Jay Harvey Upstage

The only book I've ever owned and read based on a Time magazine review is Richard Holmes' "Shelley: The Pursuit," a biography that garnered much praise upon its publication on in 1975. I think I was especially impressed by how the review ended, which went along these lines: Percy Bysshe Shelley's three decades of existence were less a life than a haunting . At about the age the poet was when he died by drowning, I just had to read such a ghost-saturated biography. The truth of that interpretation comes home when the poet's life is seen through the independent authorial stature of his beloved second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley. Though her life settled into the status of Keeper of the Flame, Mary's experience as continually bereaved mother and premature widow is transmuted through a sustained haunting — one marvelous adolescent creation, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus."  Victor Frankenstein applies himself to work, organ by o

Returned to his home base, Sweeney Todd celebrates the tools of his trade. Is a grisly drama based on the "penny dreadfuls" of Victorian England perhaps Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece? The sweep that "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" has made across the theatrical world, including adoption by opera companies, has been astonishing over the 44 years since its premiere. That's   no surprise, considering its artistic stature and the opera repertoire's receptivity  to implausible stories. Main Street Productions has mounted a suitably thrilling production of the show at its home in Westfield to open the 2023-24 season. On opening night, the prerecorded accompaniment found the singers well-matched in music that is intricately put together with Sondheim's witty lyrics; musical director Laura Hicks deserves kudos. Andrea Odle's stage direction is trim, forceful and vivid, realizing Sondheim's vision, which is established and sustaine

  Of all the books about music I've read, Alex Ross' "Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music" is the only one that got me thinking: "Sure, music is important, but it's not THAT important."  Elisabeth gives vent to her exasperation with Friedrich. That private response is no knock on Ross, a much-admired music critic who garnered well-deserved praise for this exhaustive 2020 study. Rather, the idolatry of Wagner and his music-drama had a kudzu-like spread well into 20th-century Western culture, and tempts one to think that no music should be assigned that kind of quasi-religious significance, absorbing and elevating a wealth of regrettable biases into the bargain. Ross' attention to this phenomenon is itself wholly admirable.  Among the most famous early acolytes of the Wagnerian message was Friedrich Nietzsche, the subject of Marcia Eppich-Harris' new play, "Seeking Nietzsche," which opened Thursday night in Shelton Auditori

G (Senaite Tekle) and B (Diego Sanchez-Galvan) connect. The ambiguities in the relationship of the girl and boy verging on young adulthood in "Sanctuary City" are stunningly illuminated in its second act. And there's  enough mystery left over to shadow the play's final lines. But it's the quality of the acting in the first act that makes the ambiguities so moving, even ennobling.  In American Lives Theat re's production of Martyna Majok's play, the performances of Senaite Tekle and Diego Sanchez-Galvan give the relationship of G and B (the Kafkaesque meaning of mere initials being clear enough)  a stature far above the uncertain status "dreamers" face here. Defining people as "legal" and "illegal" according to who they are is among the many sorrows of identity politics when misapplied to its official victims.  The practical dilemmas that must be worked through are complicated by the actual lives of the people in question. Thes

Multiple views of Steve Allee addressing Saturday's audience It's always a treat, and there's always new material jostling with old favorites when the Steve Allee Big Band returns to the Jazz Kitchen . The pianist-bandleader is forever writing, it seems, and when he speaks about "our new composition" it doesn't come across as "the royal we," but rather a way of emphasizing his sturdy zest for collaboration with excellent musicians. That was consistently evident in the band's second set Saturday night. The 18-piece ensemble always rivals the cookin' going on in the club's actual kitchen: Mouth-watering, palate-pleasing, and both easy and stimulating to digest. That prevailed from the well-knit opener, "Doppelganger," which settled into a full-ensemble riff behind the solo partnership of the pianist and vibraphonist Rusty Burge, to the deceptively chaotic "Bus to Belmopan," one of the old favorites. There were a few visi

 Events that turned Detroit into a war zone in the summer of 1967 resonated with me as a Michigander in far-away Cambridge, Mass., where I was a graduate student.  I went to a newsstand in Harvard Square known for its stock of newspapers from major cities, only to find the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press sold out. I had to play catch-up with the cataclysm in an era that now seems so remote when it comes to the way news is disseminated. I caught up with TV news on the fly, but typically for a student, I had no TV of my own. "Detroit '67" is an imaginative look into the ways in which the summer turmoil wrenched from its moorings family life in the inner city. Attempts to restore civil order slid into violations of civil rights, continuing a pattern that has scarred African-American life to this day, as it had from emancipation on. In 1967 indignities that seemed matters of Motor City habit became both intensified and concentrated. Dominique Morisseau's lengthy two-