Monday, March 3, 2014
In "The Flick," Annie Baker creates youngish characters that my students at Boston University would call “relatable,” exploring how self-delusions, stereotypes, and fear keep them from c…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 01:38PMTuesday, February 25, 2014
A lack of dramatic combustion sometimes makes the Lyric Stage Company production, despite its intelligent detail, more staidly melodramatic than it should be.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 04:40PMMonday, February 17, 2014
"Witness Uganda" is a quintessential American musical -- a work of cultural tourism that condemns cultural tourism.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 01:06PMFriday, February 14, 2014
The protagonist may necessarily be passive in the face of his or her diminishing mental condition, but art must rage against the dying of the light.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:40AMTuesday, February 4, 2014
The "Cambridge Jonson" volumes are available online, and the site is a bibliographical joy to behold, Ben Jonson's plays, poems, masques, and prose arranged in chronological order and in a s…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 05:09PMSunday, January 26, 2014
Those willing to accept that powerful political theater can be as much about depicting pain as providing hope will find much to admire in this visually striking, dramatically compelling piec…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 01:27PMMonday, January 13, 2014
"Criticism will always have the force of the child in the story about the emperor's new clothes, because there will always be naked emperors who everybody says are wearing today's Crown Jewe…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:59PMFriday, January 10, 2014
"Venus in Fur" could be best described as cheeky rather than kinky, more of a talky intellectual exercise than a zesty exploration of the allure of sexual domination and submission.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:39PMTuesday, January 7, 2014
Through meticulous research, interviews, and reminiscence, this compelling book illuminates a nook in the heart of darkness.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 06:09PMFriday, January 3, 2014
Arts Fuse critics select the best in dance and theater that's coming up this week.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:52AMSunday, December 29, 2013
Fuse Theater critics pick some of the outstanding shows of the past year.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 11:18PMMonday, December 23, 2013
What is refreshing about the muscular back-flipping in David Farr’s amusing rewrite of the Robin Hood fable is that Maid Marion is as much into derring-do as the Merry Men.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 06:00PMThursday, December 19, 2013
Given how rarely "Henry VIII" is staged, any Shakespeare enthusiast worth his or her salt should definitely take in this uneven production.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 05:47PMTuesday, December 17, 2013
Chekhov's jokes are the inevitable by-products of his characters confronting life’s absurdities; Christopher Durang is content to wring laughs out of wacky situations and cartoon caricatur…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 04:46PMThursday, December 5, 2013
In her compelling deconstruct/rewrite of "Miss Julie," set in South Africa 18 years after the end of apartheid, director/dramatist Yaël Farber doubles down on the elemental energies of Gree…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:07AMMonday, November 25, 2013
With the 1% rapidly vacuuming up the upper and middle classes, A.R. Gurney's comic vision of the tipsy idle rich, shorn of cares and criminality, floats completely free of reality.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 11:21AMSaturday, November 23, 2013
Please send tax deductible dollars to "The Arts Fuse" so the magazine can continue to serve its mission -- we need funds to pay our writers, to continue to grow our readership, and to raise …
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 04:02PMFriday, November 15, 2013
British dramatist Caryl Churchill proffers a valuable line of satiric attack on our delusions of doing good, so it is easy to forgive the dramatist her broad and scattershot comic approach.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:36AMWednesday, November 6, 2013
Unfortunately, there are only flickers of Kurt Vonnegut’s dark and playful genius in "Make Up Your Mind."
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:55AMSunday, October 27, 2013
Whenever you hear greeting card bromides intoned with a straight face (it's usually in scenes set in a hospital) you know that moral fuzziness isn't far behind.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 11:10AMMonday, October 14, 2013
Interestingly, both of these powerful visions of horror root their avenging vision of mayhem in the brutal mistreatment of children.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:10AMSunday, October 6, 2013
Ring Lardner wrote the funniest stand-alone sentence using the fewest words with which that feat can be done: "'Shut up,' he explained."
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 11:40AMWednesday, September 25, 2013
Pulitzer prize-winning dramatist Robert Schenkkan is chained to a dreary, fact-driven approach in "All the Way," tossing in bits and pieces of "what if" for unconvincing dramatic effect.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:00AMWednesday, August 28, 2013
Those who champion the arts need to realize that talk is cheap -- we have to fight to get a place at the political table.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 02:50PMThursday, August 15, 2013
Nothing is going to be done about the posting of the review in the Boston Globe. The reasoning is that, because the newspaper didn't send its own critic, it hadn't broken the ban. This is in…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:12PMSaturday, August 10, 2013
Author Douglas Kennedy is beginning to generate a considerable readership in this country. He will be reading at the Boston Public Library on August 15 at 6 p.m.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 04:15PMIntellectual frameworks such as “the rise of Europe,” “the decline of the East,” or “the clash of civilizations,” tell us more about the laziness of the human mind than they do a…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 01:20PMThursday, August 1, 2013
The Titanic Theatre Company production struggles with Christopher Durang's superficial satire and manages to squeeze some laughs out of it.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:19AMMonday, July 29, 2013
In 2011, the Boston Globe characterized the Lowell Folk Festival as "a celebration of diversity." This year, the floundering newspaper isn't interested in celebrating anything but itself.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 05:50PMWednesday, July 24, 2013
Surely the lesson of "Pygmalion" is that Eliza should never look back. She doesn't need to.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:35PM"The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra" is a compelling celebration of art as a force of nature, a fragile yet indomitable demand for possibility despite the constraints of a torpid existence.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:06AM 
