Paramore dominated day one of Boston Calling. So why weren’t they a headliner?
A TERRIFIC LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION! AT ZEITGEIST STAGE
★★★★☆ There’s no getting around the fact that Love! Valour! Compassion! Terrence McNally’s 1994 Tony-winning dramedy, is beginning to show its age. It was the talk of the town 24 years ago when it opened at the Manhattan Theater Club and promptly made the leap to Broadway. Although Angels in America had […]
GALLERY REVIEWS 5.10.18
Pilgrims, Feeling of a Feeling, and Art in the Age of the Internet Chuck Webster: Pilgrims: Drawings 2017-2018—Steven Zevitas Gallery The naivete in Chuck Webster’s work is misleading. What looks like pan watercolors and marker doodles on sheets of bond is shellac-based inks on vintage paper. The noodly line work comes from the […]
A BLEAK AND BRILLIANT CABARET AT MOONBOX
★★★★★ Taking on iconic material is always a risky thing, particularly something as well known and oft revived as Cabaret. But if there’s anything the 1966 masterwork has demonstrated over the years, it’s that it is not a musical resistant to reinvention. (Bob Fosse proved this with his 1972 film adaptation, as did […]
GALLERY REVIEWS 4.10.18
Playtime, Drawn, & Questions and Answers Playtime—Peabody Essex Museum You know that you’re in Playtime from the squealing emanating from one of Martin Creed’s two pieces in the show, Work No. 329 (2004). The installation, following the artist’s precise instructions to “fill latex balloons with half of the air in a given space […]
THEATER REVIEW: THREEPENNY OPERA
Reviewing Threepenny Opera is about deciding where to raise the curtain. For a lot of people this work, written in 1928 by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, is as familiar an opera as exists. To many others, it rings no bells, except, perhaps, via the song “Mack the Knife.” I’ll compromise and start in […]
CARAMEL’S CARAMEL
A taste of the new French bakery cafe’s gateway dessert The Boston area has been in the midst of a bit of a bakery renaissance in recent years. The growth of small upscale cafe chains like Flour and Tatte is testament to Hub dwellers’ love of sweets, and we don’t seem to have […]
IMAGES OF DEPARTURE: ON “PHANTOM THREAD”
In Louise Glück’s poem “The Garden,” we are shown an image of tenderness: Look at her, touching his cheek to make a truce, her fingers cool with spring rain; in thin grass, bursts of purple crocus— even here, even at the beginning of love her hand leaving his face makes an image of departure. […]
GALLERY REVIEWS 2.22.18
Inventur, Culture Hustlers, and Sandrine Schaefer Inventur: Art in Germany, 1943-55—Harvard Art Museums Five years in the making, Inventur examines German artistic production in the decade-plus of recovery after World War II. It takes its name from a Günter Eich poem that describes his meager belongings, including a “precious nail / I keep concealed […]
BUGGIN’ OUT ALL OVER AGAIN: ON THE BUGS BUNNY FILM FESTIVAL AT THE BRATTLE
Rarely does one go to a film festival in the hopes of watching something they’ve seen before. And yet that’s often the case with the Brattle Theatre’s Bugs Bunny Film Festival, an early-February hallmark that begins its 23rd annual iteration this week. For as long as I’ve been attending, the format has remained more or […]
