Discard the empty rhetoric about "amplifying the arts," follow the money and you will eventually find, winding your way through all the obfuscation and spin, WGBH's thrifty corporate charact…
Based on The New York Times Public Editor Arthur S. Brisbane's recent article on arts criticism, he and the editors at the newspaper haven't much of a clue regarding what a serious arts revi…
Northrop Frye, inspired by the poet William Blake, demands that the critic be a warrior in a "Mental Fight," articulating the liberating value of literature as a source of imaginative energy…
WGBH is not even attempting to make any excuses, not bothering to put in the energy to explain why the station isn't using funding from its supporters to hire first-class journalists or to c…
My impression is of a trio of rough-but-ready theater groups spoiling for some nervy, in-yer-face theatrical action. That is the way it should be.
Jazz is dying on WGBH -- long live the arts, and let us all eat cake financed by Citizens Bank at the upcoming Arts Weekend, created by WGBH and The Boston Globe
As a long time arts critic for print, broadcast, and the Web, the potential for cultural coverage online strikes me then and now as exhilarating. The challenge for The Arts Fuse is to foster…
Early on I was given these words of wisdom by my friend, the late theater critic Arthur Friedman: "Criticism should not read as if it had been written by a publicist.
Director Robert Lepage's spectacular projections, aided by a savvy use of sound effects and lighting, move the dramatic focus of Cirque du Soleil's Totem with ease, opening up the imaginati…
I have read the Harvard Business School study about critics and it is clueless on so many levels about the craft and mechanics of reviewing that it is astonishing that major newspapers and m…
If Wordsworth was right in saying that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, than a rugby memoir is a punch in the face reconsidered from a hospital bed.
Written by a man who spent most of his life in a bourgeois harness, Amsterdam Stories focuses on the fleeting thrills of refusal, the chemical and philosphical rush that comes from floating …
Dramatist and director Wesley Savick faces a number of fascinating but formidable theatrical challenges, and the generally compelling Yesterday Happened (how could it not be, given its story…
We are a long way from the love-destroyed-by-hostility pieties of Romeo and Juliet, but Actors' Shakespeare Project director Tina Packer wants to make Troilus and Cressida fit into that reas…
One of my students at Boston University, Kyle Clauss, has a program on the school's station WTBU. He had me on to talk about The Arts Fuse, teaching, and translation, among other issues. Her…
It is important for audiences to go to Ten Blocks on the Camino Real with an open mind. Do not expect a play like The Glass Menagerie. Go to hear a youthful Tennessee Williams's marvelously …
It is a pleasure to report that -- driven by the lively direction of Jamie Lloyd and the skills of an energetic cast -- the National Theatre production proves that even after two centuries O…
"Deported/ a dream play" tells a local story with global implications. Many countries, including our own, still have not officially acknowledged that this genocide actually occurred and who …
August Strindberg's work unquestionably has not received the degree of popular acclaim in America that it deserves. It's a bit mysterious, given that major U.S. playwrights -- Eugene O'Neill…
The year kicks off with few unusual productions -- companies are depending on proven New York hits, such as the Yasmina Reza duo, the Tony award-approved "Red," "Green Eyes," though the Will…
The documentary "The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground" is pleasing to watch, but there are a number of ways of respecting as well as loving great artists, the most important being coming up with t…
The essential task of the critic is not to like or dislike the arts or to push bromides, such as to celebrate the "power of reading." Despite some troublesome modifications, Lionel Trilling …
As the year nears its end, time is running out to write at length about some of the new books that gave me pleasure. Thus this quick list of favorites. As usual, my taste runs to prose that'…
Ben Jonson is one of the great unknown geniuses of the English theater and of western literature. Ian Donaldson's new biography of the playwright/poet successfully makes the case that he des…
For all of his claims to being a subversive termite, Jonathan Lethem the puffy white elephant appears more often in this collection, trudging down a much safer, much happier road -- leave th…