“Unhappiness is funny. Happiness is not funny at all.” Cartoonist Charles Schulz makes this statement in “The Man Who Saw Snoopy,” a play written and directed by Lenny Schwartz that opened Thursday in the Bell Street Chapel’s DayDream Theatre on Federal Hill. He reflects on the changing nature ...
My first experience with “Hamlet” was watching an episode of “The Simpsons.” Bart was the thought-tormented prince, Marge was Gertrude, Moe was Claudius and Homer was the ghost of the dead King Hamlet. To a young boy of five or six, thrilled by the opportunity of maturity, nothing could be more ...
The arts have never been a stranger to the vilification of greed, but the recent combination of economic recession, Occupy movements and increased populism have brought a resurgent relevance to the story of the systematic underdog. This dynamic manifests in recent releases like “The Dark Knight Rises,” ...
The first satisfying feature of “She” — the group exhibition with the ambitious subtitle of “picturing women at the turn of the 21st century” — is its not having been called “Her.” The nominative pronoun seems to promise a feminist inflection, a show that will deliver to us women as ...
Brown students can sometimes be out of touch with the realities of the city they live in. But they can at least partially remedy this by seeing “A Kind of Providence,” a play in which the essence of the city shines through in all its diversity, grit and creativity. Director Ashley Teague GS, a ...
Only rarely does a young adult novel achieve the complexity and gravitas of general literary fiction, which perhaps explains why writers in the latter category rarely seek to appeal to the former. Of course, there are notable exceptions, including Carl Hiaasen, Philippa Gregory and — as of the Sept. ...
Some time far in the future, amid a nebulous myriad of mystical galaxies and celestial entities, a space-themed party assembles people invited from all over the universe to view the detonation of a star. The raucous party is hosted by three “sisters,” who are soon revealed to be clones. Among the ...
The comfortable silence draping the couple is interrupted by the end of the meal. The woman takes off her heels. “I’ll get a head start, then you follow when you think they aren’t looking,” she says. Seconds later, he sprints out of the restaurant, urging her on with the waiter in hot pursuit. ...
Modern-day reinventions frequently come across as gimmicky in theater and film. Too often, they serve as better marketing than art — or, perhaps more dangerously, they can come from the monomaniacal will of a rogue director, so concerned with his or her creative impulses that the reinvention ends ...
Perhaps it is rather cliche to convey imperfection through visual art, but to experience it aurally is an innovative concept. This is indeed at the heart of the “Audible Spaces: Tristan Perich, Zarouhie Abdalian and [The User],” an exhibition that constructs physical space around sound. Upon entering ...
Walking through the Peace Art Exhibit is a Twilight Zone-esque venture. At first, it is easy to stare with academic detachment at the results of this experiment, which gave blank wall space to various members of the Providence community and asked them to represent on it the abstract idea of peace. ...
The enticing aroma of freshly-caught seafood mingled with the refreshing breeze blowing off the Providence River and the mellow sounds of live bands to establish the laidback atmosphere at India Point Park, where over 20,000 people gathered over two days for the fourth annual Rhode Island Seafood Festival. “It’s ...
On Tuesday evening, Wriston Quadrangle rung with more than just the sounds of fraternity brothers playing cornhole and returning students picnicking over Sharpe Refectory take-out. Riffs drifted out from a makeshift stage as Off-White, a student rock band, played for the crowd attending the campus welcome ...
“Violet,” directed by Skylar Fox ’15 and running in the Production Workshop Downspace this Friday through Monday, deals with problems of appearance, and avoiding the cliche, it does not discredit the power of the superficial. The musical follows the titular character’s quest to heal a disfiguring ...
Beyond the two-by-fours of a derelict construction site, a cityscape looms stoically in the distance. Obscured geometric patterns evoke the protective stance of a mother crouching over a cradle. A rough, asphalt-like exterior is chiseled away to expose a smooth, blue underbelly. Such images of instability ...
In the very first scene of “El Grito del Bronx,” light illuminates the center of the stage as Lulu, wearing a white wedding dress, glides toward center stage, approaching a frame. She contemplates this simulation of a mirror and gazes through it as an unknown man, eventually revealed to be her ...
In 1993, Ralph Fiennes harrowed audiences as Nazi war criminal Amon Goeth, calmly sniping concentration camp workers from his balcony for nothing more than pre-breakfast entertainment. Twenty-one years later, the “Schindler’s List” actor stars in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” a film currently ...
Opera often connotes the stuffy Victorian era, the dismal Baroque era or the strict Italian aristocracy. Rarely is it a lens through which to explore meditation, sexual desire and anarchy. But in “Hydrogen Jukebox,” directed by Jonathan Adam ’16 and produced by Brown Opera Productions, this traditional ...
In 2002, Bryonn Bain was pulled over for an extinct left taillight. He was arrested for three outstanding warrants — charges he denied — and spent three days and two nights in jail before he was released without being convicted. In the end, the wrongful charges were a case of identity theft. Out ...
Like many films, “Her” spends most of its time espousing views on human existence. But to its credit, Spike Jonze’s new film is to the Encyclopedia Britannica what the average movie is to a pamphlet. In fact, it rewrites the Encyclopedia Britannica. Set in a glimmering near-future Los Angeles, ...
Solutions by The State News
