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The October highlight for Underground Music is the Homegrown Festival. The 3-day gathering runs on the weekend of October 14 and features a lot of local and national acts.
The quality varies at the TWTF, but here is a chance to become aware of rarely done Williams plays. And if a production does not measure up to one’s expectations, the effort will inspire a few sturdy directors to try their own hand at these and other texts of America’s most eloquent poet-playwright.
Comparing Rick Berry’s expressionist paintings with Damon Lehrer’s exquisitely rendered, classical and contemplative work made me wonder about the expressionist style in general. By this I mean that artistic terrain where the passions, vehemence, or ferocity of the artist so colors the work as to form a powerful but distorting lens through which we see the work.
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.
The Lexington Symphony is a far more professional orchestra than the typical community orchestras around Boston (Newton Symphony, Waltham Symphony, Brookline Symphony, the Longwood Symphony) and the level of playing was high indeed.
The audience, seated at tables in semi-darkness, responded to TV talk-show style questions. At first, we raised our hands to vote on generic, consensus-building questions: Who believes in private, public or charter schools? Who wants significant change in their lives?
The astonishing exhibition “Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge” has the strange beauty and density of a scientific diagram or star chart. You can’t examine it deeply all at once. It is best to take a certain reading, see what questions arise, and go off to your lair to think.
In “Drive,” director Nicolas Winding Refn crafts a cool, tight and stylish film that gets away with a lot. He managed to make a movie that works as some kind of bizarre but wonderful Michael Mann/Jean-Pierre Melville/Quentin Tarantino mash-up, helmed by star Ryan Gosling, who described it as a “violent John Hughes movie.”
“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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