Each week, Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx contributes a commentary and selects some of the magazine’s most provocative, vivid, or timely pieces to highlight. Content is added daily — go here to see what is new.

From The Editor’s Desk

An enthused shout-out—albeit with some pointed questions—for September 18’s Creative Labor: A Boston Cultural Policy Summit, co-produced by Boston Public Library and the Doris Duke Foundation. The confab will take place at the BPL and is billed as a discussion that will assert that “creative labor—the work of artists and cultural workers—is real labor, deserving of fair pay, stable conditions, and the same dignity and protections as work in any other sector. In collaboration with Arts Activate Boston, we aim to inform an equitable cultural labor policy for Boston and to make the case for creative labor as civic infrastructure.”

An afternoon session will “explore policies that impact wages, housing, healthcare costs, and/or working conditions for creatives, and give those in the room the opportunity to discuss and test out possible solutions.” To all of this I say: Hallelujah!

But as I look over the announcement and the event website, a crucial word is missing—one that should accompany any reference to creative-labor policy: unions. Isn’t strengthening these collectives—building membership and reinforcing their clout—part of what it means to “bring together coordinated activations across the U.S. to center artists in a national conversation about the future of artistic labor”?

Unions have been invited to attend and participate, but no representatives from organized labor in the local creative economy—the Boston Musicians’ Association, AFM Local 9-535, SAG-AFTRA New England Local, and UAW Local 2110, among them—are slated to appear on the panels. The morning talk will include Ali Noorani, president and CEO of the Barr Foundation, and Sam Gill, president and CEO of the Doris Duke Foundation, alongside Company One Theatre’s co-founders and leaders, Shawn LaCount and Summer L. Williams. The Greater Malden Asian American Community Coalition and Congruence Cultural Strategies are sponsoring the afternoon confab. The latter firm specializes in learning, strategic planning, facilitation, and research/evaluation—not labor organizing, collective bargaining, union representation, or labor law.

Is it really possible to talking about fighting for “fair pay, stable conditions, and the same dignity and protections as work in any other sector” without spotlighting, in some way, the experiences of union leaders and/or members? I am not sure.

Times are changing politically, partly in response to a reactionary national power grab. Cultural workers have been losing ground for decades, and they now see AI eroding their future earnings. They have grown impatient with the well-meaning lip service that wealthy and corporate interests pay to meeting workers’ demands. Economic power lies in the ability of members of an exploited class to band together for their common benefit. Those who care about fair treatment for creative labor should look for ways to shore up—and build on—union solidarity.

— Bill Marx, Editor

Latest Views & Reviews from the Fuse

Music

Sara Bareilles’s “Good Grief” Turns Loss into Communion

By Melissa Rodman

Josh Alexander’s intimate studio documentary follows Sara Bareilles and her collaborators as they shape songs of infertility, bereavement, friendship, and collective consolation. Read the review

Books

“The Eighth Wonder” Traps a Drifting Man in a Dream of Doubt

By David Mehegan

In Vlady Kociancich’s newly translated Argentine novel, an indecisive Buenos Aires lawyer wanders through Berlin, cinema, erotic fantasy, and a reality that may be entirely of his own making. Read the review

Dance

Huang Yi’s “Ink” Writes the Body into Darkness

By Debra Cash

Animated calligraphy, dancers in half-shadow, and two industrial robots create an eerie, elegant theater of marks, motions, and metallic afterimages at Jacob’s Pillow. Read the review

Music

Radius Ensemble’s Spirited “Carnival”

By Jonathan Blumhofer

On its lively new recording, the Boston chamber group gives buoyant, colorful, and sharply characterized performances of three works by a longtime MIT composer. Read the review

Film

“Coyote vs. Acme” Gives Wile E. Coyote His Day in Court

By Betsy Sherman

This lively live-action/animation hybrid turns the Road Runner cartoons’ eternal loser into a surprisingly moving plaintiff—and takes sharp aim at corporate impunity along the way. Read the review

Film

“Buddy” Turns Children’s-TV Cheer Into a Nightmare of Control

By Sarah Osman

Casper Kelly’s wildly unhinged horror-comedy, featuring Keegan-Michael Key as a murderous orange unicorn, finds dark laughs—and a sharp study of abuse—inside the artificial warmth of 1990s kids’ programming. Read the review

Visual Arts

Elsie Kagan’s Uncanny Waters

By Yvonne Owens

In “the drop falls” at 3S Artspace, the artist’s lush hybrid paintings bring Virginia Woolf, artificial intelligence, and ecological collapse into a seductive, disquieting flow. Read the review

Books

The Enigmatic Miniatures of Diane Williams’s “I Liked Rex”

By Bill Littlefield

These micro-fictions can feel slight, funny, or confounding—but their strange imagery and off-kilter observations occasionally land with surprising force.. Read the review

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Each week, Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx contributes a commentary and selects some of the magazine’s most provocative, vivid, or timely pieces to highlight. Content is added daily — go here to see what is new.

From The Editor’s Desk

The Harvard Film Archive was closed over the summer months because of restoration activities at the Carpenter Center, but the facility has just opened, and it is starting off with a fine series — running through October 19 — entitled “The Cold Heart is More Precious Than Diamonds: The Cinema of Graham Greene.” The focus is on films based on the writer’s fiction, but his intersection with the movie world also took the form of criticism — from 1935 to 1940, he was the film critic for The Spectator and, for a short period, Night and Day, eventually publishing over 400 reviews. Greene was a fierce reviewer — incisive, unruly, and witty. For those not familiar with this aspect of his celluloid-adjacent career, it is well worth reading through the pieces collected in The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews & Film Stories.

Some of Greene’s judgments hold up, such as his admiration of the films of John Ford. Others do not, particularly his puzzling disparagement of Alfred Hitchcock. For me, there is no question that Greene is wrong when he claims the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races is better than their A Night at the Opera. A strain of sexism runs throughout the reviews: Jean Harlow “totes her breasts like a man totes a gun.” But, as one contemporary admirer put it, Greene “can feel his subject more intimately than anyone else writing in England today. His criticism is that of a creative writer.”

That passion inevitably led Greene into the use of satire. The reviewer was tasked with ridiculing mediocrity—both its makers and those who enabled it to flourish. Greene put it this way: “This is to make a flank attack upon the reader, to persuade him to laugh at personalities, stories, ideas and methods that he has previously only taken for granted. We need to be rude, rude even to our fellow reviewers, but not in the plain downright way, which may help to kill a picture, but leaves its kind untouched. The cinema needs to be purged with laughter.”

Greene’s merciless mockery of the big studios’ sentimentality and sexual hypocrisy was prescient. In 1937, Hollywood moguls brought a libel suit against him and Night and Day, alleging that Greene’s review of Wee Willie Winkie implied that nine-year-old Shirley Temple was being sexually exploited. Greene had pointed to Temple’s “dubious coquetry” and suggested a “more secret and more adult” dimension to her appeal. The resulting settlement helped bring about the magazine’s demise. In an era before social media, it was a daring—and devastatingly mischievous—critique.

— Bill Marx, Editor

Latest Views & Reviews from the Fuse

Music

The Cramps’ Lost Album, Unearthed

By Steve Erickson

A newly released 1977 collection documents the Cramps making the past feel dangerous again. Read the review

Books

“The Black Shield” — A Black Family’s Reckoning with Policing and Power

By Bill Littlefield

In his powerful memoir, Wilbert L. Cooper examines the paradox of Black police officers seeking safety and status inside an institution shaped by racial violence. Read the review

Dance

Dancing the Odissi in my Spine — Bijayini Satpathy’s New Journey

By Smitha Radhakrishnan

In her Boston solo premiere, Rāgachitra, the former Nrityagram artist draws on a lifetime in classical Indian dance to create searching, contemporary works shaped by memory, mythology, gender, and an inward turn. Read the preview

Music

Anne-Sophie Mutter’s Restless New-Music Advocacy

By Jonathan Blumhofer

The violinist’s latest Alpha recording pairs two late works by André Previn with Sebastian Currier’s witty, searching Ringtone Variations. Read the review

Film

“Don’t Say Good Luck” Finds Grace in Grief, Theater, and Teenage Life

By Sarah Osman

Sunny Sandler gives a quietly affecting performance in a heartfelt, unsentimental coming-of-age drama about a high school musical, a mother’s cancer recurrence, and the precarious coexistence of sorrow and joy. Read the review

Film

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” — Slasher Summers, Reimagined

By Peg Aloi

Director Jane Schoenbrun’s seductive, funny, and unsettling meditation on horror, desire, and cinema turns summer-camp carnage into a tale of identity, intimacy, and renewal. Read the review

Theater

John Turturro Resists the Herd in A.R.T.’s “Rhinoceros”

By Bill Marx

Director Diane Paulus’s high-spirited A.R.T. adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s anti-conformist play sometimes overplays its comic business, but John Turturro’s scruffy, strident, and anguished Berenger gives the production its necessary mix of horror, humor, and desperate resistance. Read the review

Books

“The Frenchmen” — When Literary Theory Was Cool, French, and Sexy

By Henry Carrigan

In a lively blend of memoir, intellectual history, and philosophical primer, Emily Eakin revisits the French theorists who transformed American literary studies—and asks what their skepticism about language and power can still offer in the age of AI. Read the review

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Each week, Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx contributes a commentary and selects some of the magazine’s most provocative, vivid, or timely pieces to highlight. Content is added daily — go here to see what is new.

From The Editor’s Desk

I want to underscore the splendidly iconoclastic value of the mission of artists Nicholas Shaplyko and Ekaterina Sorokina, the creators of the Museum of Modern Renaissance in Somerville, MA. As is evident in the photo above and in the article below, the museum is not merely a container for art; it is, itself, a work of art—a fact made urgent by the current campaign to preserve the 25-year-old project. It reflects the pair’s visionary belief that “art could be more than an object placed inside a room. It could become the room, the architecture, the atmosphere, and the life that unfolds within it.”

This conception of art as something that encloses and animates life, rather than remaining trapped within a discrete object, places their work in the tradition of William Blake, one of my favorite poets. For him, the prophetic artist labors to rebuild a damaged world; material construction is inseparable from spiritual and imaginative renewal. Shaplyko and Sorokina have not paid lip service to this notion of restoration, as many in the increasingly corporate-driven museum world have; they have acted on it, infusing their individual imaginations into every available nook and cranny of the building.

Like Blake’s illuminated books, the Museum of Modern Renaissance challenges standard cultural definitions of where art begins and ends. In the piece, the pair ask salient questions about the future of what they have created: “How does America recognize an independent artistic environment created outside conventional systems of commissioning, museum patronage, and institutional funding? How should a work be evaluated when the artists, the architecture, the archive, and the cultural life of the place have become inseparable?” Will our country set aside its ever-tightening “mind-forg’d manacles” and see this place for what it is: not simply a museum, but a living work of imagination? The fate of the Museum of Modern Renaissance may depend on the answer.

— Bill Marx, Editor

Latest Views & Reviews from the Fuse

Arts Feature

The Museum of Modern Renaissance — The Urgency of Preserving a Living Work of Art

By Nicholas Shaplyko and Ekaterina Sorokina

“This is not a conventional museum, where individual works are displayed inside a neutral container. The building itself has become the principal work of art.” Read the commentary

Books

Daniel Silva’s “Ransom” — A Spy Thriller for an Unsettled Present

By Clea Simon

Daniel Silva’s latest Gabriel Allon novel sidelines Israeli politics for an unusually timely, expertly paced tale of Russian aggression, drone warfare, and fraying Western alliances. Read the review

Visual Arts

The Great Elephant Migration — Pachyderms on Parade, Conservation at Stake

By Matt Favermann

On Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue Mall, 100 handcrafted elephants turn an exuberant family attraction into a persuasive call for human-wildlife coexistence. Read the review

Music

Latin Jazz Album Reviews: Jonathan Suazo’s “Fruto de Mi Corazón Ricano Vol. 2” and Ray Obiedo’s “Slight Accent”

By Brooks Geiken

Jonathan Suazo’s exhilarating, roots-conscious celebration of Puerto Rican and Dominican traditions is the standout, while Ray Obiedo assembles an expertly chosen cast for a consistently engaging, groove-rich set. Read the review

Visual Arts

“Troubleshooting — Making Photographs with Dona Ann McAdams”

By Yvonne Owens

A retrospective survey of a photographer who has long worked at the intersection of art, activism, and community. Read the review

Film

“The End of Oak Street” — Dinosaurs in the ’Burbs

By Michael Marano

David Robert Mitchell’s affectionate, unsettling return to an early-’80s Detroit suburb brings Spielbergian wonder and suburban anxiety into collision—though its dinosaur-driven black comedy eventually wears thin. Read the review

Music

Mission of Burma Reunites for a Fenway Recordings Homecoming

By Paul Robicheau

At Brighton Music Hall, Boston’s avant-punk legends capped Mark Kates’s label anniversary with a surprisingly potent four-song set and a tribute to the late Jeff “Monoman” Conolly. Read the review

Books

The Great Profile — Without the Myths

By Tom Connolly

Terry Chester Shulman’s biography offers a vivid, corrective account of actor John Barrymore’s artistic greatness, private devastations, and spectacular decline. Read the review

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Each week, Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx contributes a commentary and selects some of the magazine’s most provocative, vivid, or timely pieces to highlight. Content is added daily — go here to see what is new.

From The Editor’s Desk

Don’t let anyone tell you that arts coverage has become so anemic in our mainstream newspapers and magazines because it is too expensive to pay for. Features, reviews, and profiles about cultural doings from freelancers cost far less than what it takes to expense investigative journalism and beat reporting. I was a freelance arts writer for decades; I am now paying arts writers for this magazine. After 19 years, I can testify that reimbursing first-rate pieces on the arts will not break the bank. The truth is, The Boston Globe and other major newspapers and magazines could easily pay for more comprehensive cultural coverage. They choose not to do so, a decision that should raise alarms about how little our major media and society values arts and culture. It also goes a long way to explaining what many lament as the decline in the economic and civic infrastructure that supports sustained, in-person, professionally produced art. The signs of decay are all around us: the end of local criticism, the fragility of small venues and nonprofit companies, and lack of interest in arts education.

Every now and then, I highlight some of the recent, noteworthy films that the Boston Globe hasn’t bothered to review. (The Arts Fuse has critiqued a number of them.) Before I posted my earlier lists, I asked for a comment from the Globe arts editors. They have never responded. I will post any defense they have — if they ever send me one.

Silent Friend (foreign)

Kontinental 25 (foreign)

Last One For the Road (foreign)

Jinsei (foreign)

Mare’s Nest (indie)

CAMP (indie, woman director)

Couture (woman director, foreign)

Jackass: Best and Last (comedy/reality feature)

Romería (foreign, woman director)

Night Nurse (indie, woman director)

Summer Tour (doc, woman director — an interview, but no review)

Dead Souls (indie)

Her Private Hell (indie)

Wild Inside (woman director, doc)

Also—whether out of cost-cutting or indifference to expertise is besides the point—the Boston Globe recently dropped three knowledgeable writers from its weekly “The Ticket” feature, a selective, service-oriented guide to arts and events in Boston and nearby communities.

Over a number of years, Maura Johnston (pop), Kevin Lowenthal (jazz), and Stuart Munro (folk, world, and country) brought deep, beat-specific expertise to the roundup. They have largely been replaced by writers who appear to be interns. At the Globe, as in the Trump administration, knowing too much can get you canned.

— Bill Marx, Editor

Latest Views & Reviews from the Fuse

Film

“Bernstein’s Wall ” — A Vivid Portrait of the Artist as Activist

By Jonathan Blumhofer

Douglas Tirola’s documentary draws on a remarkable archive to make Leonard Bernstein’s musical, political, and moral commitments feel urgently contemporary. Read the review

Interview

Clinton Fearon on Reggae, Resilience, and the Songs That Endure

By Noah Schaffer

Ahead of a run of shows with Boston’s Naya Rockers, the veteran Jamaican musician looks back on the Gladiators, Lee “Scratch” Perry, political “sleepwalking,” and a career still driven by curiosity. Read the interview

Music

At Newport Jazz 2026, the Past and Future Jam Side by Side

By Paul Robicheau

Kamasi Washington, Herbie Hancock, Flea and a lively new generation showed how the festival is stretching jazz’s boundaries without losing its center. Read the review

Film

“Scary Movies XIV” Finds Horror in Bodies, Landscapes, and Ecological Ruin

By Steve Erickson

This strong 2026 lineup ranges from a colonial nightmare in the Kalahari to a Japanese ghost story and Carlos Conceição’s chilling vision of cosmetic obsession amid climate catastrophe. Read the review

Television

“Monsters of God” Trades “Tiger King” Chaos for True-Crime Dread

By Sarah Osman

HBO’s docuseries on the illegal reptile trade is less wild than its predecessors, but its sorrowful, criminal undertow makes it unsettling in a different way. Read the review

Film

“Ice Cream Man” Melts Down in a Pool of Blood

By Peg Aloi

Eli Roth’s brightly packaged slasher has an intriguing premise, sweet candy-colored visuals, and impressive effects, but its lazy derivations, forced humor, and AI-generated cartoons leave a sour aftertaste.. Read the review

Visual Arts

“Rothko in Florence” — Against the Solace of Transcendence

By Margherita Artoni

This ambitious catalogue is strongest when it treats Mark Rothko’s paintings as shifting perceptual structures—and weakest when it resolves them into metaphysical comfort. Read the review

Books

Johannes Brahms’s Unwedded Love

By Christina Nellas Acosta

John Worthen’s biography explores the composer’s lifelong devotion to Clara Schumann and its role in shaping his music. Read the review

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Each week, Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx contributes a commentary and selects some of the magazine’s most provocative, vivid, or timely pieces to highlight. Content is added daily — go here to see what is new.

From The Editor’s Desk

It is impossible not to see some connections between conflagrations, physical and cultural, after recent reports that “AI companies are using intermediaries to acquire books at industrial scale anonymously. Companies specializing in bulk sourcing advertise their ability to locate hundreds of thousands of titles while promising confidentiality for AI clients, reflecting the sensitivity surrounding the practice.” AI giants explain that they are simply “racing to preserve human-authored knowledge before it is diluted by AI-generated text, often called ‘AI slop.’ Books published before the rise of generative AI in 2023 are especially valuable because they provide high-quality training data written entirely by humans.” The destruction of millions of volumes (“stripped apart, scanned into training datasets, and discarded”) is supposed to reassure investors of a lucrative future — by eradicating future AI slop, which many insist is unstoppable. The used-book business is already being negatively affected.

This summer, catastrophic fires are raging across forests in parts of Europe and the U.S., the fruits of the ongoing and ever-strengthening climate crisis. (In the U.S.: 5.15 million acres by August 3; in Europe: 434,976 hectares by July 29, about 1.07 million acres.) How many thousands of acres’ worth of books have been demolished by the flamethrowers of AI? No one can know for sure — for PR reasons, that information is being kept as a corporate secret. But it is clear that Anthropic and its paper-killing ilk are industrial-sized versions of the pyromaniac firemen in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Some critics argue that AI is out to colonize human consciousness. Is it too much of a stretch to also see AI as the climate crisis for literacy? Over the centuries, books have shaped our capacity for abstract thinking. Will removing them leave nothing but scorched and barren inner landscapes?

As in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, “human-authored knowledge” may be considered in decades to come as threatening authoritarian dominance, a menace to AI’s monopoly on thinking that big businesses might like minimized, perhaps even eliminated. I would like to believe that, when the novelist was working out his story’s conclusion, he had Jonathan Swift’s anthropomorphic belief in mind: “When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.” At one point in the novel, one of the “book people” says, “the most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important … We’re nothing more than dust jackets for the books, of no significance otherwise.” With the invasion of the blowtorches of AI and laws that criminalize librarians and booksellers, those who care for literacy must recognize their own significance and sound the alarm — to preserve and protect the voices of books.

— Bill Marx, Editor

Latest Views & Reviews from the Fuse

Arts Remembrance

Jeff “Monoman” Conolly -- He Knew All the Secrets

By Jon Garelick

The “Monoman” was obsessive, exacting, and unforgettable. Read the homage

Film

“Her Private Hell” — A Rorschach Test in Neon and Leather

By Nicole Veneto

Nicolas Winding Refn’s baffling, vibe‑driven film trades narrative for fetish—and asks whether you still care what the critics think. Read the review

Music

Phish Turns Fenway Into a Jam-Heavy Homecoming

By Paul Robicheau

The weekend stand in Boston offered crowd-pleasers, deep cuts, and one of Phish’s most startling bust-outs in decades. Read the review

Music

Film Composers in the Concert Hall

By Scott McLennan

A Singapore Symphony Orchestra recording of compositions by John Williams, Bernard Herrmann, and Hugo Friedhofer quietly punctures old prejudices about people who write scores for movies and “serious” music. Read the review

Dance

Brinae Ali Dances Baby Laurence Back Into the Spotlight

By Debra Cash

At Jacob’s Pillow, Brinae Ali’s Baby Laurence Legacy Project reanimates a jazz tap master’s bebop musical brilliance through choreography, live music, and technology. Read the preview

Film

“Wild Inside” — The Story of the Owl That Stopped New York

By Peter Keough

In her wry, incisive documentary, filmmaker Penny Lane turns Flaco’s rise and fall into an unusually moving inquiry into animal sentience, urban spectacle, and the cost of liberation. Read the review

Visual Arts

By Tervor Fairbrother

In Boston and Hanover, new works by Alan Michelson and Kent Monkman challenge the myth of the vanishing Native—and the Cyrus Dallin bronze that enshrined it. Read the commentary

August Short Fuses — Materia Critica

Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

Compiled by Arts Fuse Editor

Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews. Read the roundup

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Each week, Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx contributes a commentary and selects some of the magazine’s most provocative, vivid, or timely pieces to highlight. Content is added daily — go here to see what is new.

From The Editor’s Desk

We are at the beginning of what is likely to be a brief but volatile phase in the amour fou between AI, art, and criticism. Lines are being drawn even as the ground shifts beneath them. Confusion reigns. How much generative AI is too much in a creative work? When is AI a collaborator, and when is it effectively running the show? Will we be able to tell—and, if so, will we care? What percentage of machine assistance still allows a book or artwork to be accepted as human-made? And do critics have any clout in a debate that is going to shape the future of art? Will they even be invited to judge the mix? So far, they have been left out in the cold, partly because they don’t seem all that interested in the battle.

Meanwhile, scandals are forcing the issue. Mia Ballard was accused of using generative AI in her horror novel Shy Girl; she denied personally using it, but the controversy was enough for Hachette to pull the planned U.S. edition. The CBC reported that John Degen’s murder mystery Seldom Seen Road was among the first Canadian books to carry a small “Human Authored” label on its jacket, a sign of how quickly some — not all — publishers are moving to mark off human labor from machine mediation. Who would have guessed? “Human Authored” — the blurb.

According to Andrey Mir, in his provocative book The Technological Imperative, the crisis of discerning authenticity—human or memorex?—is not going to last long. AI is accelerating at such a supersonic pace that “everything created by humans will be refurbished … likely many times, into AI slop. Eventually, the share of original human-made content will decrease to an indistinguishable degree.” The outnumbered products of human-made material will be in competition with the tailored-to-be-consumable stuff from AI that will flood the market in biblical proportions.

Mir suggests that AI will shape culture, not the other way around. In the conflict between ease and difficulty, the comfort of access will win out every time. “At some point, choosing human over AI will involve too much friction,” he argues, “which does not suit the nature of frictionless digital consumption. Withdrawing from frictionless digital consumption is as hard as refusing to take soma in [Aldous] Huxley’s Brave New World; only iron-willed dissidents can do that.” Given that reasoning, humanity will likely find few defenders in America’s cultural-industrial complex, whose weak-kneed resistance to authoritarianism has only underscored how rarely the art world produces — or tolerates — genuine rebels.

— Bill Marx, Editor

Latest Views & Reviews from the Fuse

Music

The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll at Mid-Year: Consensus in Retreat

By Tom Hull

Few things more clearly attest to the endurance of the human spirit and the drive for creativity than the uninterrupted and unstoppable torrent of brilliant new jazz albums we’ve already seen this year. Read the poll results

Books

Immigrant Songs: Stories of Refugees, Borders, and Brutal Grace

By Michael Londra

In The Age of Migration, Kai Maristed follows displaced characters through political danger, private desperation, and unexpected acts of survival. Read the review

Music

Two Duets — One Language of Trust

By Steve Elman

Separated by 35 years, new releases from Ran Blake & Dominique Eade and Mick Goodrick & Fred Hersch illuminate jazz at its most intimate—where interpretation, history, and shared sensibility converge. Read the review

Music

Billy Strings Balances Precision and Firepower in Boston

By Scott McLennan

At Agganis Arena, the guitarist led a genre-spanning set from tight harmonies to deep-space jams. Read the review

Theater

Amid a Smokey Haze, Double Edge Theatre Delivers an Inspirational Warning

By Nicole Estvanik Taylor

The farm-dwelling company is reviving its 2015 roaming spectacle of ecological grief, political resistance, and communal art. Read the review

Film

Two Films about Time, Diminishment, and Redemption at the Woods Hole Film Festival

By Peter Keough

Director Robb Moss’s latest revisits countercultural lives in later years, while Amazing Live Sea Monkeys probes a bizarre empire shadowed by exploitation and extremism. Read the review

Interview

By Robert Duguay

John Stanier of Tomahawk talks about the supergroup as its members reconvene after more than a decade for a rare tour stop at the House of Blues Boston Read the interview

Commentary

The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll at Mid-Year: Warming Up a Riff — How It Happened, and Why It Matters

By Tom Hull

Few things more clearly attest to the endurance of the human spirit and the drive for creativity than the uninterrupted and unstoppable torrent of brilliant new jazz albums we’ve already seen this year. Read the essay

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Each week, Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx contributes a commentary and selects some of the magazine’s most provocative, vivid, or timely pieces to highlight. Content is added daily — go here to see what is new.

From The Editor’s Desk

John Hawkes (1925–1998) was a leading postwar American experimental writer, part of a generation that included William Gaddis, William H. Gass, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Stanley Elkin, and Robert Coover. Their novels have largely faded from cultural consciousness, though Gass’s epic trip through the alternately ghastly/lyrical fulminations of a neo-Nazi in the heartland, 1995’s The Tunnel, has recently received welcome attention. The rap on these writers is that their focus on language came at the expense of conventional satisfactions—linear narrative, sympathetic characters, and clear moral framing. In a 1965 interview, Hawkes characterized the group’s common aesthetic: “a quality of coldness, detachment, a ruthless determination to face up to the enormities of ugliness and potential failure within ourselves and in the world around us, and to bring to this exposure a savage or saving comic spirit and the saving beauties of language … to expose, ridicule, attack, but always to create and to throw into new light our potential for violence and absurdity as well as for graceful action.”

Hawkes’s interest in dramatizing “our potential for violence and absurdity” attains prophetic force in his 1976 novel Travesty, a short, fierce dissection of diseased, self-destructive masculinity. The plot is elemental: a man who calls himself “Papa” drives like a demon at night through the South of France in a fancy sports car, delivering a smug, rambling monologue to his daughter, Chantal, and her lover, Henri. He invites them to speak, but they are usually panicked or sick once they learn that he intends to crash the car into a wall. As rain falls and the auto races through the streets, Papa describes some of the landscape as he speeds by, when he is not first articulating and then dismissing possible motives for his suicidal act: revenge for Henri’s affair with Papa’s wife, an onset of terrorist insanity, or a godlike gesture of control.

Five decades on, it is still difficult to find a more pitiless portrait of an aestheticized strain of toxic masculinity. (“I love the dark night,” says Papa, as he sketches the outside world for his passengers. “Through the thick green lens of the night I see only the brightest light.”) As literary monsters go, the narrator lacks the preternaturally charming chops of Humbert Humbert, but he presents a vivid portrait of a patriarchal ego awash in “privilege” (his word), prurient sexuality, and facile rationalizations that aid and abet amorality (“We are all secret encouragers of ignorance; at heart we are all willful barbarians.”). In Travesty, domination is caricatured as a “dead passion,” a nihilistic yearning for transcendence.

— Bill Marx, Editor

Latest Views & Reviews from the Fuse

Music

At 85, Bob Dylan Still Defies Expectation

By Scott McLennan

A reconfigured band and evolving arrangements made his Boston set vital, strange, and rooted in Rough and Rowdy Ways.
Read the review

Books

Chronicling a Life of Devotion and Disquiet

By Joan Frank

Michael Klein’s new essay collection, “Happiness Ruined Everything,” weaves brushes with artistic giants into candid meditations on addiction, desire, and survival.
Read the review

Visual Arts

“America at 250” — Art and Commerce at the MFA

By Trevor Fairbrother

A sprawling 250th‑anniversary display sidles up to hot‑dog branding and influencer playfulness
Read the commentary

Music

The Guess Who — A Worthy Trip Down Memory Lane, with Caveats

By Jason M. Rubin

The Guess Who and Don Felder brought skill and spirit to Boston, though the evening’s nostalgia came packaged with more than a few modern annoyances.
Read the review

Theater

Still Dreaming on the Boston Common at 30

By Susan Saccoccia

Commonwealth Shakespeare Company celebrates its milestone season by revisiting “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” reaffirming its mission to make Shakespeare a truly public art.
Read the feature

Commentary

When Books Become Evidence — Hong Kong’s Raids and the New Global War on Dissent

By Jeremy Ray Jewell

Every bookshelf becomes a latent crime scene: China’s all-too-familiar totalitarian playbook to encourage self-censorship.
Read the analysis

Interview

On Excavating a Lost Queer Berlin

By Preston Gralla

Novelist Milo Todd discusses his novel “The Lilac People” and the challenge of reconstructing queer and trans lives under—and after—Nazism.
Read the interview

Books

A Provocative but Flawed Overview of What’s Wrong with the Media

By Dan Kennedy

Walter Lippmann defined objectivity as the fair-minded pursuit of the truth, but all too often it has degenerated into false equivalence. Canadian journalist, author, and podcaster Tara Henley tries to have it both ways.
Read the review

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Each week, Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx contributes a commentary and selects some of the magazine’s most provocative, vivid, or timely pieces to highlight. Content is added daily — go here to see what is new.

From The Editor’s Desk

John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, Reince Priebus, Steven Mnuchin, and Sam Nunberg are among those who have said Donald Trump is an idiot. But it is not the President alone; Trump’s virulent mindlessness has become normalized in international politics today. Where does the appeal of the unthinking come from? Leonhard Emmerling’s Idiots: The History of Homo Nullus (translated by Parnal Chirmuley) offers a fascinating history of the evolution of the idiot in the Western tradition, separating the figure from the buffoon, fool, madman, and jester.

Stretching from the Greeks and Paul in the New Testament to the punks and Andy Warhol, the book charts the historical transformations of a character who revels in nullification. For the Greeks, negation-gone-wild was a form of political critique. Cynics like Diogenes lived in a ceramic storage vessel because they were targeting social corruption. Saint Francis of Assisi renounced the delusions of the world for the sake of spiritual enlightenment. Over the centuries, the idiot remained an outsider, challenging our understanding of religious value as well as medical definitions of madness. Eventually, idiocy morphed into a more complex phenomenon—when was one playing at being an idiot, and when was one the real McCoy? Then, with the modern era, a purposeful lack of intelligence became a source of cultural clout: in contemporary art, radical purposelessness became a way, for some, to subvert the conventional. These gestures of nullity were often rewarded with fame and fortune.

It was only a matter of time before a dependence on pure intuition in the name of authenticity, along with a wholesale rejection of expertise, became political power. On the public scene today, according to Emmerling, the idiot “pursues his own interests, the provincial, small-minded know-it-all to whom education means nothing, but having an opinion means everything, and who, with his smartphone in front of his nose, blurts out his news masquerading as news into the digital world incessantly.”

I am proud to report that theater may have been the first to analyze the worship of inanity. For Emmerling, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi presents a dramatic prototype of our current belief in the heroics of “idiocy.” His protagonist represents the ascendancy of grotesque, self-seeking nullity; he transforms ignorance and appetite into murderous public action. Jarry and his 1896 absurdist play were prophetic because they project, through zany comedy, how stupidity can be converted into a charismatic style that transcends exposure and scandal. Trump and his enablers are the descendants of Ubu Roi, “peddling their lack of aptitude, education, and expertise as a form of authenticity and authority.” One wishes Idiots was a funnier book about idiocy’s evolution — but it is about the transformation of ignorance into evil.

— Bill Marx, Editor

Latest Views & Reviews from the Fuse

Books

Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story – Renaissance Guitar Man

By Ed Symkus

Jeff Beck is a bigger guitar hero than you realized.
Read the review

Theater

Playwright Interview: “A New Era,” Reconsidered

By Nicole Estvanik Taylor

Playwright Miranda Austen ADEkoje revisits an 1895 gathering of Black women activists, uncovering the tensions, ambitions, and humanity behind a historic coalition.
Read the review

Dance

The Akram Khan Company — Remembering, Selectively

By Debra Cash

In Thikra: Night of Remembering, Akram Khan’s searing imagery of female ritual and sacrifice is shadowed by what the work chooses not to confront.
Read the review

Music

Daniel Donato on Bringing Cosmic Country to the Levitate Festival

By Robert Duguay

The rising Nashville artist on genre-blending, spiritual energy onstage, and a full-circle live album.
Read the interview

Theater

Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” Finds Its Knife-Edge at Gloucester Stage

By David Greenham

This crisp revival turns emotional recoil, backward chronology, and elegant restraint into a sharp study of infidelity.
Read the review

Film

Tribeca Film Festival, Part Two: Addicts on Chelsea (MA) Streets, Love and Death at Sea, and Micronations

By David D’Arcy

At this year’s festival, two dramas stood out among the narrative films—stark, street-level tales of addiction and a wintry queer love story turned murder mystery set on a Canadian ship.
Read the review

Music

Jazz Album Review: Guitarist Eric Hofbauer’s High Concept Yields Deep Rewards

By Jon Garelick

Eric Hofbauer and EHX turn a wide-ranging songbook into a cohesive, emotionally charged jazz narrative.
Read the review

Television

This Time Around, A Wilder Prairie

By Sarah Osman

Strong performances and sharper realism redefine Little House on the Prairie for a new generation.
Read the review

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From The Editor's Desk

With President Donald Trump recently insisting that communism is “the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding,” and arguing that it poses a greater danger to the republic than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11—perhaps even all combined—it may be time to revisit the “scoundrel times” of the 1950s, when the Red Scare made its initial cultural impact. I have been reading Philip Roth’s 1998 novel I Married a Communist and am enjoying it; he aptly describes McCarthyism as “the first postwar flowering of the American unthinking.”

In what ways might artists respond to this invitation to enter a new era of national “unthinking”? The 1972 script Are You Now or Have You Ever Been draws on material from Eric Bentley’s Thirty Years of Treason, which compiles the actual testimony of Hollywood figures before the House Un-American Activities Committee at the height of McCarthy-era paranoia. Among those compelled to answer the era’s infamous question—“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”—were Arthur Miller, Jerome Robbins, Paul Robeson, Elia Kazan, Lillian Hellman, Abe Burrows, and Lionel Stander. A production of the script is running at New York City Center Stage through September 11. Bentley left playwright Bertolt Brecht out of his onstage lineup; a dramatization of Brecht’s bamboozling of HUAC can be found here.

Docudramas can be both enraging and instructive, but this moment may call for more direct satiric confrontation. To get the ball rolling, I would propose a movie or stage adaptation updating Leo McCarey’s infamous 1952 anti-communist melodrama My Son John. In the original, salt-of-the-earth parents come to suspect that their son, a government employee, is abetting the communist cause—a premise that earned the film an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. What might a contemporary version look like? Perhaps conspiratorially minded MAGA parents begin to suspect that their son or daughter is entangled—whether truly or not—with commies. Or perhaps they think one of them has been lured into the clutches of antifa? And, in keeping with McCarey’s own insistence, the story should arrive at a happy ending

— Editor Bill Marx

Archive:

From the Editor’s Desk: 2026

From the Editor’s Desk: 2025

From the Editor’s Desk: 2024

Coming Attractions through July 20 — What Will Light Your Fire

Compiled by Arts Fuse Editor

Our expert critics supply a guide to film, visual art, theater, author readings, television, and music. More offerings will be added as they come in.

Visual Arts Review: “Where’s Boston? 50 Years Later” — A City in Focus

By Lauren Kaufmann

Constantine Manos’s bicentennial-era photographs capture a city divided, resilient, and still recognizable half a century later.

Film Review: Married to Amazement — “Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World”

By Michael Londra

This documentary about poet Mary Oliver is a moving study of solitude, partnership, and the stubborn power of wonder.

Concert Review: Goose in Boston, Nights One and Two — Precision Jams, Pop Hooks, Chaos Controlled

By Scott McLennan and Paul Robicheau

Goose’s blitz at Leader Bank Pavilion on night one dovetailed improvisation with irresistibly catchy rock.

Television Review: “Elle” — No Bends, No Snaps, No Point?

By Sarah Osman

The Legally Blonde prequel Elle spotlights a charming Lexi Minetree, but struggles to justify its place in the Blonde-verse.

Dance Review: Ilya Vidrin’s “Proxies” — The Opposite of Avatar

By Debra Cash

A sensor-driven dance work probes embodiment, data, and the limits of technological intimacy.

Book Review: Beyond the Canon — How Cultural Authority Is Made

By Julie Trébault

Move Over, Mona Lisa maps the “inequality pipeline” linking museums, publishing, and academia—and challenges the systems that shape what the world sees and reads.

Help Keep The Arts Fuse Lit!

Precious few independent online arts publications make it to double digits. Please give us the resources the magazine needs to persevere at an essential cultural task.

Keep the Fuse lit and support our 70+ writers by making a donation.

The magazine is published by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to cultural/educational/literary enrichment. EIN: 27-0924769

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And…tell your friends about the in-depth arts coverage you can’t get anywhere else.

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Bill Marx

wmarx103@gmail.com

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From The Editor's Desk

Because journalistic arts criticism is under increasing threat in mainstream media, it is important that it be defined clearly. Reviews are independent judgements; verdicts that are backed up by evidence and analysis. There is a consumer guide component to reviews, but they are also about discrimination, separating the wheat from the chaff. Recommendations are always positive — reviews should be free to let the chips fall where they may. Book review publications, if only for the sake of editorial credibility, must cover the gamut: positive, negative, and mixed.

So the announcement that Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts is now publishing Porter Square Review of Books, featuring about one review every week or so, needs to be greeted with a caveat. It is admirable that, as bookstore co-owner Josh Cook said to Sophie Culpepper at NiemanLab, the magazine’s goal is to “throw our support behind smaller presses and less well-known authors, so you’ll probably see a bit more debuts, a bit more lesser-known books.” But that sunny side approach is not good for book reviewing. PSRB is committed to cheerleading rather than criticism: the first four notices on the site are flat out raves, written by people connected with the bookstore, including its marketing department.

Book reviewing in the United States is eroding along multiple fronts. It declines not only when newspapers and magazines eliminate their review sections, but also when criticism is recast as publicity. A book culture that cannot see the value of sustaining negative judgments—or even mixed appraisals—undercuts the very conditions that make praise matter.

— Editor Bill Marx

Archive:

From the Editor’s Desk: 2026

From the Editor’s Desk: 2025

From the Editor’s Desk: 2024

Theater Review: “The Zionists” — A Bold Debate, Blunted

By Bill Marx

S. Asher Gelman’s script opens as a rare, bracing political drama before collapsing into conventional family melodrama.

Book Review: “The Veiled Prophet” — The Pageantry of Reaction

By Lucas Spiro

Veiled power in St. Louis – How a secret society turned class war into ritual and never let go.

Classical Music Album Review: Mahler’s Fifth, Without Urgency

By Jonathan Blumhofer

Andris Nelsons and the Vienna Philharmonic deliver a polished but curiously inert reading of a symphonic powerhouse.

Visual Arts Review: What Do Trees Know?

By Lisa Reindorf

Artists confront climate change by probing the intelligence, fragility, and resilience of trees.

Book Review: Rivalry as Collaboration — Dylan, the Beatles, and the Sound of Influence

By Michael Londra

Jim Windolf’s joint portrait argues that competition between icons did not divide them—it reshaped modern music.

Film Review: “Jackass: Best and Last” — A Eulogy for Shitheads

By Nicole Veneto

A ragged farewell that mixes new stunts with archival scraps as Johnny Knoxville and his merry band of masochists age out of self-destruction.

Theater Review: Arlekin’s “Delirium” Reimagines Ionesco with Visual Flair and Urgency

By Bill Marx

Arlekin’s high-energy adaptation underscores absurdism’s resonance in an age of conflict.

Help Keep The Arts Fuse Lit!

Precious few independent online arts publications make it to double digits. Please give us the resources the magazine needs to persevere at an essential cultural task.

Keep the Fuse lit and support our 70+ writers by making a donation.

The magazine is published by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to cultural/educational/literary enrichment. EIN: 27-0924769

Keep The Fuse Lit

The Arts Fuse also needs underwriting for the magazine to continue to grow.

And…tell your friends about the in-depth arts coverage you can’t get anywhere else.

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Bill Marx

wmarx103@gmail.com

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From The Editor's Desk

Thanks to all those who contributed to the magazine’s Spring Appeal. We have met our goal, but that doesn’t mean we could not use some icing on the cake. For those who have not yet donated to the gallant cause of sustaining a future for excellence in arts journalism, please consider making as generous a gift as you can. You might also consider becoming a monthly contributor—even small, regular donations can add up in a meaningful way. You can make these gifts online or by check.

For those interested in hearing me expound on the value of arts criticism in an age awash in marketing slop, turn to the latest edition of The Short Fuse podcast, where three other Boston noteworthies and I are posed the big question: “Can the Arts Create a Ruckus?” Those also grappling with the issue are Akiba Abaka, Interim Executive Director, National Center for Afro-American Artists; Dawn Simmons, Artistic Director, SpeakEasy Stage Company; and architect Anthony J. Piermarini, Associate Professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology.

My combative response reflects my belief that the arts cannot create a ruckus without the aid of independent arts reviewing — critics who know their craft inspire the kind of dialogue that focuses on discernment, debate, and disagreement. Who knows if something is new or shocking— unless knowledgeable critics dare to draw lines? Along with the fog of influencers, there’s a new foe of critical thinking: AI rewards homogeneity, not risky evaluation.

From The Guardian: “The recent MIT study’s analysis notes that an AI system’s approach – and whether it’s more prescriptive or probing – can affect a user’s ability to maintain good judgment. Although users are often looking for a chatbot to provide speed and certainty, it’s the more nuanced, guided questioning that can improve critical thinking, the study notes.” That is what substantial arts criticism should be — nuanced, guiding, challenging — and that is what you will find in The Arts Fuse.

With heartfelt thanks to those who have supported the magazine as it enters its 20th year. Onwards …

— Editor Bill Marx

Archive:

From the Editor’s Desk: 2026

From the Editor’s Desk: 2025

From the Editor’s Desk: 2024

Theater Review: “Black Swan” — Beauty, Madness, and a Misguided Musical

By Martin Copenhaver

Despite striking choreography and a tour-de-force lead, the A.R.T.’s adaptation of Black Swan can’t escape the film’s excesses — or its own thin score.

Coming Attractions Through July 6 — What Will Light Your Fire

Complied by Arts Fuse Editor

Our expert critics supply a guide to film, visual art, theater, author readings, television, and music. More offerings will be added as they come in.

Festival Review: Green River Festival Hits a New Peak with Eclectic, Youth-Driven Lineup

By Paul Robicheau

A record crowd for genre-blurring acts, with Geese and Wednesday signaling a shift in the festival’s identity.

Film Reviews: My Provincetown Film Fest 2026 — Highs, Lows, and One Film I Loved

By Gerald Peary

From Anne Packard’s irresistible presence to a polarizing slasher homage and a breakout no-budget film, this year’s roundup offered plenty of satisfactions and some surprises.

Film Reviews: Two “Rocky Horror” Documentaries Mark the Film’s Golden Anniversary

By Christopher Caggiano

Strange Journey traces the origins of one of cinema's most unlikely cults. Time Warp shows why it still matters.

Short Fuse Podcast #89: “Can the Arts Create a Ruckus?

By Elizabeth Howard

Host Elizabeth Howard moderates a conversation about whether the arts can provoke, reflect, and sustain cultural dialogue in a period of disruption and transformation.

Arts Commentary: The Kennedy Center and the Boston Symphony Orchestra — A Tale of Two Crises

By Jonathan Blumhofer

A court-ordered reset in Washington and a self-inflicted rupture in Boston expose deeper failures of leadership, transparency, and trust.

Help Keep The Arts Fuse Lit!

Precious few independent online arts publications make it to double digits. Please give us the resources the magazine needs to persevere at an essential cultural task.

Keep the Fuse lit and support our 70+ writers by making a donation.

The magazine is published by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to cultural/educational/literary enrichment. EIN: 27-0924769

Keep The Fuse Lit

The Arts Fuse also needs underwriting for the magazine to continue to grow.

And…tell your friends about the in-depth arts coverage you can’t get anywhere else.

Share The Arts Fuse

Questions, comments, concerns?

Editor-in-Chief

Bill Marx

wmarx103@gmail.com

Subscribe now

From The Editor's Desk

“The connective tissue between makers and communities — the critics, the curators, the alt-weeklies, the record stores, the civic institutions that brokered between artists and audiences — got bypassed. The platforms didn’t replace that contextual value, they monetized its absence. And it has undermined and sabotaged traditional culture models ever since.

The middleware that connected artists to the public was extracted, not replaced. Over the past year, that extraction has accelerated sharply. Google’s AI Overviews have eaten the search-referrals that kept the economy of the open web viable. Chartbeat data shows global publisher traffic from Google down by roughly a third. Google traffic to small publishers is down 60 percent. When an Overview appears, the click-through rate on the top-ranked result collapses. About 58 percent of searches now end in zero clicks. The chatbot referrals supposedly replacing them account for less than 1 percent of publisher page views.

Why does this matter to an arts organization? Because the same pipeline is what’s made you visible. It displays your listing, your review, your interview, your season announcement, your ticket processor.”

Douglas McLennan, AJ Chronicles blog

Resist the algorithm! Support The Arts Fuse

19 years ago this month, I began the Arts Fuse as a way to combine the best of arts coverage of the past with the opportunities presented by what was coming online. I was aware of the breakdown of cultural coverage in mainstream media, but I had no idea how dangerous the web would become for writing and thinking seriously about the arts. The Arts Fuse is maintaining the vital mission of traditional arts coverage — to deepen as well as strengthen the “connective tissue” among artists, audiences, and critics. Culture must not be reduced to consumption — one way to combat this is to encourage public dialogue that articulates the value of the arts, providing a place for substantial discussion and debate. That is what the Arts Fuse has been and will be in the future as we head toward our 20th birthday.

Every day, I hear from artists and cultural organizations, large and small, that the publication is indispensable. We ask that our followers be part of that “connective tissue” — not only by reading the non-profit magazine, but by contributing their support so that the Fuse can continue.

My gratitude to those who have already contributed. For those who have not yet donated to the cause, please consider making as generous a gift as you can. You might also consider becoming a monthly contributor—even small, regular donations can add up in a meaningful way. You can make these gifts online or by check.

With heartfelt thanks,

— Editor Bill Marx

Archive:

From the Editor’s Desk: 2026

From the Editor’s Desk: 2025

From the Editor’s Desk: 2024

Film Review: Life Comes at You Fast in “Jinsei”

By Peter Keough

Ryuya Suzuki’s DIY animated epic fuses pop-idol satire, existential dread, and apocalyptic spectacle into a singular coming-of-age saga.

Concert Review: Claypool Gold — Three Bands, One Brain, Infinite Detours

By Scott McLennan

The Claypool Gold tour turns Leader Bank Pavilion into a shifting laboratory of psychedelia, satire, and virtuosic groove.

Television Review: “Alice and Steve” — Laughing Optional, Discomfort Guaranteed

By Sarah Osman

In the series Alice and Steve, Nicola Walker anchors a dark comedy that’s less about laughs than about longing, aging, and emotional dysfunction.

Book Review: Frederic Edwin Church, America’s Master of Grandeur

By Peter Walsh

Victoria Johnson’s lively biography celebrates Frederic Church’s ambition, while overlooking some of the broader shifts that dimmed his legacy.

Dance Preview: Reclaiming the Social Heart of Dance

By Rachel Hackam

Shakia Barron’s The Gathering transforms the stage into a shared space of rhythm, improvisation, and release.

Book Review: “The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution” — What’s the Domesday Book Got to Do with It?

By Daniel Lazare

Historian Mark Peterson’s book makes land the sole driver of American development—ignoring racism, morality, citizenship, and the heart of the Civil War.

Arts Commentary: What Might the Kennedy Center Best Become?

By Joseph Horowitz

A reconsideration of the Kennedy Center’s unrealized national mission — and what its future could yet hold.

Help Keep The Arts Fuse Lit!

Precious few independent online arts publications make it to double digits. Please give us the resources the magazine needs to persevere at an essential cultural task.

Keep the Fuse lit and support our 70+ writers by making a donation.

The magazine is published by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to cultural/educational/literary enrichment. EIN: 27-0924769

Keep The Fuse Lit

The Arts Fuse also needs underwriting for the magazine to continue to grow.

And…tell your friends about the in-depth arts coverage you can’t get anywhere else.

Share The Arts Fuse

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Editor-in-Chief

Bill Marx

wmarx103@gmail.com

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From The Editor's Desk

“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.” — Baudelaire

For 19 years, The Arts Fuse has been committed to nurturing the arts, strengthening our mothership by providing critical judgments and generating dialogue about their importance in our lives. Today, this mission has become more vital than ever, given the current one-two punch: the diminishment of arts coverage in the mainstream media and the rise of authoritarian thuggery.

Our Spring Appeal is one of two times each year that the nonprofit magazine asks for support from its devoted readers. My thanks to those who have already contributed to the cause of arts journalism, whose value Henry James summed up nicely: “The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption in, and our enjoyment of, the things that feed the mind as aware of themselves as possible.”

For those who have not yet donated, please consider making as generous a gift as you can. You might also consider becoming a monthly contributor—even small, regular donations can add up in a meaningful way. You can make these gifts online or by check.

With heartfelt thanks,

— Editor Bill Marx

Archive:

From the Editor’s Desk: 2026

From the Editor’s Desk: 2025

From the Editor’s Desk: 2024

Coming Attractions Through June 22 — What Will Light Your Fire

Our expert critics supply a guide to film, visual art, theater, author readings, television, and music. More offerings will be added as they come in.

Concert Review: Little Feat’s Farewell Tour — No Signs of Fadeout

By Scott McLennan

At Indian Ranch, Little Feat balances nostalgia and renewal in a high-caliber stop on its “Last Farewell Tour.”

Theater Review: “Eureka Day” — Groupthink Gone Viral

By Martin Copenhaven

Jonathan Spector’s successful satire finds biting comedy—and uneasy truth—in the limits of well-meaning consensus.

Book Review: “Death of the Soccer God” — A Life Replayed at Gunpoint

By Kai Maristed

Dimitry Elias Léger’s glorious novel turns a final moment into a sweeping meditation on love, history, and the Beautiful Game.

Film Review: “Disclosure Day” — Broadcasting the Truth?

By Steve Erickson

Steven Spielberg revisits extraterrestrial wonder with technical virtuosity, but his media-age fable drifts into sentimentality and soft-focus optimism.

Local Author Interview: Lelia Farsakh — A Life in Exile, A Voice in Cambridge

By Preston Gralla

Palestinian scholar Lelia Farsakh reflects on a life shaped by displacement, her father’s legacy, and the political and personal stakes behind her emerging memoir.

Cultural Commentary: Death by Incorporation — Why Do Bean-Counters Run Arts Boards?

By Thomas Connolly

When corporate thinking dominates cultural institutions, the art often pays the price..

Help Keep The Arts Fuse Lit!

Precious few independent online arts publications make it to double digits. Please give us the resources the magazine needs to persevere at an essential cultural task.

Keep the Fuse lit and support our 70+ writers by making a donation.

The magazine is published by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to cultural/educational/literary enrichment. EIN: 27-0924769

Keep The Fuse Lit

The Arts Fuse also needs underwriting for the magazine to continue to grow.

And…tell your friends about the in-depth arts coverage you can’t get anywhere else.

Share The Arts Fuse

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Editor-in-Chief

Bill Marx

wmarx103@gmail.com

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From The Editor's Desk

Cultural criticism is not disappearing because the arts no longer matter. It is vanishing because mainstream, corporate-minded media platforms prioritize speed, homogeneity, and algorithmic visibility over thoughtful analysis and critical insight.

Now in its 19th year, The Arts Fuse continues to grow, reaching more than a million readers worldwide who seek independent, high-quality writing on arts and culture—reviews, commentaries, and features that take provocative positions, engage a wide range of ideas, and give serious attention to both major artists and those too often overlooked. Alongside our criticism, we produce The Short Fuse podcast and publish a new poem every Thursday.

Your support helps us pay our writers, expand our coverage, and keep incisive arts criticism and cultural commentary available without a paywall or paid subscriptions. Needless to say, the magazine is not free to produce.

Our Spring Appeal is now underway. Please consider making as generous a gift as you can. Two magnanimous donors are offering a $3,000 match. Help us meet it quickly and double your impact. You might also consider becoming a monthly contributor—even small, regular donations can add up in a meaningful way. You can make these gifts online or by check.

With heartfelt thanks,

— Editor Bill Marx

Archive:

From the Editor’s Desk: 2026

From the Editor’s Desk: 2025

From the Editor’s Desk: 2024

June Short Fuses — Materia Critica

Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

Film Review: “Miss You, Love You” Brings Jim Rash to HBO

By Sarah Osman

Allison Janney and Andrew Rannells star in a bittersweet new drama about grief, love, and second chances.

Theater Review: Quick Changes, Big Laughs in “The Mystery of Irma Vep”

By David Greenham

Gabriel Graetz and Paul Melendy power Charles Ludlam’s camp classic, even as a stripped-down design leaves some comic potential untapped.

Jazz Concert Review: The Write Stuff – Kurt Rosenwinkel Quintet at the Regattabar

By Jon Garelick

This was not genre-pushing experimentation. Kurt Rosenwinkel’s tunes stayed well within recognizable patterns of chords and rhythms, but the inventive craft alerted the ear at every turn.

Book Review: A Forceful History of America’s Unfinished Reckoning

By Roberta Silman

In a sweeping account of the nation’s anniversary milestones, Eddie Glaude Jr. shows how whitewashing and racial exclusion have shaped America’s self-image from 1826 to 2026.

Arts Remembrance: Sonny Rollins, Jazz’s ‘Saxophone Colossus,’ Dies at 95

Compiled by Arts Fuse Editor

To appreciate Sonny Rollins is to marvel at the casual ordinariness of his blazing genius.

Arts Commentary: The Last Laugh — Stephen Colbert, Comedy, and Cultural Resistance

By Matt Hanson

How Stephen Colbert’s late-night run became a casualty of corporate power, political retaliation, and the thin skin of America’s oligarch class.

Help Keep The Arts Fuse Lit!

Precious few independent online arts publications make it to double digits. Please give us the resources the magazine needs to persevere at an essential cultural task.

Keep the Fuse lit and support our 70+ writers by making a donation.

The magazine is published by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to cultural/educational/literary enrichment. EIN: 27-0924769

Keep The Fuse Lit

The Arts Fuse also needs underwriting for the magazine to continue to grow.

And…tell your friends about the in-depth arts coverage you can’t get anywhere else.

Share The Arts Fuse

Questions, comments, concerns?

Editor-in-Chief

Bill Marx

wmarx103@gmail.com

Subscribe now

From The Editor's Desk

It feels ungenerous to take aim at mainstream arts coverage just as it slides, helpless and accelerating, down a greased chute toward extinction. Still, attention should be paid, if only to take note of what is being missed and to hail an independent media that’s picking up the cultural slack. As in earlier editorials, I have come up with an incomplete list of the significant films that The Boston Globe didn’t bother to review over the preceding months. About two years ago, I asked the paper’s arts editors for why important films were being neglected: I am still waiting for an answer. It is never too late to hear from the Globe why it is not doing its job. (Pat on the back: a number of these movies have been reviewed by The Arts Fuse.)

Challenging independent and/or foreign films

The Voice of Hind Rahab (interview with director, no review)

The Rip (the film’s trailer was reviewed!)

Greenland Two: The Migration

Crime 101

Dead Man’s Wire

Magellan (foreign)

A Poet (foreign)

The Love that Remains (foreign)

Miroirs No. 3 (foreign)

The Wizard of the Kremlin (foreign)

Erupcja (foreign)

The Stranger (foreign)

The President’s Cake (foreign)

Films by women

Die My Love (mentioned as one of the films to see in the Globe’s Fall Preview — but not reviewed)

Amrum (foreign)

Documentaries

Steal This Story, Please (!)

Orwell: 2+2=5 (interview with director, no review)

— Bill Marx

Archive:

From the Editor’s Desk: 2026

From the Editor’s Desk: 2025

From the Editor’s Desk: 2024

Coming Attractions Through June 8 — What Will Light Your Fire

Our expert critics supply a guide to film, visual art, theater, author readings, television, and music. More offerings will be added as they come in.

Book Review: Not with a Crash but a Siege — The Real Story of Constantinople’s Fall

By Thomas Filbin

Historian Anthony Kaldellis recasts the fall of Constantinople as a long process of attrition, shaped by strategy, fear, and the limits of Western indifference.

Television Review: Apple TV’s “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” Delivers Anxiety, Not Ecstasy

By Sarah Osman

Tatiana Maslany anchors a cluttered but compulsively watchable thriller about cam culture, murder, and a very stressed-out mom

Concert Review: Bruce Springsteen’s Gospel of Resistance

By Paul Robicheau

In Boston, the Boss fused crowd-pleasing anthems with a forceful anti-Trump jeremiad—raising questions even as he roused the faithful.

Book Review: The Roots of the Thin Blue Line — How Slavery Created American Policing

By Bill Littlefield

A powerful new book exposes how the fear of Black liberation shaped the American legal order—and how the legacy of the slave patrol endures today.

Film Review: “I Love Boosters” — Stealing Style, Seizing Power

By Steve Erickson

Boots Riley fuses anti-capitalist critique with surrealist comedy, imagining revolt as both necessity and joy.

Book Review: “Defending the Music” – A Bracing Voice from a Bolder Critical Age

By Jonathan Blumhofer

This substantial collection of the writings of classical music critic Michael Steinberg evokes a time when critics educated, provoked, and helped build cultural life.

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From The Editor's Desk

In his column today, Paul Krugman argues that the blitzkrieg of corruption unleashed by anti-democratic forces within the American government has reached a point of no return: “Either they succeed in destroying America as we know it, or they won’t. And until that’s resolved, they may as well engage in even more corruption and criminal acts.” As I have noted before, Boston’s performing arts organizations have largely chosen to ignore these mounting threats to democracy, ducking controversy—even the faintest whiff of protest—in the hope that all will somehow be well.

That indifference, however, may be shifting. Arts Fuse stage critic Robert Israel, surveying recently announced theater seasons, detects tentative but welcome signs that companies may have begun to acknowledge dangerous political realities. He notes what he calls “flickers of healthy sparks” (see his commentary below).

My hope lies less with current institutions than with the discontent that is stirring beneath them. Many public figures and commentators predict that, with the rise of A.I., there will soon be little need for human beings. In her recent New York Times column, “Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass,” Jasmine Sun notes that “the workforce will shift toward less automatable jobs where humans retain a comparative advantage—such as entrepreneurship, care work, the skilled trades, and entertainment like sports and the performing arts.” The efficiencies promised by A.I., particularly in marketing and technology, may lower barriers to production, making it easier to create theater that reflects the pressing concerns of communities and civic organizations—labor unions, political parties, and others.

As A.I. displaces jobs, especially among the young, it may also intensify a hunger for the tactile and communal experiences that only live performance can offer. “I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms,” dramatist Thornton Wilder wrote, “the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.” Freed from commercial imperatives, smaller-scale productions may begin to ponder the urgent concerns that larger institutions have been reluctant to confront—political, cultural, and social alike: the fate of democracy, the challenge of A.I., the erosion of international law, rising inequality, and the deepening climate crisis. Chances are it will be theater that asserts the value of human beings against the corporate-fueled vision of an automated future.

— Bill Marx

Archive:

From the Editor’s Desk: 2026

From the Editor’s Desk: 2025

From the Editor’s Desk: 2024

Author Interview: Annie Zaleski on Stevie Nicks’s Lasting Power

By Blake Maddux

The author of Stevie Nicks in 50 Songs talks about Nicks’s enduring mystique, her influence on younger artists, and the challenge of choosing just 50 tracks.

Theater Review: A Barrio-Born Oedipus That Engages, but Rarely Devastates

By Bill Marx

Set amid the rituals and turmoils of barrio life, this contemporary take on Oedipus Rex trades Sophoclean complexity for theatrical vitality.

Theater Reviews: Two Shows on Broadway Attempt to Capture the Dark — “The Lost Boys” and “The Rocky Horror Show”

By Christopher Caggiano

Two beloved cult properties arrive on Broadway with formidable casts and decades of devotion behind them – but conjuring darkness turns out to be harder than it looks.

Opera Album Review: Argento’s “Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe” Finally Recorded—Rich, Strange, and Long Overdue

By Ralph P. Locke

Dominick Argento’s adventurous 1975 operatic transit through the psyche of Edgar Allan Poe proves to be both delightful and disturbing.

Book Review: Stop Romanticizing the Starving Artist

By Debra Cash

Making Art and Making a Living assembles colorful tales of ingenuity while skirting the economic inequities that make them necessary.

Visual Arts Review: Rembrandt’s Jewish Amsterdam

By Lauren Kaufmann

An MFA exhibition traces how Amsterdam’s Jewish community shaped the artist’s imagination, revealing a rich interplay of daily life, biblical narrative, and cultural exchange.

Stage Commentary: Where’s the Fire? Boston Theater’s Cautious Return to Relevance

By Robert Israel

After a year of safe revivals and recycled material, companies hint at change—but caution, celebrity casting, and déjà vu still dominate the lineup.

Help Keep The Arts Fuse Lit!

Precious few independent online arts publications make it to double digits. Please give us the resources the magazine needs to persevere at an essential cultural task.

Keep the Fuse lit and support our 70+ writers by making a donation.

The magazine is published by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to cultural/educational/literary enrichment. EIN: 27-0924769

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And…tell your friends about the in-depth arts coverage you can’t get anywhere else.

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From The Editor's Desk

Brutish autocrats are gaining ground in the government. An insane war grinds on with no end in sight. The economy is sputtering. Libraries and freedom of speech under attack. None of these troubles (and more) seems to trouble Boston theaters, which continue kicking up their heels inside a feel-good bubble. Around here, it’s matter of sticking to the right commercial priorities: democracy may be on the ropes and inflation climbing, but rejoice—the American Repertory Theater might snag a Tony for its socko Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York). Joy! Ticket sales!

For those who believe the stage ought to grapple with the world we actually inhabit—by spelunking the grisly pits we’re digging for ourselves—this cheerfulness smacks of a cowardly evasion. Which makes it all the more bracing to encounter productions elsewhere that refuse to stage the anesthetic. Among the works that speak directly to America’s current authoritarian drift is Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satire The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. The Times Literary Supplement’s rave for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current staging confirms my sense: this sardonic parable of power-hungry thugs mounting an insurrection captures, with unnerving precision, the showbiz vulgarity of our own would-be dictator.

As critic John-Paul Stonard observes, Ui is a low-rent gangster whose murderous ascent mirrors Hitler’s: a sociopath who “builds his empire of violence through a protection racket targeting cauliflower traders in Chicago and Cicero.” Spiced with allusions to Trump, the RSC production is not just here “to entertain us with gall and grimace, or to remind us of the banality of evil … the point is to bring us back to what is happening in our world right now, and there is a stirring and infectious sense that the players know this, that they know the importance of what they are doing.” Productions like this are an invaluable reminder of the important things — artistic, political — our fearful theaters are not doing and our shamelessly docile critics are not demanding.

Archive:

From the Editor’s Desk: 2026

From the Editor’s Desk: 2025

From the Editor’s Desk: 2024

Book Review: In “Sad Tiger,” Truth Cuts Deeper Than Memoir

By Kai Maristed

Neige Sinno’s Sad Tiger turns a devastating childhood experience into a fearless, searching work of moral and psychological clarity.

Poetry Review: Adrian Matejka’s “Be Easy” — Identity, History, and the “Alpha Poet”

By Michael Londra

Poet Adrian Matejka distills identity, anti-racist critique, political commentary, and literary history into rapid left-right-left punches, each landing hard.

Concert Review: Controlled Chaos — The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis Ignite City Winery

By Paul Robicheau

With chemistry forged on tour, the group fuses jazz, punk, and prog into a fluid live assault.

Book Review: Literature vs. McCarthyism — A Battle Marjorie Garber Only Thinks She’s Winning

By Thomas Connolly

Marjorie Garber’s case for poetry as resistance proves more fanciful than persuasive.

Book Review: Literary Critic Harold Bloom — The Man Who Read Too Much?

By Matt Hanson

A new collection of Harold Bloom’s letters reveals a critic who found the heights of Western literature far more inviting than the “drab” reality of a Vermont forest.

Film Review: “Obsession” — The Horror of Dating for a New Generation

By Michael Morano

Director Curry Barker’s debut turns dating, consent, and loneliness into a bleak and deeply felt horror tragedy.

Film Commentary: “Cuckoo’s Nest” in the Age of Trump — Viewer Beware!

By Bob Katz

What happens when the rebel archetype outlives its ideals — and finds new, troubling champions.

Help Keep The Arts Fuse Lit!

Precious few independent online arts publications make it to double digits. Please give us the resources the magazine needs to persevere at an essential cultural task.

Keep the Fuse lit and support our 70+ writers by making a donation.

The magazine is published by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to cultural/educational/literary enrichment. EIN: 27-0924769

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And…tell your friends about the in-depth arts coverage you can’t get anywhere else.

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Bill Marx

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From The Editor's Desk

On the heels of my April 22 editorial on the United States supporting Israel’s acts of culturicide in Gaza, a parallel logic emerges at home. In Arizona, under the banner of “border security,” the Trump administration has overseen the destruction of a Native American heritage site—an act that reveals how readily cultural erasure is justified when folded into the language of national defense.

According to a recent report in The Intercept, on April 23 “a rare archaeological site in the Sonoran Desert was bulldozed by a Department of Homeland Security contractor involved in building the latest sections of Donald Trump’s border wall.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed the destruction, and stated that it was coordinating with tribal authorities on next steps—an acknowledgment that arrives only after irreversible damage has already been done.

The site lies on land sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose members have long resisted the intrusion of border wall construction across their reservation. During Trump’s first term, the tribe successfully fought to preserve the 272-foot Las Playas Intaglio, an ancient ground design etched into the desert of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. At this point, it looks as if the tribe’s luck has run out.

Professional organizations have not been silent. The Society of Architectural Historians has issued a clear statement opposing continued border wall construction in culturally sensitive areas and calling for the removal of existing sections. Yet the administration has relied on the REAL ID Act of 2005, which grants the Secretary of Homeland Security sweeping authority to waive dozens of federal, state, and local laws in the name of national security. As the Society notes, this waiver has been deployed most aggressively to insulate border wall construction from public scrutiny and legal challenge.

What emerges is not an isolated incident but a governing principle: when culture is deemed to be expendable, the law is reshaped to permit its destruction. The same rationale that enables the obliteration of heritage abroad—framed as collateral to security or strategy—operates domestically with equal force. In this case, sacred archaeological memory and Indigenous sovereignty are obstacles to be cleared.

If cultural institutions, scholarly societies, and the broader public fail to respond with more urgency than they are doing so now, they risk normalizing a precedent in which heritage survives only at the discretion of executive power. This is not merely a policy dispute; it is a test of whether the United States will recognize cultural preservation as a non-negotiable value—or continue to treat it as expendable whenever it proves inconvenient.

Archive:

From the Editor’s Desk: 2026

From the Editor’s Desk: 2025

From the Editor’s Desk: 2024

May Short Fuses — Materia Critica

Compiled by Arts Fuse Editor

Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

Arts Commentary: The Boston Symphony’s New Humanities Blueprint Makes Sense

By Joseph Horowitz

Why festival programming—and humanities partnerships—can help the BSO.

Visual Arts Review: Rewriting the Machine — Raffaella della Olga’s Radical Typewriter Art

By Debra Cash

Raffaella della Olga prepares manual typewriters the way John Cage prepared pianos, using their percussive power to completely subvert their original purpos

Poetry Review: Mortality’s Muse — Building the Ship of Death

By Michael Londra

D. H. Lawrence’s final poems confront mortality with mysticism, sensuality, and hard-won clarity.

Jazz Interview: Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Todd Stoll — Jazz Education’s Farm Team Keeps Growing

By Steve Provizer

The Jazz at Lincoln Center vice president of education discusses the growth of Essentially Ellington, the rise in student playing, and the organization’s push for wider access.

Classical Music Album Review: The Neave Trio’s “In Her Hands”

By Jonathan Blumhofer

The Neave Trio’s new album is as well recorded as it is programmed and played.

Doc Talk: In “Steal This Story, Please!,” the Free, Independent Press Persists

By Peter Keough

A brisk, galvanizing portrait of Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman and the stubborn fight for adversarial journalism.

Help Keep The Arts Fuse Lit!

Precious few independent online arts publications make it to double digits. Please give us the resources the magazine needs to persevere at an essential cultural task.

Keep the Fuse lit and support our 70+ writers by making a donation.

The magazine is published by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to cultural/educational/literary enrichment. EIN: 27-0924769

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And…tell your friends about the in-depth arts coverage you can’t get anywhere else.

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Bill Marx

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From The Editor's Desk

Pointed references during Bread and Puppet’s spring touring show to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and to February’s U.S. missile strike on a girls’ elementary school in Iran—where at least 110 children were killed, roughly 54 of them girls—serve as reminders that, in the past, live theater has engaged directly with political crises (or, in these cases, catastrophes). Once upon a time, Broadway even tackled the specter of authoritarianism. Case in point: 1943’s Tomorrow the World, which ran for just under 500 performances and was later adapted into a film, its simple anti-fascist message intact. What is most interesting about the work today is how it raises the question of how a society should deal with those who have been indoctrinated.

The plot revolves around a German youth, inculcated with Nazi doctrine, who, after his parents’ deaths, is taken into the household of a Midwestern college professor whose fiancée is Jewish. In his pan of the show—aside from admiring child actor Skippy Homeier’s performance as the young Nazi—critic George Jean Nathan wrote that the drama “lies in the youngster-automaton’s persistent adherence to and practice of the Hitler dogma, the manner in which he devastates the household, and his ultimate persuasion to the fact that the American way of life may be better after all.” Nathan is right to excoriate the script’s obvious melodrama and sentimentality, though there are also some intriguing xenophobic brushstrokes. At one point, the assimilationist professor comes perilously close to choking the boy after he commits an act of violence.

The fear underlying the script is rooted in the nature of the postwar world: how would the millions who had followed Hitler be redeemed and become trusted citizens again? What would be the best way to bring them back into the democratic fold? For Nathan, the vision purveyed in Tomorrow the World—a “faith-hope-and-charity” philosophy toward Germans—would come to dominate the stage once the war had ended. Will our theater companies take up the thorny question of whether—and how—homegrown Christian nationalists can be reengaged with democratic life? Will they accept the difficult task of dramatizing the price of authoritarian complicity? Or will they stage empathetic pleas for forgiveness for those—from the libertarian broligarchy downward—who continue to dream of an end to democracy?

If our theaters shrink from attempting that reckoning, they risk forsaking their role as forums for democratic imagination, becoming instead stages on which its erosion is quietly normalized.

Archive:

From the Editor’s Desk: 2025

From the Editor’s Desk: 2024

Coming Attractions Through May 11 — What Will Light Your Fire

Compiled by Arts Fuse Editor

Our expert critics supply a guide to film, visual art, theater, author readings, television, and music. More offerings will be added as they come in.

Theater Review: “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” and “Masquerade” – What a Bold Concept Can and Can’t Do for Andrew Lloyd Webber

By Christopher Caggiano

Two productions set out to reinvent Andrew Lloyd Webber’s back catalog. Only one of them succeeds.

Film Festival Reviews: Berlin — A Vampire Returns and a Fascist Invasion Revisited

The Berlin International Film Festival had two major premieres this year — a vampire parade and a war saga in Ethiopia.

Film Commentary: “Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts,” “The Serpent’s Skin,” and the New Trans Cinema Moment

By Nicole Veneto

If a truly trans cinema canon is to exist, then it must reclaim authorship over how trans people and narratives are represented on screen by giving trans artists the means and opportunity to create a cinema of their own.

Theater Review: A Strong SpeakEasy Stage Cast Steers “Swept Away”

By Robert Israel

SpeakEasy Stage’s musically rich production grips with its performances, even as the drama struggles to fully deepen its tale of a crisis at sea.

Short Fuse Podcast #88: “Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence”

By Elizabeth Howard

Host Elizabeth Howard talks to Peter Bouteneff about the power of silence in the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

Local Author Interview: “Love Is What We Carry” — Andrew Krivak on Storytelling, Memory, and “Mule Boy”

By Preston Gralla

In conversation, Andrew Krivak discusses inherited grief, immigrant roots, and the unusual form of his latest novel.

Help Keep The Arts Fuse Lit!

Precious few independent online arts publications make it to double digits. Please give us the resources the magazine needs to persevere at an essential cultural task.

Keep the Fuse lit and support our 70+ writers by making a donation.

The magazine is published by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to cultural/educational/literary enrichment. EIN: 27-0924769

Keep The Fuse Lit

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And…tell your friends about the in-depth arts coverage you can’t get anywhere else.

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Bill Marx

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From The Editor's Desk

“It is said, for example, that a man ten times regrets having spoken, for the once he regrets silence. And why? Because the act of having spoken is an external fact, which may involve one in annoyances, since it is an actuality. But the fact of having kept silent! Yet this is the most dangerous thing of all.” — Søren Kierkegaard on silence as symptomatic of an unacknowledged despair that “occasions no embarrassment but makes one’s life easy and comfortable” in The Sickness Unto Death.

We are seeing “the most dangerous thing of all” embraced by America’s major artistic institutions as well as its largest universities and philanthropic organizations. They are putting their heads down and clamming up. On April 7, President Donald Trump threatened Iran with obliteration: "… a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again," if the country did not meet his deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and sign a deal to end the conflict. There were individual outcries from academics, and PEN America issued a joint statement of protest with over 200 human rights organizations, including Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam America, and the ACLU. But our major universities and artistic institutions have yet to come out with public statements condemning Trump’s barbaric fantasy. Those sworn to uphold civilization are refusing to speak out in its defense.

A shameful pattern of silence unites America’s cultural movers and shakers. Few have objected to Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s universities, or at U.S. or Israeli strikes that have targeted over 30 Iranian universities. An Israeli attack on March 12 damaged Lebanon's Lebanese University, killing two senior faculty members. These bombings are part of a determined campaign to commit cultural genocide, to wage a merciless assault on a group's cultural and intellectual foundations, including the destruction of its art, its history, and its collective memory. America had been financing culturicide well before Trump’s apocalyptic gesture toward Iran.

Melissa Gilliam, President of Boston University, recently told its community that the institution is dedicated to “fostering an academically rigorous environment that also prepares our students to be global citizens.” An admirable sentiment. But aren’t our universities, philanthropic organizations, and artistic institutions “global citizens”? Isn’t it their moral responsibility to speak out against the systemic demolishing of international educational centers, to object to the erasure of civilizations? Neutrality is complicity — it betrays the very values our elite institutions claim to uphold.

Archive:

From the Editor’s Desk: 2025

From the Editor’s Desk: 2024

Dance Review: Angkor Troupe’s “Swan Lake” — Trauma into Triumph

By Debra Cash

This performance demonstrates how comprehensively Cambodian classical dance has been resurrected across the United States.

Television Review: “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” Tackles Sex Work, Survival, and Suburban Hypocrisy

By Sarah Osman

A sharp, locally grounded dramedy that captures the contradictions of suburban Southern California — and the steep cost of survival for young women.

Film Review: François Ozon Reimagines Camus with Style—and Judicious Revisions

By Gerald Peary

A rigorously faithful Stranger that nonetheless reframes the novel’s moral center in worthy, modern ways

Jazz Album Reviews: Young Fire, Fearless Sound — Trumpeters Adam O’Farrill and Dave Adewumi Push Jazz Forward

By Brooks Geiken

Two standout releases showcase adventurous composition, tight ensemble interplay, and the next wave of trumpet-driven jazz.

Book Review: Saints, Oysters, and the Weight of Melancholy in Nancy Lemann’s New Orleans

By Matt Hanson

I was surprised by how smoothly each book went down, with a little tingle of acidic satire lingering on the palate.

Book Review: Wilhelm Furtwängler in Wartime – Reflections on Ian Buruma’s “Stay Alive”

By Joseph Horowitz

If there is a through-line consolidating Ian Buruma’s account, it is the admonition: Do not rush to judgment.

Film Fest Preview: The Independent Film Festival Boston — Demanding and Creating Independent Audiences

By Michael Marano

This year’s Independent Film Festival Boston kicks off this week, and it offers a grand selection of must-see indie films that set audiences free from the soulless product of corporate franchises.

Help Keep The Arts Fuse Lit!

Precious few independent online arts publications make it to double digits. Please give us the resources the magazine needs to persevere at an essential cultural task.

Keep the Fuse lit and support our 70+ writers by making a donation.

The magazine is published by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to cultural/educational/literary enrichment. EIN: 27-0924769

Keep The Fuse Lit

The Arts Fuse also needs underwriting for the magazine to continue to grow.

And…tell your friends about the in-depth arts coverage you can’t get anywhere else.

Share The Arts Fuse

Questions, comments, concerns?

Editor-in-Chief

Bill Marx

wmarx103@gmail.com

Subscribe now