Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Huntington Theater Company
Theater Review: “The Purists” — Rapping Out the Blues
With The Purists, Dan McCabe has written a comic drama that not only has a lot to say, but does it with an enormous amount of playful vim and vigor.
Theater Review: “Yerma” — The Tragic Power of Desire
Melinda Lopez’s superb new translation of Yerma makes the language of the play approachable, even conversational, without losing the beauty of Lorca’s poetry.
Theater Review: “Ripcord” — Bittersweet Geriatrics
Yes, Ripcord is candied, but there’s just enough astringency blended in to make the sugar sufficiently tangy.
Theater Review: “I Was Most Alive With You” — Ambition is Not Enough
The effort to merge Deaf culture with the Book of Job becomes too much a burden for Craig Lucas’s family melodrama to bear.
Theater Review: “How I Learned What I Learned” — August Wilson’s Indelible Lessons
August Wilson’s dramatized autobiography, thanks to the magnificent actor Eugene Lee, is a stirring experience.
Theater Review: “Milk Like Sugar” — Vivid Snapshots of Confused Lives
Milk Like Sugar cries out for dialogue and confrontations that direct us deeper into the conflicts the young women face.
Theater Review: A Magnificent “Betrayal”
The Huntington Theatre Company is hosting an exemplary revival of Harold Pinter’s fascinating 1978 work, thanks to the spot-on direction of Maria Aitken.
Coming Attractions in Theater: February 2010
A recent piece in the New York Times provides further proof of the increasingly pernicious stranglehold marketing exerts on the production of new voices in the theater. By Bill Marx Let’s face it—the fastest growing segment of non-profit hiring in the arts over the past decade or so, marketing, is now pretty much in the […]
Coming Attractions in Theater: January 2010
By Bill Marx The coming month offers some unusual examples of theater. Finished with “exploding” Shakespeare, the American Repertory Theater has decided to present the American classics unabridged. Produced by the Elevator Repair Service, “Gatz” is an evening of drama that revolves around a complete reading of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Political […]