Articles

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Page 417
Armstrong’s ‘Two Trees I’: Bracing to view.

Hamlin and Armstrong at Gross McCleaf

Between reportage and imagination

In a new show, Louie E. Hamlin and Martha Armstrong offer divergent approaches to landscape painting.

Andrew Mangravite

Articles 1 minute read
Cruikshank's 'The Head Ache' (1819): Visual shorthand.

Five centuries of caricatures at the Met in New York

When the Prince of Wales was the Prince of Whales

When we bemoan the loss of civility in our current political discourse, along comes a show like "Infinite Jest" to remind us that French cartoonists used to portray their King as a giant pear.

Andrew Mangravite

Articles 2 minute read
Scarborough: Who knew?

Discovered: La Salle's unsung art museum

The best art museum you never heard of

An obscure museum in a North Philadelphia basement houses world-class treasures by masters like Tintoretto, Edouard Vuillard, Rembrandt Peale, Georges Rouault and Joseph Epstein. Most remarkable of all, admission is free.
Richard Carreño

Richard Carreño

Articles 4 minute read
McGovern as Watt: Grotesque but essential.

"Watt' at Annenberg: Barry McGovern performs Beckett

Play on words, Beckett-style, or: Is language possible?

Virtually everything Samuel Beckett wrote, in whatever form, is dramatic, but reducing the richness of a novel like Watt to the demands of an hour-long monologue necessarily involves tradeoffs. Nevertheless, Barry McGovern is an exceptional actor for whom Beckett comes as naturally as his own brogue, and the result is like standing under a rare and wonderful waterfall for an hour.
Robert Zaller

Robert Zaller

Articles 6 minute read
Voigt (left) and Morris: For a change, an authentic love duet.  (Photo: Ken Howard.)

Met's "Siegfried' in HD-TV Live

Broad shoulders and a waterfall, too

In Siegfried, Robert Lepage and the Metropolitan Opera have at last come up with a spectacular Ring production that realizes the potential we expected from that director and that company.
Steve Cohen

Steve Cohen

Articles 3 minute read
Masoudnia: A somber 'After the Burial.' (Photo: Matthew Hellerbash.)

Network For New Music at World Café Live

Can poets and musicians get along?

The Network for New Music presented its first concert at the World Café, surrounded the music with a touch of the era of lung cancer and lengthy tirades against the restraints of middle class society.
Tom Purdom

Tom Purdom

Articles 4 minute read
'Card Sharps and Fortune Tellers': A shadowy underworld gets a sterile showcase.

Caravaggio in Fort Worth: All that light

That sanitized feeling: Caravaggio in Texas

Louis Kahn designed the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth to provide “perfect, subtly fluctuating illumination for works of art.” Those light and airy spaces may be well suited for contemporary art, but they dilute the vivid drama and power of the gritty Baroque Italian milieu in which a master like Caravaggio worked.
Victoria Skelly

Victoria Skelly

Articles 6 minute read
Dardaris: Questions of survival.

Sarah Treem's "The How and the Why' by InterAct

Hot and bothered over menopause

In The How and the Why, Sarah Treem rapidly unpacks a world of interpersonal aspersions, thwarted love, feminist struggle and scientific theory. Although her play is dense with themes and ideas, it's a crackling two hours, thanks to Seth Rozin's fast-paced direction and two character-driven actresses.
Alaina Johns

Alaina Johns

Articles 3 minute read
Portrait of the artist as a young man in an awkward transition.

Orchestra's heavyweight Brahms Requiem

Awesome, yes. But what was Brahms trying to say?

Brahms's stirring German Requiem was performed with astonishing power by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Westminster Choir and two outstanding soloists director-designate Yannick Nézét-Séguin. Yet it raised questions of just how this work should be interpreted and performed.
Victor L. Schermer

Victor L. Schermer

Articles 3 minute read
Shannon: Trouble in our planet begins inside our heads.

"Take Shelter': Prophecy vs. lunacy (1st review)

Sleepwalking toward Armageddon

In Take Shelter, a young worker and husband in central Ohio can't decide whether the apocalyptic visions that torment him are the mark of a prophet or a madman. Director Jeff Nichols provides no easy answers, but he does make us think hard about where all of us are at this moment.
Robert Zaller

Robert Zaller

Articles 8 minute read