By Bill Marx
Back in the ’30s, Philip Rahv memorably divided American fiction writers into redskins and palefaces — Mark Twain epitomized the wild men, Henry James the civilized — a chasm that today may be outmoded or politically indelicate. But Lewis M. Dabney’s fine biography of Edmund Wilson suggests that when it comes to assessing […]

by Bill Marx
I wanted to review The Nora Theatre Company’s New England premiere production of Steven Berkoff’s The Secret Love Life of Ophelia last weekend, but I didn’t have the heart. I caught the show on its next to last performance. It wasn’t the direction or the performances that left me shaking my head so […]

by Bill Marx
Globe arts news reporter Geoff Edgers frets that the latest change in the Boston Globe’s arts section will set off panicked stories about the paper “cutting the arts staff.” Since I was one of those who, about two years ago, wondered about the health of the Globe’s arts section when slots for visual […]

by Bill Marx
The schizophrenia is instructive if somewhat dizzying. At the Calderwood Pavilion, the Huntington Theatre Company kicks off its season with “The Atheist,” a cynical exercise in scatological anti-heroism about a sleazy reporter who blackmails his way to fame. On its main stage at the Boston University Theater the HTC wallows in PG […]

Machiavellian monsters aren’t what they used to be in the theater. The gloriously godless creeps that memorably rampage their way through the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Shaw and Brecht scale the dizzying heights of inhuman ambition and self-admiration. The closest contemporary American theater comes to that kind of mountain-sized ego is Roy Cohn in Angels […]

When George Bernard Shaw’s comedy Misalliance, subtitled “a debate,” premiered in 1910, critics couldn’t make heads or tails of the play. It didn’t matter if the reviewer was sympathetic to Shavian excess — the evening’s self-parodying polemics and prophetic theater-of-the-absurd trappings were too much. The production closed after 11 performances: the script, along with the […]

Given the timidity of so many American theater companies, who seem to reserve their courage for implementing new marketing schemes, reminders of what creative risk is all about serve a useful purpose. Some theater artists around the world face jail when they perform on stage. On August 22, special forces of the Belorussian police raided […]

After four movie versions of Alexandre Dumas’s nineteenth-century novel, does it make any sense to make a musical out of The Three Musketeers? The film versions efficiently present the book’s mix of comic book mayhem and romance and are available on DVD and video.
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Some show biz flair-ups are dead debacles walking. Producers sparked a flap in Chicago recently by tossing accusations of foul play at a critic whom they claimed wrote about shows she didn’t have permission to review.
actors guild president, annual festival, chicago reader, chicago sun times, critics, dramatists guild, Featured, hedy weiss, in development, john weidman, […]

Bloggers predicted that CEO/President Josiah Spaulding Jr.’s over-the-top 1.265 million dollar retention bonus would spark inquiries into how much money goes where at the Citi Performing Arts Center (CPAC). It does not seem too much to ask, given that the state and other funders are throwing much moolah at a troubled nonprofit arts institution whose […]