, spirits lifted, all else forgotten for a brief still time. Another houseful of listeners waited on the sidewalk for the second set. By Steve Elman The best way to hear…
Read MoreUltimately, Basil Twist’s Petrushka is a meditation on the tension between the animate and inanimate, a story that lets a puppet explain what it’s like to be a puppet, a fable that argues that to be alive is to recognize causality and suffering—and that the ability to suffer is paradoxically a precious gift. Basil Twist’s…
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The encroachment of winter weather meets its match in a month of Latin music mastery.
Read MoreAnd so I go, Jewish and glad to be, theatre director—maybe between gigs, old enough to believe that movies are best on the big screen among other (quiet) viewers and that you don’t have to be Jewish to love good Jewish movies. By Joann Green Breuer The danger of speaking critically of any ethnic art…
Read MoreTribes makes us privy to the dynamics of a twenty-first-century, secular, Jewish family in a series of fast-paced scenes that leave few holds barred. The parents—middle-class, middle-aged, hyper-verbal intellectuals—are trying to cope with the fact that their three adult children have returned to inhabit the nest. By Helen Epstein. When I first wrote London friends…
Read MoreLaudably, the Cantata Singers music director David Hoose, now in his 28th year at the helm, has chosen to bring forward works not often played, of which there were two on this month’s program. Three other composers were also represented during the evening. By Caldwell Titcomb. In the first major concert by the Cantata Singers…
Read MoreThe Boston Lyric Opera’s current production, adapted from the Scottish Opera, is updated, but this does no real damage. The three locales are properly preserved. And the three principal characters—opera diva Floria Tosca, her lover Mario Cavaradossi, and the lusting and villainous Baron Scarpia—hit their mark solidly. By Caldwell Titcomb. Some years ago the noted…
Read MoreOddly, not everyone is concerned with vampires. A friend tells me he finds them overdone, ornate, weighed down with baroque bells and whistles. His vote goes to zombies. I reply that zombies are one-trick monsters. They don’t even suck, only bite. That, he says, is what he likes about them; they are stripped down, perfect…
Read MoreYears (or would that be decades?) ago, editors had the self-respect to be embarrassed by critical incompetence, perhaps because there was the assumption that knowledgeable people were reading the paper. Those discriminating readers are long gone from the marginalized arts section of The Boston Globe . . . By Bill Marx I haven’t seen the…
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