Artscope Magazine

New England's Culture Magazine

Artscope Magazine | March/April 2020

Subscribe to the Magazine

A vibrant, dynamic magazine with arts news, reviews and info you can use, delivered right to your door!

Subscribe now

Sign up for our Email Blasts!

Special Artscope updates in your inbox every two weeks!

Sign up

Theatre

The Women Who Mapped the Stars production

The Women Who Mapped the Stars at Central Square Theater

// Artscope Online, Theatre

by James Foritano

There are times when a reviewer comes home after a late night to look at his theater ticket and feel like kissing it for the scintillating drama its admission provided. That’s how I felt, in spades, as I looked at author Joyce Van Dyke’s light blue ticket to her play, “The Women Who Mapped the Stars,” now running at the Central Square Theater through May 20. The setting is the Harvard College Observatory in the late 1800s, just as the door of the 20th century was about to swing open on so many new ways of thinking, so many scientific discoveries. That door was also opening for women in science, but more hesitantly, more creakily, and not with the wide-open brio with which it swung open for able men of most any brand. This play takes no time at all to introduce the audience to both the opportunities and the obstacles for women, the former dauntingly narrow but doable, the latter all … [Read more...] about The Women Who Mapped the Stars at Central Square Theater

IMAGE: Christie Lee Gibson (seated), Brian Church, in The Rosenburgs. Photograph by Kalman Zabarsky.

The Rosenbergs (An Opera)

// Theatre

By James Foritano Waltham, MA - Presented by the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (BPT) and produced by Boston University and Brandeis University, The Rosenbergs (An Opera) is moving to its Brandeis University venue this Thursday, April 26, to run through its final matinee performance on April 29. Nearly every American knows, if only vaguely, of the controversial trial in 1951 and execution in June 1953 of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiracy to commit espionage by transferring atomic secrets from Los Alamos to Russia in the last half of the 1940’s, just after World War 11. Only a few Americans have seen the North American premiere of this Danish opera performed by the Boston Playwright’s Theatre just last weekend. An opera of a controversial trial for conspiracy in atomic secrets moves these fraught actions and their actors from the stage of reality to that of art, from … [Read more...] about The Rosenbergs (An Opera)

WALT MCGOUGH’S BRAWLER AT THE BOSTON PLAYWRIGHT THEATRE

// Featured, Theatre

by James Foritano BOSTON, MA--It’s an unimposing facade and a small stage inside the Boston Playwrights’ Theater at 949 Commonwealth Avenue, so if you take your cues from looks and size, you’re not prepared at all for the tragic grandeur of “Brawler,” authored by Walt McGough, and directed in a world premiere collaboration with Kitchen Theatre Company by M. Bevin O’Gara. Tragedy, rightly understood, doesn’t seem to appeal to us anymore, the way it did to the ancient Greeks or to Shakespeare. We cherish our “innocence” and bad things just seem to happen to innocent people without their connivance — like extreme weather and ambushes with heavy weapons. Very bad luck, in other words, but unavoidable. The four characters in “Brawler” are, to different degrees, anything but innocent, in spite of the fact that they are all more or less dedicated to nothing more harmful than … [Read more...] about WALT MCGOUGH’S BRAWLER AT THE BOSTON PLAYWRIGHT THEATRE

THE WHITE CARD AT THE EMERSON PARAMOUNT CENTER

// Featured, Theatre

by James Foritano BOSTON, MA--Claudia Rankine’s The White Card, playing through April 1 at the Emerson Paramount Center on the Robert J. Orchard Stage, is about both the privileges of whiteness in a multi-racial society and the enervating struggles of a family in conflict and confrontation. Either one of these themes is huge enough to be handled alone, but both at once, however deftly explored, seemed, to this reviewer to overwhelm rather than enlighten. “Charles,” Daniel Gerroll’s character, is a prosperous developer of everything between and including the polar opposites of hospitals and private prisons, trying to live down the conflict between the nurturing and punishing aspects of these institutions by establishing a foundation which aspires to collect and forefront black art and artists. “Charlotte,” played by Karen Pittman, is a black artist invited for dinner … [Read more...] about THE WHITE CARD AT THE EMERSON PARAMOUNT CENTER

THE BUSINESS OF ART: ART FREE FOR ALL

// Artscope Online, News, Theatre, Visual Arts

By Nancy Nesvet Okay, so now we acknowledge that the world of art is tied to economics. Only the Venice Biennale and other recent exhibitions after that model survive to showcase the best of new art not for sale or created with economic appreciation in mind, only the other kind. There is no shame in admitting people buy art to hang on their walls while also hoping the work goes up in value; that supports galleries who pay artists, a noble and necessary employment. The art fairs are a great venue for creating an art marketplace for collectors to buy and galleries to sell. But let’s acknowledge the distinction between and value of art fairs for fun and profit and the Biennales, Documentas and other not for sale art venues. That value was recognized until the recent economic debacle of Documenta 14 at Kassel and Athens. Not only did Documenta 14 lose millions of euros, but the loss … [Read more...] about THE BUSINESS OF ART: ART FREE FOR ALL

THEATER PREVIEW: BOSTON OPERA COLLABORATIVE PRESENTS “AS ONE” AT PICKMAN HALL

// Artscope Online, Featured, Music, Theatre

By James Foritano Cambridge, MA — I’m occupying the cat-bird seat in the intimate recital space of Cambridge’s Longy School of Music at Bard College at a pre-performance interview with cast members of a new operetta, “As One,” which will be presented January 25-28 by the Boston Opera Collaborative at Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall. The two male vocalists sitting at our conference table are young, intense, and talented. They are bursting with information about what it’s like to represent with their resonant baritones the existential struggles of a young man, a boy really, transitioning to a mature woman. I’m trying to focus as much as possible on the sense of what they’re saying, but the sensuousness of their trained voices short circuits, repeatedly, my hard- headed note taking. I’m rescued, anchored by an anecdote related to me by vocal coach Jean Anderson Collier, sitting to my … [Read more...] about THEATER PREVIEW: BOSTON OPERA COLLABORATIVE PRESENTS “AS ONE” AT PICKMAN HALL