Articles
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Bartusiak's "The Day We Found the Universe'
Our long march across the cosmos: Humankind gets something right
A talented science writer tells the story of one of history's great intellectual sagas: how a group of semi-rational primates on an obscure planet discovered the true size and scope of the universe.
Articles
5 minute read
Yale and those Muhammad cartoons
Great moments in publishing: Judgment by committee at Yale
To avoid potential violence, Yale University Press has announced that the controversial 2005 Danish newspaper cartoons satirizing the prophet Muhammad (like the one at left) will be omitted from a forthcoming book about the global riots provoked by those cartoons. Is this a case of responsible behavior or intellectual cowardice?
Articles
4 minute read
Christian Petzold's "Jerichow'
A German talent worth watching
Christian Petzold's Jerichow, a sly thriller from Germany that raises disturbing questions, recycles a twice-told noir classic, The Postman Always Rings Twice, but with the focus on the seeming victim rather than the seedy lovers. German film has never fully recovered from Hitler and rarely gets international distribution, but Jerichow announces a talent worth watching.
Articles
6 minute read
Canada theater festival roundup
Only 24 hours from Broad Street: Five provocative days in Canada
In two charming Ontario towns through early November, you'll find theater as good as New York's or London's. At the Shaw and Stratford Shakespeare Festivals, I managed to squash eight plays and a hippy-dippy folk concert into five days. Here's what I saw.
Articles
8 minute read
Francis Bacon at the Met
Francis Bacon's virtual reality
Francis Bacon, Britain's greatest modern painter, took the difficulty of modern perception as his subject, while heroically refusing to abandon the human image, as Abstract Expressionism had done. The result is, typically, an embattled figure on an ambiguous ground.
Articles
9 minute read
Beethoven's "Appassionata' turning point
What Horowitz taught me about Beethoven
I used to sneer when that superficial crowd-pleaser Horowitz sat down to play Beethoven. But getting reacquainted with the “Appassionata” through Horowitz recordings lately made me think more about the circumstances that brought Beethoven's groundbreaking sonata into being.
Mauckingbird's "Never the Sinner'
Leopold and Loeb, punished again
Fascinating performances, highly nuanced direction and strong production values manage to infuse tremendous theatrical power into John Logan's otherwise mediocre retelling of the famous 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder case.
Articles
3 minute read
The classical musician's greatest phobia
Self-promotion? By a classical pianist? Oh, the horror!
Juilliard taught me almost everything I needed to know about playing the piano, and almost nothing about promoting myself. Why are we classical musicians so hesitant about tooting our own horns?
Articles
6 minute read
Merce Cunningham's final challenge
Merce Cunningham confronts the future (from the grave)
The late Merce Cunningham was ferocious about protecting his dry, acerbic, difficult, complicated and often downright incomprehensible work. Now his greatest challenge lies ahead— namely, can a choreographer preserve his vision from the grave?
Articles
4 minute read
Summer camp for show biz hopefuls
Tricks of the trade
Summertime, and many theater companies defray their fixed costs by conducting training camps for aspiring performers. But such camps are not all alike, as a recent exhilarating week-long program in Verizon Hall— more intense and more professionally-focused than the summer training schools run by several of Philadelphia's theater companies— reminded me.
Articles
4 minute read