by Bill Marx
“The way of the Samurai is a natural way of the Universe, Ma, and to learn it, one must live one’s life from first to last in self-control. I know all about that stuff now.”
– Wynne in Adam Rapp’s “Stone Cold Dead Serious”
Just how far are American playwrights from dramatizing a […]

By Bill Marx

“The best of the regular theater critics … the brightest America ever had.”
– Eric Bentley
“Intelligent play-goer number one.” – George Bernard Shaw
“The truth is that Mr. Nathan is both a theatrical storehouse, full of the most voluminous and astonishing information, and a whole theatre in himself. He maintains an impetus and lustre that […]

By Bill Marx
“It’s remarkable because the nominators tend to skew much older,” said Rocco Landesman, president of Jujamcyn Theaters, none of whose tenants were nominated for best musical. “I guess they want to be young and hip. This is more surprising than usual.” – The Year’s Tony List is Filled with Unusual Suspects, New York […]

By Bill Marx

I narrate disintegration among rulers
And the kindness of the enemy
I report the speed at which fear grips the innovative
And the intolerable loneliness of the habitually free
– From Howard Barker’s poem “Gary Upright”
A Hard Heart by Howard Barker. Directed by Richard Romagnoli.
Presented by Whistler in the Dark Theatre at the Arsenal Center […]

by Bill Marx
“Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.” – Sarah Ruhl
NPR as well as New York theater critics think playwright Sarah Ruhl, the “Golden Ruhl” with “The Midas Touch,” is sure money in the artistic bank. A winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 for her comedy […]

By Bill Marx
“I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.” — Howard Barker
Given the New York Times’s unenthusiastic review of an off-Broadway staging of Howard Barker’s A Hard Heart back in December – “Kathleen Chalfant can perform such miracles onstage that she has even found […]

By Bill Marx
Shining City, by Conor McPherson. Directed by Robert Falls. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company, through April 6 at the Boston University Theatre.

John Judd and Jay Whittaker gas on about a pesky ghost
At their best, ghost stories frolic in the freedom of the imagination: the writer generates his or her delicious shocks […]

By Bill Marx
Television offers so little discussion of local stages that I had to check out WGBH’s Greater Boston segment on the state (artistic and financial) of the city’s theater, which aired last week. Of course, I wasn’t expecting much, but I was surprised that – in a predictable effort to assuage the anxieties […]

by Bill Marx
Avenue Q, though March 23 at the Colonial Theatre, Boston, MA.
Music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, book by Jeff Whitty. Based on an original concept by Lopez and Marx. Directed by Jason Moore.

Puppets and people warbling up a storm in the touring production of Avenue Q
Where is Avenue […]

by Bill Marx
A recent study in Editor & Publisher delivers the lowdown; with its circulation down about 20% in four years, The Boston Globe is in free fall. Two major investors in The New York Times, which owns the Globe, are “challenging the company’s investment decisions, including its commitment to the struggling newspaper industry beyond […]