Rehearsing for Pippin at A.R.T. (Photo: Dina Rudick/Boston Globe) In my previous post I wrote about how surprising it was to find such striking beauty in the overstated, extremist interior of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia. It brings to mind one of my art professor’s words to me from so long ago, “To make a great painting […]
Theater
A Distant Mirror: Coriolanus on the Common
Coriolanus, on the Boston Common (Photo: Tamir Kalifa for the Boston Globe) How invigorating to revisit something you thought you knew (and might have dismissed as “been there, done that”) and find it utterly compelling. That was my response after seeing the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s production of Coriolanus last night. Not one of my favorite […]
Loving Schubert, in Any Form
Three Pianos, currently playing at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, is another successful production in line with the theatrical proclivities of artistic director Diane Paulus—theatrical mastery, audience engagement, crisp production values, meaningful content (and context,) and the delivery of an evening out that is both fun and informatively rich. Paulus has demonstrated a deft […]
Boston Common: All’s Well That Ends Well
Will LeBow as the King of France in All’s Well That Ends Well, now playing on the Boston Common Do not miss the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company‘s production of All’s Well That End’s Well, free on the Common through August 14. Last year’s production of Othello with Seth Gilliam and James Waterston (reviewed here) was spectacular […]
A Season Inside
Death and the Powers uses new performance techniques and an animated set, including a musical chandelier with dozens of Teflon strings that can be played by the performers. (Jill Steinberg) What is it about live theater that is so compelling? Don’t answer that question, just indulge me while I ask it over and over again. […]
Bucky for the Ages
R. Buckminster Fuller Content-rich theater is hard to do. Tom Stoppard is probably our most exemplary contemporary playwright of that genre. In so many of his plays, ideas and intellectual constructs take on theatrical forms, functioning almost as characters in the story. The Stoppard experience is deeply layered and yet neither didactic nor instructional. Which […]
Pointing
I’m short on words these day. Sometimes language goes flat for me when I need to hibernate or retreat from everyone and everything. Sometimes it happens when the center of gravity in my life becomes extremely image-based. Sometimes it is a sign of a nascent percolation deep inside, that odd sense that something is showing […]
A Compass Demagnitized
The Blue Flower, A.R.T. Tom Stoppard’s last two plays, Coast of Utopia (a 3 play trilogy) and Rock ‘n’ Roll, explore the historical periods preceding significant events as a way of contextualizing and unpacking those outcomes. To make sense of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Stoppard placed his 9 hour Utopia trilogy in the years between […]
David Hare on Art, Matisse and Meaning
Plays that deal with visual art and art making can be problematic. I remember seeing La Bohème as a child and already being cognizant that the bohemian lifestyle portrayed in the opera was mythic, a well used trope that only people like my father believed was real. (He tried to discourage me from pursuing my […]
As American as Baseball and Theater
I have written on this blog about several of the productions from Diane Paulus’ first season as artistic director at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge: The tantalizingly beguiling Sleep No More from UK-based theater company Punchdrunk; the stunningly brilliant Gatz, an unforgettable verbatim performance of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby; and Paradise […]