Highlights on stage this month include the world premiere of a drama about evolution by a respected local playwright and an intriguing collection of plays and musicals that bring an unusual perspective to topics ranging from love and music to extinction and dehumanization. And the wait is over: a show featuring singing dinosaurs has arrived.

By [...]

Boredom is the root of all evil . . . The influence that it exerts is altogether magical, except that it is not the influence of attraction, but of repulsion. — Søren Kierkegaard, “Either/Or”
Private Fears in Public Places by Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by David J. Miller. Set design by Miller. Staged by the [...]

It’s not every day you meet a new food, one you’ve never seen or tasted, one you can’t identify. You can never know everything about food. It’s humbling, just when you thought you were getting a handle on things. There’s always a new ingredient from somewhere on the planet. One year Szechuan pepper, another year [...]

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
that lift and drop a question on your plate
— From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot, 1917
Not Enough Air by Masha Obolensky. Directed by Melia Bensussen. Set designed by Eric Levenson. Staged by the Nora Theatre [...]

More than any other art, theater asks for relevance. A play that convinces us that “this is the way it is now” can be excused many shortcomings. At any one moment there is a particular quality of feeling which dominates in human intercourse, a tonality which marks the present from the past, and when this [...]

By Peter Walsh
Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA through May 9.
Locked into a low-status, unprofitable niche, talented Spanish still-life painter Luis Meléndez (1716–1780) made little money and achieved even less fame during his lifetime. He is said to have complained to the king, who never honored him [...]

A recent piece in the New York Times provides further proof of the increasingly pernicious stranglehold marketing exerts on the production of new voices in the theater.
By Bill Marx
Let’s face it—the fastest growing segment of non-profit hiring in the arts over the past decade or so, marketing, is now pretty much in the cultural [...]

by Caldwell Titcomb
Time was when Boston had a City Censor, and books and plays drummed up trade by getting “Banned in Boston.” The Boston Modern Orchestra Project, headed by conductor Gil Rose, came up with the deliciously punning title “Band in Boston” for its Jordan Hall concert on January 22. Indeed there was not a [...]

By Kate Vander Wiede
The Cantab, as the regulars called The Cantab Lounge, is like a quirky not-quite-speakeasy complete with a narrow stairwell leading below street level and smoke-perfumed attendees. This night, bass chords shake the ceiling, courtesy of the band headlining one floor up. Dim lights hardly illuminate the cramped room, which is lined with [...]

This enjoyable anthology of crime stories proffers a grimy ride through the murderous and creepy side of Beantown.
Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane. Akashic Books, $15.95
Reviewed by Kate Vander Wiede
In the introduction of Boston Noir, editor, contributor. and best-selling novelist Dennis Lehane explains that while Aristotle “mandated that a tragic hero must fall from a [...]