review

Earlier in the year, I fancied the idea of reviewing the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s (PMA) latest exhibition, “Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection.” Outsider art is the label given to artwork made by artists who aren’t formally trained and whose work isn’t shown in museums or galleries. [...]

Production Ensemble’s Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov, was incredible. The show was performed on LPAC mainstage this past weekend, with an exceptional cast, a huge set, and Russian music that blasted over loudspeakers between acts. The costumes, particularly the soldier’s uniforms, were striking. Three Sisters is a classic and a masterpiece, so naturally my primary [...]

Sometimes the best discoveries are accidental.  Some time ago, iTunes was giving away free downloads of the pilot episode of MTV’s “Awkward.”, a show I knew little to nothing about.  I figured that I had nothing to lose from a free download, so I took advantage of Apple’s magnanimity, figuring I’d stumble upon the episode [...]

Dance-pop duo Disclosure clearly knows what they’re doing.  The pair has successfully integrated the tropes of the UK’s underground dance music into poppier structures, allowing the band to break into the UK’s top-40 charts and set them on the precipice U.S. of omnipresence.  But as the electronic production duo brought their live act to Philadelphia’s [...]

This past weekend’s performances of “The Maids” served as reminders that Honors Theater theses are one of the best-kept secrets within Swarthmore’s arts scene.  These projects in acting and directing present an opportunity for Swatties to put on challenging and often deeply intellectual works as a culmination of their four years of work in theater [...]

“Macbeth,” the most recent Yellow Stockings Player production, is an interesting twist on Shakespeare’s canonical play. As Director Patrick Ross ’15 explained and chuckled, “we are going to do it in medieval Scotland, but we are going to do it with witches and lesbians…[i]t’s like, this isn’t a real place at all.” Having “done a [...]

BAM. That’s the feeling I got after watching the opening number of Broadway’s smash-hit musical “American Idiot,” performed this week (through Sunday February 17th) at the Merriam Theater. BAM. Like, what just happened. Like, that was awesome. If there ever was a sensationalist musical, this is it. I don’t mean sensational as in it was [...]

Patti Smith has had an amorphous career.  Even before she published her National Book Award-winning memoir, “Just Kids,” in 2010, it always seemed salient to ask whether the artist was more of a musician or a poet.  Now after her book’s publication we’ve had to ask whether the 66 year-old has been a writer this [...]

When viewers pass through the Baltimore Museum of Art’s (BMA) Modern Art galleries to enter the newly renovated Contemporary Wing, which just opened on November 18 after a year-long closing, it feels as if they have walked into a different museum. This stark architectural change owes partly to the fact that the wing wasn’t originally [...]

About halfway through Ang Lee’s extraordinary 2001 movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, just as the pace is quickening and the plot is intensifying, we suddenly find ourselves in an empty desert. This is a flashback, but we do not yet know this. A caravan inches along, and in one of the carriages we see a [...]