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 […]

by Bill Marx
In a New York Times article I wrote about earlier this week, dramatist Marsha Norman suggests ways to soften nasty stage reviews, which she claims chase audiences away from the glories of theater and into the decadent arms of television. But how would she discipline a successful homegrown dramatist, Neil LaBute, when he […]

by Bill Marx
Has anyone actually read the recent Boston Foundation Arts Report? A column in Boston.com suggests that the sputtering economy is essentially to blame for what The Boston Foundation sees as an increasingly tough time for nonprofit theaters. The solution for Boston’s theaters, suggests the starstruck observer, boils down to new and improved Rolodexes […]

By Bill Marx
The war over critics-as-bullies is over, but some diehards keep fighting the same old battles to the point of arthritic absurdity, like Lee Marvin and Toshirô Mifune as old and forgotten American and Japanese veterans of WWII slugging it out in the 1968 movie Hell in the Pacific.The latest retread salvo comes in […]

By Bill Marx
For any self-respecting Shavian, the major attraction of Canada’s Shaw Festival is the chance to see first-rate productions of plays by GBS and his contemporaries, especially the opportunity to take in ace stagings of scripts that fall outside of the greatest hits list. But during the `80s a close second was the opportunity […]

by Bill Marx
A recent report from the Boston Foundation helpfully advises that if a small arts group’s vision “either dissipated or lost its resonance with its audience or supporters” the troupe should either die quietly or merge with other struggling companies, apparently so they can vanish in bulk more efficiently. But what about larger arts […]

by Bill Marx
What particularly disappointed Boston Globe theater critic Louise Kennedy about the Huntington Theatre Company’s recent production of David Rabe’s Streamers was that it lacked the emotional impact of the 1976 staging of the script. She found it “painful because that earlier production clearly resonated with its audiences as a powerful antiwar statement, something […]

By Bill Marx
No play in the history of theater presents a deeper or more lacerating vision of the inhuman nuts and bolts of starvation, from the poetics of paucity to the politics of poverty, than Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1892 naturalistic masterpiece The Weavers. Based on fact – a riot by the horrifically oppressed weavers of Silesia […]

War is hell, as the Boston Phoenix theater critic Carolyn Clay would have it, but she doesn’t seem to realize that the inferno is a moving target. And it is the diminishing capacity of contemporary American theater to imagine violence and its effects that interests me most about the Huntington Theater Company’s current revival of […]