387 stories by "Bill Marx"
Fuse Theater critics pick some of the outstanding shows of the past year.
What is refreshing about the muscular back-flipping in David Farr's amusing rewrite of the Robin Hood fable is that Maid Marion is as much into derring-do as the Merry Men.
Given how rarely "Henry VIII" is staged, any Shakespeare enthusiast worth his or her salt should definitely take in this uneven production.
Chekhov's jokes are the inevitable by-products of his characters confronting life's absurdities; Christopher Durang is content to wring laughs out of wacky situations and cartoon caricatures.
In her compelling deconstruct/rewrite of "Miss Julie," set in South Africa 18 years after the end of apartheid, director/dramatist Yaël Farber doubles down on the elemental energies of Gr…
With the 1% rapidly vacuuming up the upper and middle classes, A.R. Gurney's comic vision of the tipsy idle rich, shorn of cares and criminality, floats completely free of reality.
Please send tax deductible dollars to "The Arts Fuse" so the magazine can continue to serve its mission -- we need funds to pay our writers, to continue to grow our readership, and to raise …
British dramatist Caryl Churchill proffers a valuable line of satiric attack on our delusions of doing good, so it is easy to forgive the dramatist her broad and scattershot comic approach.
Unfortunately, there are only flickers of Kurt Vonnegut's dark and playful genius in "Make Up Your Mind."
Whenever you hear greeting card bromides intoned with a straight face (it's usually in scenes set in a hospital) you know that moral fuzziness isn't far behind.
Interestingly, both of these powerful visions of horror root their avenging vision of mayhem in the brutal mistreatment of children.
Ring Lardner wrote the funniest stand-alone sentence using the fewest words with which that feat can be done: "'Shut up,' he explained."
Pulitzer prize-winning dramatist Robert Schenkkan is chained to a dreary, fact-driven approach in "All the Way," tossing in bits and pieces of "what if" for unconvincing dramatic effect.
Those who champion the arts need to realize that talk is cheap -- we have to fight to get a place at the political table.
Nothing is going to be done about the posting of the review in the Boston Globe. The reasoning is that, because the newspaper didn't send its own critic, it hadn't broken the ban. This is in…
Author Douglas Kennedy is beginning to generate a considerable readership in this country. He will be reading at the Boston Public Library on August 15 at 6 p.m.
Intellectual frameworks such as "the rise of Europe," "the decline of the East," or "the clash of civilizations," tell us more about the laziness of the human mind than they do about history.
The Titanic Theatre Company production struggles with Christopher Durang's superficial satire and manages to squeeze some laughs out of it.
In 2011, the Boston Globe characterized the Lowell Folk Festival as "a celebration of diversity." This year, the floundering newspaper isn't interested in celebrating anything but itself.
Surely the lesson of "Pygmalion" is that Eliza should never look back. She doesn't need to.
"The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra" is a compelling celebration of art as a force of nature, a fragile yet indomitable demand for possibility despite the constraints of a torpid existence.
Efforts to ensure that arts education is a significant part of our schools is not the kind of glamorous activity that prys dollars out of the wallets of donors or drums up tourism.
The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's production of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" is spunky and engaging -- but the play is spun in one direction, away from its weird edginess.
Nabokov will become much more seriously playful about extinction and the nature of love in the increasingly complex fables to come. "The Tragedy of Mr. Morn" is his initial earnest fairy tal…
Dan Kennedy could have written a book that extols the "Huffington Post," WGBH, or Patch as the future of serious community journalism. He doesn't, which means that he is on the side of the a…
