Jonathan Franzen’s new novel is the talk of the town, but does it have anything to say?

Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 576 pages, $28.

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

In two days, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux will publish Freedom, the new novel by Jonathan Franzen whose last book, The Corrections, made just about every best-of list of 2001. It also earned the National Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and an offer (later rescinded) to be a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. Bret Easton Ellis called it one of the three great books of his generation, and just last year, the literary website The Millions voted it the best novel of the decade.

All of which is to say that something is in the air. It is possible that the rarest of occurrences—one comparable to a visit by Halley’s Comet, or a negative quarter for Apple, or a watchable M. Night Shyamalan film—is imminent. We may be about to witness a national conversation about literature.
More…

A whole lot of deconstruction of the classics going on this month, along with productions of scripts by familiar homegrown names, from William Inge and David Mamet to Sarah Ruhl. A visit from a master puppeteer and a show about race that’s “recommended for mature audiences” look intriguing.

By Bill Marx

The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Diego Arciniegas. Staged by Publick Theater Boston at the Boston Center for the Arts, September 2–25. Stoppard’s early (1968) exploration of illusion and reality, done mainly for laughs, tosses a couple of dim-witted theater critics into a confusing murder mystery. The cast includes Barlow Adamson and William Gardiner.

More…

Reviewed by Helen Epstein

I saw Shakespeare & Company’s excellent production of Richard III in Lenox, MA last weekend (through September 5 at Founders’ Theatre), with an exceptionally strong ensemble that was kicked into high gear by a high-energy performance from John Douglas Thompson in the title role.
More…

By Helen Epstein

Perhaps a director’s most important choice is sifting through the great backlist of dramatic literature and choosing a play whose sensibility she not only wishes to explore and inhabit, but that she can cast and direct well. When the play, the director and design team, the actors, and historical moment all line up, the result can be as magical as Daniela Varon’s production of Sea Marks by the late Gardner McKay at Shakespeare & Company running through September 4.

More…

Actor John Douglas Thompson can captivate, seduce, and thrill any audience in any play, which is exactly what he did, once again, in Shakespeare & Company’s enthralling new production of The Life and Death of King Richard III.

The Life and Death of King Richard III by William Shakespeare. Directed by Jonathan Croy. Conceived and adapted by Tony Simotes. Staged by Shakespeare & Company at the Founders’ Theatre through September 2.

Reviewed By Susan Miron

For 35 summers spent in the Berkshires, I, like many summer residents, blithely took for granted the Berkshires’ embarrassment of artistic riches as if they were some kind of inalienable right attached to Berkshires house ownership or rental.

Last summer, knowing my time in this paradise was up, experiencing theater took on a metaphysical urgency. I opted for total immersion in Shakespeare & Company productions, attempting to see all of them. Two plays have haunted me ever since: Othello, a tour de force featuring the brilliant actor John Douglas Thompson (who had spent the year before playing Othello first at Shakespeare & Company and then in New York City winning a host of awards) and The Dreamer Examines His Pillow, also featuring Thompson and directed by the wonderful actress Tod Randolph.

More…

Papercut’s mission is to collect, catalog, and make available to the public the widest possible collection of contemporary ‘zines.

By Dylan Rose

I’m new at this reporting bit and, in an early conversation with my editor about the particular goals and restrictions of the genre, I blundered: I happened to refer to Arts Fuse as a “ zine.” I was at this time made to understand that the term “zine”—a small, self-published magazine about a particular subject—is now somewhat passe. “A zine,?” he asked, “Who’s making zines anymore?”

Ordinarily I would have simply apologized for the blunder—to peeve an editor is, as I understand it, a journalistic high crime—but I could not in this case have made the apology sincerely. Although I believe his question was intended to be rhetorical and instructional, it does have a definite answer. The answer is that the zine is in fact still a vital form and, as I have been recently made to understand, it shares a great deal in common with projects like The Arts Fuse. More…

What is a Judicial Review? It is a fresh approach to creating a conversational, critical space about the arts. The aim is to combine editorial integrity with the community—making power of interactivity. This is our second session.

---

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

For dance critic Debra Cash, Serenade/The Proposition, the first of Bill T. Jones’s investigations into the myth and legacy of Abraham Lincoln, “the choreographer looks at history and history looks back.” Now a professional critic, a scholar, and dance enthusiasts look closely at the performance, and one of the artists responds.

Review by Nina Silber

Review by Anna, Miriam and Adina Ornstein

Critic’s response by Debra Cash

Artist response by Janet Wong

Summary by Bill Marx

---

The dance piece was the first of Bill T. Jones’s investigations into the myth and legacy of Abraham Lincoln. Choreographed in 2008, it was presented on the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s 25th anniversary season and was the first of a series of commissions marking the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth.

Last week it was was presented in a high-profile engagement at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires (the Pillow awarded Jones its fourth annual award as an “outstanding visionary artist” this past June, a prize that carries $25,000, the largest cash award in American dance).

For more background on the work, as well as Debra’s superb critical analysis of the performance, see her Judicial Review preview.

The Judicial Review focuses on the responses of Professor Nina Silber of Boston University, a Civil War scholar, and Miriam Ornstein, a Boston-area child psychiatrist, who was joined at the performance by her mother and daughter. The critical reactions of Silber and Ornstein are followed by some thoughts by critic Cash on the points they raise. The artist will also weigh in soon. We invite you to become part of the discussion—send in your observations, arguments, and perceptions.

More…

This farcical stage version of the classic Sherlock Holmes novel teems with physical humor and visual gags while retaining the basic storyline of the complex original version.

The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Steven Canny and John Nicholson. Directed by Thomas Derrah. Presented by Central Square Theater, at Central Square Theater, Cambridge, MA, through August 22.

Reviewed By Alyssa Machado

Steven Canny and John Nicholson’s spoof of Hound of the Baskervilles, the classic Sherlock Holmes novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, distills the characters and plot to their most basic humorous qualities, exaggerates those qualities tenfold, and tasks three actors to tackle 16 roles at breakneck speed to tell the tale of the murderous hellhound of the great Grimpen Mire. The methods are familiar comedy and farce standards (crossdressing, physical gags, gay innuendo), but the execution, timing, and silly self-awareness of Central Square Theater’s production make the Devonshire moor an amusing place to visit for the evening . . . if you dare.

More…

By J. R. Carroll

Vacation time? Not for the musicians of New England. An amazing amount of live music this month, not a little of it free and open to the public.

Photo by Denise Sullivan

Treme trombonist and vocalist Glen David Andrews bridges gospel and New Orleans jazz at Johnny D’s in Somerville, MA at 9 p.m. on Tuesday, August 3. (He’ll also be at the Red Fox Inn in Bondville, VT at 9 p.m. on Saturday, August 7.)

Klezmatic trumpeter Frank London brings his Klezmer Brass All-Stars to the Museum of Fine Arts at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, August 4.

More…

By Caldwell Titcomb

August 3: The Old West Organ Society presents the award-winning, young organist Jacob Street in a program including works by Buxtehude, J. S. Bach, and Mendelssohn. He will also play music by Jean Langlais (1907-91) and Gaston Litaize (1909-91). At Old West Church, 131 Cambridge Street, Boston, MA, 8 p.m.

More…

The summer season winds down with (too) many of the usual crowd-pleasers, enlivened by a couple of world premieres, a re-vamping of an Oscar Wilde warhorse, and an encounter with non-being, courtesy of Edward Albee.

By Bill Marx

The Taster by Joan Ackermann. Directed by Tina Packer. Staged by Shakespeare & Company at the Founders’ Theatre, Lenox, MA, through September 4. The world premiere of a play that promises to be “a sumptuous feast of language” that “introduces audiences to a world where the powers of literature and imagination co-mingle in the affairs of a contemporary couple at a crossroads.” The cast features Rocco Sisto (OBIE Award winner), Maureen O’Flynn (acclaimed soprano), Tom O’Keefe, and Robert Biggs.

More…

By Helen Epstein

If you want a country theater experience, complete with magical valley and stream and a freight train in the distance, go to Chester, MA this month. Chester Theater Company’s The Nibroc Trilogy is a winner and will culminate on the final two Saturdays of the season (August 14 and 21) with the presentation of the complete cycle in one day. Special event tickets for those days will include an afternoon ice cream social and a country-style dinner.

More…

By Justin Marble

August 4, “Best of the Oughts” at the Brattle: Putting together a list of the best films of the decade is quite difficult, and putting together a film series might be even tougher. But the Brattle appears to have done a good job, pulling in a mix of Hollywood and indie films for its “Best of the Oughts” series, which runs on Wednesdays and Thursdays in August (continuing from July). Novice filmgoers will recognize titles like Eternal Sunshine and the Spotless Mind and There Will Be Blood, but the opportunity to catch lesser-known gems like George Washington and 4 Weeks, 3 Months and 2 Days should not be passed up.

More…

If you want to know what’s for dinner in the Middle East or Africa, look no further than this marvelous book. Here a Persian dish of eggplant with saffron and yogurt, there a Ghanaian soup of chicken and ground nuts scooped up with a dumpling called fufu, there a Lebanese stuffed grape leaf from Arnold Arboretum.

Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories from Immigrant Kitchens by Lynn Christy Anderson. University of California Press, 304 pages, $24.95.

By Sally Levitt Steinberg

How do you get clammed up people talking? Ask them what they fix for dinner. That’s what Lynne Christy Anderson did, and before you could say spanakopita, her shy ESL students were spilling out stories of their foods from Cape Verde or Sudan or Russia, cooked in the kitchens of Boston. And bringing in their dishes. In Lynne’s book, Breaking Bread, a Persian woman says, “I think food is a great icebreaker.”
More…

On August 1st a group of dedicated Melvilleans gathered at the author’s Arrowhead home in the morning to commemorate his 191st birthday by hiking to Monument Mountain. This trip is meant to reenact the hike Melville took on August 5, 1850, which led to his meeting Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse had so impressed the writer only some days prior.

By Christopher M. Ohge

It was risky business for Herman Melville to move his family from New York City to Arrowhead Farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1850 for the plain fact that his father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, loaned a good chunk of money to go toward the mortgage but also because Melville’s literary career was in serious question.

At the time relatively famous for his novels Typee and Omoo, Melville had since let down many of his readers by laboring over a novel called Mardi, a tale of island hopping in the South Pacific with subject matter and narration that made it more of a tribute to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy than any kind of travel story. He followed Mardi with two quickly composed novels: the autobiographical Redburn (unfortunately under-read to this day) and White-Jacket, both of which were commercial failures as well as books only worthy, by Melville’s own estimation, of “cakes & ale.”

More…

Shakespeare’s late romance, with its catastrophic opening capped by a supernatural-tinged happy ending, is not for those who like their tragedies undiluted.

The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare. Directed by Kevin G. Coleman. Staged by Shakespeare & Company at the Founders’ Theatre, Lenox, MA, through September 5.

Reviewed by Susan Miron

The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s late plays, often called a romance (along with The Tempest, Pericles, and Cymbeline). It also qualifies as a family tragedy, a comedy of mistaken identities, and, by the end, a Disney-like, family fairy tale.

More…

By Harvey Blume

Short Fuse and the Arts Fuse will continue to follow and comment on this story. We welcome your thoughts as well. Updates on the Marc Hauser story here, here, and, here. And now more — here and here.

As of August 12, 2010, Marc Hauser has taken a year leave from his position as Professor of Psychology at Harvard University pending investigation into his research. I, for one, remain intrigued by his attempt to prove his theories about our elemental moral makeup but am not completely surprised by this turn of events. More…

“Under the Skin: Tattoos in Japanese Prints” displays some of the most intricate manifestations of tattoos in woodblock prints, leaving the viewer curious about its footprints in contemporary art and popular culture.

By Yumi Araki

Under the Skin: Tattoos in Japanese Prints is showing at the Museum of Fine Arts through January 2, 2011.

As a cultural prelude to a business trip I’m taking to my home country of Japan, I decided to visit an art exhibition whose subway ad beckoned me with a familiar image of a fully tattooed Japanese warrior.

Showing since April at the Museum of Fine Arts, “Under the Skin: Tattoos in Japanese Prints” explores the meaning and influence of tattoos in Japanese woodblock prints. It’s also a rare collection of postcards, manuscripts, and books by artists from the Edo period (1615-1868) that has only recently been made for online and public display.

More…

By Helen Epstein

This Tanglewood season, overshadowed by the absence of ailing maestros James Levine, Seiji Ozawa, and others who have canceled their appearances, has got me thinking about age and illness. There have been some compelling concerts these past two months, including Michael Tilson Thomas’s riveting Mahler renditions, but the absence of a strong director is palpable. Nevertheless, thousands of people have thronged Tanglewood this summer, picnickers taking advantage of in the unusually dry weather. As in recent summers though, many seats in the Shed have gone unsold, and those who attended were overwhelmingly Senior Citizens.

More…

The complete Women of Will is an exhausting adventure, led by a manically enthused and deeply generous and talkative tour director who also is a fabulous actor.

Reviewed by Susan Miron

Women of Will. Written and performed by Tina Packer. Directed by Eric Tucker. Featuring Tina Packer and Nigel Gore. At Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, MA, September 11 and 12.

“If you want to know what Shakespeare thought, listen to his women,” was Tina Packer’s oft repeated mantra over a 3 day, 5 performance marathon of her portrayal of the most important of Shakespeare’s female characters. A quite condensed version of this 15 hour-long Shakespeare-a-thon, Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays was performed earlier in the summer to great acclaim.

More…

By Caldwell Titcomb

September 1, 8, 15, 22, and 29: Free Wednesday afternoon concerts continue throughout the month. September 1: Pianist Benjamin Warsaw plays works by Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Liszt, and Warsaw himself. September 8: A further celebration of Schumann’s bicentenary brings a program of songs, with soprano Lisa Lynch, mezzo Carola Emrich-Fisher, tenor Jason Sabol, bass-baritone Matthew Wight, and pianist Juliet Cunningham. September 15: Pei-yeh Tsai, a recent winner in an international piano competition, will offer Albeniz, Haydn, Scriabin, and Carl Vine. September 22: Flutist James Winn and that fine pianist David Kopp offer works by Franz Schubert and Bohuslav Martinu. September 29: Flutist Liz Horowitz and pianist Harrison Kelton offer Bach, Chaminade, de la Guerre, and Sammartini. At Church of St. John the Evangelist, 35 Bowdoin Street (Beacon Hill), Boston, MA, 5:30 p.m.

More…

Every single player and singer seemed thrilled to be performing this music, absorbed in it, attentive to their masterful conductor and having a good time. It made me think how often that is not the case at symphony concerts.

By Helen Epstein

There were no star soloists or conductors around on Friday night and since the TMC is over, no music students to paper the hall. But with David Zinman (pictured) conducting a raring-to-go Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) and an even more psyched Tanglewood Festival Chorus and soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, Friday night’s program of Poulenc’s Gloria and Holst’s The Planets Suite for Large Orchestra proved to be one of the highlights of this long, uneven summer at Tanglewood.

More…

By Helen Epstein

After some peculiar programming last week, Tanglewood’s current weekend got off to a rousing start on Thursday night as Garrick Ohlsson gave a haunting, introspective, and idiosyncratic performance of Chopin. The program, emotion-packed and filled with delicacies as though the pianist could not bear to leave anything out, included nocturnes and mazurkas, Ballade No. 1, and Piano Sonata No. 3, as well as Variations brillantes in B-flat on a rondo from Hérold’s Ludovic.

More…

In his latest novel, Michael Cunningham writes about Manhattan’s art world with canny insight and sympathy. But he goes beyond that, anchoring his story not only in beauty, as it is constantly reconceived and imagined, but in considerations of love, sex, morality, and mortality.

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $25.

Reviewed by Harvey Blume

To my mind Michael Cunningham’s novel By Nightfall has one significant flaw, namely that the New York City he cares and writes so passionately about ends at the borders of Manhattan. He describes Battery Park, for example, where Manhattan abuts New York harbor, as, “the city’s only point of contact with something bigger and more potent than itself.” Has he never heard of or visited Coney Island, that somewhat storied strand along the Atlantic Ocean?

More…

For all the hand-wringing in the media about the death rattle of jazz, what with record stores closing and radio stations losing listeners, Newport reminds you that the art form is alive and well, with a growing audience of people of all ages and races.

By Charles McEnerney, Host + Producer, Well-Rounded Radio

Both the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals take place at Fort Adams State Park, a few miles outside downtown Newport on a peninsula with a view of Narragansett Sound and the Newport Bridge. With boaters (okay, maybe yachtsmen) drifting by, ocean breezes, and seagulls floating above, it has to be the most relaxing and beautiful festival venue these days.

More…