Front Page
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Kultur Klash
Trumping the Arts
By: - Feb 15th, 2025The arts are the canary in a coal mine. Any government sponsored attack on culture diminishes dissent. Autocracy enforces a mandate of disinformation. Serfs and slaves were denied literacy. Ideas are anathema to oligarchies and must be repressed. Nazis burned books. School boards and libraries ban them.
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The Heart Sellers
A Day With Two Young Asian Immigrant Women
By: - Feb 15th, 2025Filipina Luna and Korean Jane's husbands are both resident physicians working on Thanksgiving. The new acquaintances share the day. Luna is manic from beginning to end, while Jane opens up over time. The basis for friendship develops.
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Berin Film Festival Begins
Potsdamer Platz is Command Central
By: - Feb 15th, 2025Potsdamer Platz is command central for the Berlin Film Festival. While Babelsberger Studios, the oldest large-scale studio in the world, is outside Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, is near the center of the city. It sits between the home of the Berlin Philharmonic and New National Gallery, the only building Mies Van der Rohe designed in Europe after he emigrated from the continent.
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Waste
1906 British Play Resonates in Today's Political Environment
By: - Feb 13th, 2025A politician tapped for a cabinet position in a new government impregnates a married woman. The narrative reveals women's rights of the time; men's attitudes toward women; the relationship of church and state; and the effect of scandal on political figures. Contrasts with conditions today are considered.
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Komische Oper, Berlin - Pferd Frisst Hut
Horse Eats Hat, a Comic Opera Extravaganza
By: - Feb 13th, 2025On February 8, 2025 was opening night for "Pferd Frisst Hut" (Horse Eats Hat), the hilarious and wildly entertaining comic opera extravaganza written and composed by Herbert Groenemeyer for the Komische Oper, Berlin. Sold out and enjoyed by the audience, this musical work, coproduced by the Theater Basel, allowed the entire ensemble to go wild on stage.
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Jacob's Pillow 2025
Doris Duke Theatre Reopens
By: - Feb 12th, 2025Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival 2025 will feature indoor performances in the landmark Ted Shawn Theatre and the newly-opened Doris Duke Theatre, as well as outdoor performances on the Henry J. Leir Stage. The return of the Doris Duke Theatre restores Jacob’s Pillow to its full presenting capacity for the first time since 2020, reuniting the Festival’s three core performance spaces and offering audiences an unparalleled range of dance experiences across the Pillow’s grounds.
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Calendar Girls
Charity Receives a New Twist From Middle Aged Women
By: - Feb 11th, 2025To raise money for a local hospital, members of the Women's Institutes decide on a novel approach. Rather than display staid sites of Yorkshire in their annual calendar, they agree to go cheesecake. This comedy is based on a true story.
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Berlin Film Festival 2025 Opens
Tilda Swinton Gets an Honorary Golden Bear Hug
By: - Feb 13th, 2025The Berlin Film Festival opens with an honorary Golden Bear Award for actress Tilda Swinton and a new film by Tom Tykwer,
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August Wilson’s Two Trains Running
At Hartford Stage
By: - Feb 11th, 2025Several characteristics are common in Wilson’s plays: focus on African American men, experiences of being cheated by white men or the government, and a degree of desperation. Each of these is present in this play.
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The Thing About Jellyfish
Berkeley Rep's Outstanding World Premiere
By: - Feb 07th, 2025Sixth grader Suzy loses her best friend Franny to drowning. Since Franny was an accomplished swimmer, Suzy feels that there must have been a more specific cause, which leads her on a deep dive into jellyfish research. Interesting revelations occur in a visually stunning production.
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Barrington Stage Company 2025
Seven Productions on Two Stages
By: - Feb 07th, 2025Barrington Stage Company is pleased to announce the theatre’s 2025 season which includes seven productions, including two regional premieres and two world premieres. “Our 2025 season is inspired by the once-and-future leaders of American theatre” commented Alan Paul.
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Phil Kline Surprises with a Song Cycle
Meet the Ghost of Isabella Stewart Gardner
By: - Feb 12th, 2025On Sunday, February 23 at 1:30 p.m., the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum presents the world premiere of ghost story, a song cycle commissioned from composer/lyricist Phil Kline. It’s inspired by the life and times of Isabella Stewart Gardner.
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Exotic Deadly: or The MSG Play
A Japanese-American Teen Girl Confronts Challenges
By: - Feb 06th, 2025Ami wants to be invisible, but the smelly bento box lunches she must take to school bedevil her. She is also haunted by the fact that her grandfather was a scientist at Ajinomoto where the vilified MSG was commercialized. In a hilarious Japanese anime and pop culture framework, the heroine tries to overcome obstacles.
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Portrait of a Sculptor: Walker Hancock & Michael Lafferty
Exhibition at Cape Ann Museum
By: - Feb 06th, 2025Portrait of a Sculptor: Walker Hancock & Michael Lafferty features photographs inside the Gloucester studio of renowned sculptor Walker Hancock (1901-1998) and select sculptures by Hancock. He was commissioned to complete the Confederate Memorial, Stone Mountain, which depicts Jefferson Davis. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Georgia law states that “the memorial to the heroes of the Confederate States of America graven upon the face of Stone Mountain shall never be altered, removed, concealed, or obscured in any fashion and shall be preserved and protected for all time as a tribute to the bravery and heroism of the citizens of this state who suffered and died in their cause.”
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Diet and Health
The Yellow Emperor’s Classic on Medicine
By: - Feb 04th, 2025The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine (Huangdi Neijing), compiled over 2,400 years ago, remains the leading foundational treatise on Traditional Chinese Medicine. The Huangdi Neijing addresses all aspects of inner medicine and health, and is required reading for anyone interested in understanding TCM and ancient Chinese culture.
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Steven Carter’s Eden at Yale Rep
Long-forgotten Play
By: - Feb 04th, 2025The play was first produced in 1976, receiving positive off-Broadway reviews and award nominations. It was part of Carter’s The Caribbean Trilogy; the other plays were Nevis Mountain Dew and Dame Lorraine. Carter died in 2020, and his plays have been seldom produced.
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Seong-Jin Cho Records Ravel
Released by Deutsche Grammophon
By: - Feb 04th, 2025Ravel: The Piano Concertos, in which the pianist is joined by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its Music Director Andris Nelsons, comes out digitally and on CD on February 21. A deluxe edition presenting the complete recordings will be issued digitally and as a 3-CD box set on May 2. Vinyl versions of the two individual albums will be released later this year. The Piano Concerto in G’s central Adagio assai is available to stream/download beginning February 7, while the Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn will be released in advance of the deluxe edition, on March 7, the exact anniversary of Ravel’s birth.
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Daisy by Sean Devine
This True Story Resonates in Today's Chilling Environment
By: - Feb 02nd, 2025In the 1964 presidential campaign, Doyle Dane Bernbach ad agency is commissioned to create an ad campaign for incumbent Lyndon Johnson. An innovative ad that ran only once on television instilled fear and is believed to have profoundly affected the election. Comparisons with today's political environment are frightful and inescapable.
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Film at Lincoln Center Conjures Nosferatu
Films That Inspired Robert Eggers
By: - Feb 05th, 2025Where did Dracula, aka Count Orlok and Vlad the Impaler, a commanding figure of contemporary culture across the globe, come from? Film at Lincoln Center answers this question.
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Tanglewood 2025
Best of the Berkshires
By: - Jan 30th, 2025In July, BSO Music Director and Head of Conducting at Tanglewood Andris Nelsons leads ten programs and two TLI/TMC Art of Conducting master classes in a schedule that shines a spotlight on a wide spectrum of musical guests and the festival’s rich tradition of presenting summertime concerts at their best since 1937.
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Conrad Tao Alights in Carnegie Hall
Premier Keyboard Artist Performs Debussy and His Own Works
By: - Jan 30th, 2025Conrad Tao takes our inner ear on new journeys in a program at Carnegie Hall on January 31. The first notes we’ll hear are often said to be Claude Debussy making fun of Carl Czerny. Czerny’s exercises are of course where most of us begin our piano journeys. Thumping away at scales, we don’t learn to appreciate the sounds that can emerge from the instrument. We don’t coax. We hammer. Tao will coax sound from piano keys and Lumatone hexagons.
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Unser Deutschlandmärchen, at Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin
Our German Fairy Tale, by Hakan Savas Mican
By: - Jan 29th, 2025The Turkish boy Dincer (Taner Sahintürk) is compelled to tell his life's experience in Germany when his mother Fatma (Sesede Terziyan) is laid to rest. The story comes alive on the stage of the Gorki Theater in Berlin, Germany, that is committed to telling political and socio-cultural stories in Germany.
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Jaune Quick to See Smith at 85
A Mentor and Friend
By: - Jan 29th, 2025In 2005 Astrid and I met with Jaune Quick-to-See Smith in her Corrales, New Mexico studio. Several months later she had an exhibition of new works on paper that I curated for New England School of Art & Design, Suffolk University. She remained a mentor and friend with our last e mail exchange, about Katherine Porter, just a month or so ago. She has now died at 85. Jaune was a life long activist, artist and mentor to many. In 2023 she was the first Native American Artist to have a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Late in life she received long overdue respect and recognition.
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Kind of Blue: Benny Andrews. Emilio Cruz, Earle M. Pilgrim and Bob Thompson
Transcript of Panel at Northeastern University
By: - Jan 23rd, 2025In 1986 I organized an exhibition of four African American artists who lived and worked in Provincetown. That fall Kind of Blue traveled to the gallery of Northeastern University. In Boston there was a panel discussion chaired by Edmund Barry Gaither, then the director of the National Center for African American Artists and an adjunct curator for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In addition to myself, there were two other panelists. Patricia Hills was then a professor of art history at Boston University. She has long championed issues of social justice and wrote a monograph and curated an exhibition of the work of Jacob Lawrence. Dana Chandler is an artist and activist.
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Best of Theatre 2024
Broadway and Connecticut
By: - Jan 27th, 2025Here’s my top shows/performances in New York City in 2024.
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