
Documentary of film critic Roger Ebert told with frankness & affection
Film critics are an opinionated lot, though why our opinions might matter more than yours is a very good question indeed. With the exception of highbrow cinema scholars of the Andrew Sarris ilk,…

Ruffalo & Knightley bond winningly over music in Begin Again
Once in a while a little indie movie with an unknown cast will make a big splash, if it has charm to spare. That happened in 2006 with Once: a tuneful fable about…

Love in the Wars at Bard daringly reimagines Trojan War tropes
There’s something special about attending the world premiere of a play – a frisson of excitement in the audience that lets you know right off that, with luck, you might end up telling…

Kurt Rhoads schemes brilliantly in Othello
William Shakespeare’s gifts to the world include more than a few memorable villains – choice enough to make literary critics quibble as to which holds pride of place on the Ten Worst list….

Bard premieres Love in the Wars
Quick! Name an Amazon. You said Hippolyta, right? She’s about the only one whom most of us know by name, either as the wild bride of Duke Theseus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s…
Powerhouse prediction: In Your Arms will have legs
Ostensibly, the shows performed each summer at Vassar’s Powerhouse Theater are works-in-progress – some in the early stages of development, others being polished prior to moving on to Broadway, Off-Broadway or top “out-of-town…

Good choice, but pregnancy isn’t what Obvious Child is really about
Quite a week at the Supreme Court, wasn’t it? Even though I’m blessedly beyond the age of having to worry about unwanted pregnancy, I’m still reeling from that one/two punch: first, a decision…
Gardiner Library hosts harmonica virtuoso William Galison
In recent decades, we’ve tended to think of the harmonica mainly as a blues instrument. But there was a time when harmonica-players were treated with a lot more respect. Woodstock music veteran John…

Poughkeepsie hosts Dragon Boat Races this Saturday
Considering the way that the opening of the Hudson River Rowing Association Community Boathouse on the Poughkeepsie waterfront has pumped up local interest in human-powered competitive boating, converging with the fact that Arts…

Powerhouse Theater at Vassar presents the Lobbyists in SeaWife
“Ghosts, puppets, revelry, whaleships, leviathans, rum.” That’s the description of the musical-in-development SeaWife in one of its workshop incarnations in New York City earlier this year. Nowadays, as the team putting the show…