Arts

Face off

Doubt explores the quicksand of certainty
If you were an ordinary Catholic boy in parochial school, giving nuns as hard a time as you were getting, you probably ended up with the usual stories of ruler-rapped knuckles. If you grew up to be talented playwright John Patrick Shanley, you ended up writing Doubt: A Parable , a fascinating exploration of the quicksand of certainty.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 15, 2009

Embracing humanness

Stevie Jay's Life is a work in progress
Don't go listen to Stevie Jay if you want demure talk about sex, less than X-rated language about relationships, or polite, unemotional monologues about anything else he cares to tell you about.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | September 08, 2009

Allegorical expressions

Lydia Stein's “Love Songs, Hobos & Other Spirits”
Horses break loose from carnival carousels and run free, a horse-headed naked woman cuddles a rabbit as blue birds circle, and an escaped carousel horse visits the grave of a flower in Providence artist Lydia Stein's exhibit "Love Songs, Hobos & Other Spirits" at AS220's Project Space.

By GREG COOK | September 09, 2009

Dark and light sides of pleasure

Kirsten Hassenfeld's place of "endless plenty" at Bell Gallery
"I want to create a place where people can take a little vacation from reality," Brooklyn artist Kirsten Hassenfeld has said. "I'm interested in going to a place where there is no want, only endless plenty." In "Recent Sculpture," her exhibit at Brown University's Bell Gallery (64 College Street, Providence, through November 1), she succeeds magnificently.

By GREG COOK | September 02, 2009

Photos: Kirsten Hassenfeld at Bell Gallery

Kirsten Hassenfeld at Bell Gallery, Brown University, until Nov. 1, 2009.
Photos from Hassenfeld's show at the Bell Gallery

By GREG COOK | September 01, 2009

A royal scam

TBTS' terrific Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Admit it — we are all a little perverse. How else to explain the difficulty, unless you are comatose, in not laughing heartily at Dirty Rotten Scoundrels , the tale of two con men plying their criminal trade on the French Riviera.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 25, 2009

Magical mystery tour

Michael Bizon's 'Cypheromantic' at 5 Traverse
Last Friday, I hopped over a guardrail, skirted the manicured lawn of a Providence golf course, scampered into trees, and clutched a rope (conveniently tied to a nearby tree) as I gingerly stepped down a slippery dirt slope toward Michael Bizon's secret art project. The trail stopped at the edge of a cliff of broken-up concrete with a tangle of rusty rebar snaking out.

By GREG COOK | August 25, 2009

Special delivery

The subtle genius of Norm MacDonald
For the last two decades, comedian and SNL alum Norm MacDonald has been firing off on pop culture and sharing life observations with his disarming deadpan delivery and signature subtleties through a stoner Canadian accent and nasal drawl.

By CHRIS CONTI | August 19, 2009

Imagine that

2nd Story's Harvey is simply delightful.
Mister Rogers is dead. Long live Elwood P. Dowd!

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 18, 2009

Hot Nazi beach reads

The new wave of Reich books: pop genres, good Germans
Nazis aren't blitzing just the movie screens this year, though — they're also invading the bookstores, with battalions of novels and non-fiction tomes published or upcoming.

By PETER KEOUGH | August 18, 2009

Mixed moods

Big statements at Top Drawer Art Center
The painting that sticks in my mind from "Beyond Will Power: The 5th Annual Top Drawer Group Show" at Top Drawer Art Center (2731 Pawtucket Avenue, East Providence, through September 4) is Anthony Brun's mixed-media painting Jason Killed Freddy .

By GREG COOK | August 18, 2009

Interview: Joseph Finder

True fiction
"Since 9/11, thousands of CIA employees have quit to go private. Basically, these guys are private spies."

By CLEA SIMON | August 18, 2009

Mixed and mismatched

Errors are still comical in the bucket
Oh those Elizabethans, those cutups, those bawdy scamps. If we had only William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors to go by, we'd wonder how the Brits ever built an empire between all the misidentifications and panicked confusions.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 18, 2009

The Funn(k)y Drummer

What's the connection between comedy and percussion?
Johnny Carson was revered for his impeccable comic timing. It was "so precise," wrote one newspaper in his obituary, "that we wouldn't be surprised to find buried in his skull a quartz crystal." And why might that be? Perhaps because Johnny Carson was a drummer. In drumming, after all, timing is everything.

By MIKE MILIARD | August 13, 2009

The farce within

CTC'S Noises Off is a laff riot
Farces have been keeping audiences slapping their knees ever since cavemen learned to trip into the fire on purpose. A case can be made that the most exquisitely funny farce ever devised is Michael Frayn's Noises Off .

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 11, 2009

No direction home

Hugging the Shoulder spins its wheels
The intense Hugging the Shoulder , by Jerrod Bogard, is the latest play presented by Theater of Thought (through August 8), actor and director Amber Kelly's vehicle for boiling-pot relationship dramas in inventively appropriate settings.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 04, 2009

Shakespeare for dummies

The Bard (abridged) at CTC
No, it's not sponsored by CliffsNotes. But The Complete Works William Shakespeare (Abridged) , as ably demonstrated by the Contemporary Theater Company (through August 14), shows that the bane of phys-ed majors can be more fun than a barrel of bodkins.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 04, 2009

Places that are gone

O. Winston Link and Carmel Vitullo document an era
It wasn't until the 1970s that O. Winston Link got noticed by the art world. The New Yorker had been a professional photographer since the 1930s, shooting publicity shots for an advertising firm before World War II and doing freelance commercial photography afterward. It was a decent living, but it was anonymous work.

By GREG COOK | August 05, 2009

Photos: Documenting a Moment, a Place, an Era

O. Winston Link and Carmel Vitullo at the Bert Gallery
Photos from "Documenting a Moment, a Place, an Era," exhibit at the Bert Gallery, Providence

By BERT GALLERY | August 05, 2009

Three-ring circus

The Brown/Trinity Playwrights' seriously funny fare
This is the fifth season of the Brown/Trinity Playwrights Repertory Theater, and the three productions are quite a delightful array of comedies-in-the-works, all dealing with social survival. The plays being workshopped include an existential examination from a canine point of view.

By BILL RODRIGUEZ | July 29, 2009