Performing Arts

The Boundaries of Kinship

In her plays, Alice Childress revealed how vulnerable even the most private, self-enclosed spaces are to history’s incursions.

May 17, 2022

Geoffrey O’Brien

Verdi’s Decentered Epic

The six principal characters of Don Carlos grasp at separate ends, but nothing is finally to be attained.

April 21, 2022 issue

James Shapiro

Shakespeare Noir

There are moments in The Tragedy of Macbeth when Shakespeare and Joel Coen feel in perfect alignment.

January 13, 2022 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Notes from Underground

Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s new opera recasts the Orphic myth with Eurydice as the central character.

January 13, 2022 issue

Ian Frazier

‘Part of Why We Survived’

A new history of the long tradition of Native comedy, inside and outside mainstream entertainment

January 13, 2022 issue

Tim Page

Playing Together

In the late 1980s, when composers and audiences moved in deeply divided circles, Bang on a Can’s commitment to diverse programming began to break down the divisions within contemporary music.

November 18, 2021 issue

Larry Wolff

A Halo of Nostalgia

The frivolous charms of Viennese operetta helped preserve a sense of Habsburg identity after the breakup of the empire.

November 4, 2021 issue

Adam Kirsch

Black Voices, German Song

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?

February 10, 2022 issue

The Latest

Erica Getto

Choreographed Uncertainty

Even the most rigorous viewing of a Trisha Brown dance will never quite reveal the springs and levers that hold it together.

June 22, 2022

Brian Seibert

Never the Same Step Twice

Where the previous generation of dancers arranged their steps into tidy, regular phrases, John Bubbles enjambed over the bar lines, multiplying, twisting, tilting, turning.

May 12, 2022 issue

Coco Fusco

Whose Art Thrives in Cuba?

Art and dance were battlegrounds for the struggle to define the meaning of the revolution.

December 16, 2021 issue

Dan Chiasson

Larger Than Life

Nearly sixty years after its founding, Bread and Puppet Theater still has the power to unsettle, despite evoking old battles, old adversaries, and perhaps even lost causes.

September 23, 2021 issue

Imani Perry

In Her Own Voice

To be a Black artist has always required one to fight as well as create.

July 1, 2021 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Theater, Politics, and Critic

“The way the personal and the political overlap in certain public lives can be illuminating for both arenas.”

May 22, 2021

Matthew Aucoin

A Dance to the Music of Death

Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape.

May 13, 2021 issue

Dan Chiasson

This Ain’t No Disco

Talking Heads were at once a party band and an art project.

March 25, 2021 issue

Larry Wolff

Phantasms of the Opera

The invention of gas illumination offered operagoers in the mid-nineteenth century “a completely new experience of light” that reshaped operatic composition and performance.

March 11, 2021 issue