Two men looking at the sea—one learns to harness its strength, even as he is jailed by it. The other learns to render it on canvas for others to see its power and might.
The Tempest , Plays at the American Repertory Theater’s Loeb Drama Center through June 15th.
The A.R.T makes brilliant use of magic and music in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Prospero is a wizard as never before in this thrilling new production featuring magic by the illusionist Teller (of the legendary duo Penn and Teller). When shipwrecked aristocrats wash up on the shores of Prospero’s strange island, they find themselves immersed in a world of trickery and amazement, where Tom Waits’ dusty music and Pilobolus’ athletic movement animate the spirits and monsters. But the revels come to an end when the master magician realizes he has neglected his life in service of his art, and must now relinquish his conjuring in order to provide for the future of his only child.
Turner and the Sea On view at the Peabody Essex Museum Saturday through September 1st.
In summer it's easy to appreciate a life by the sea in a town like Salem. The new exhibition of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s maritime paintings at The Peabody Essex Museum gives us even more insight to that life, if from an earlier time. Turner & the Sea features more than 100 works spanning the fifty-year career of one of Britain’s celebrated painters. Oils, watercolors, prints and sketches from the 1790s to the mid-1800s in this first full-scale examination of Turner's lifelong attraction to the sea follows the artist’s evolution as he becomes one of the most important, controversial and prolific masters of his art. Dramatic and roiling, sunlit and cloudstruck, the power of Turner’s glorious canvases changed the maritime aesthetic and influenced countless painters. The sea in itself gave Turner endless pictorial inspiration with the infinitely mutable nature of water and its relationship with light challenging to any painter. PEM's Curator Daniel Finamore told me, “He looked at the sea as the most elemental expression of nature. The unfettered kind of activity of the light, the reflections, the energy…So he ranged, ran the gamut between calm and storms. And the sea could express so many of these different kind of ideas.”
A Million Ways to Die in the West , in theaters now. Unfortunately this film falls short of Seth McFarlane's obvious ambitions to model himself after Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles. Not worth the ticket price, despite the amazing cast.
Coming up on Open Studio: Get a longer look at the Peabody Essex Museum's Turner & the Sea exhibit, featuring iconic works by Joseph Mallord William Turner.
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