This week, GBH Executive Arts Editor Jared Bowen joined the Morning Edition team to discuss a Harlem renaissance musical, the great outdoors and a museum facelift.
"Ain't Misbehavin' - The Fats Waller Musical Show"
Now playing at the Central Square Theater through May 29, then at the Greater Boston Stage Company June 9-26.
"This really is a 'stop what you're doing now' and get your tickets to this show. You don't want to miss it because there's just such extraordinary energy," Bowen says.
"Ain't Misbehavin'" brings the audience into the heart of the Harlem Renaissance by way of Fats Waller's music. "You feel like you're walking into the Cotton Club or a cabaret with the lamps aglow on the front row, and they have a five-piece band," Bowen says.
Director Maurice Emmanuel Parent electrifies the space with high energy performances, which includes having the entire cast get on stools. "This is just an exceptional show. It is so fun. ... I mean, the energy is just so incredible and extraordinary," Bowen says. "I just wanted to kind of stumble out into the night in search of more cocktails and clinking glasses and more misbehaving!"
Free programming in Boston Parks through October.
Augmented-reality exhibitions, public murals and online conversations about park accessibility are coming to Boston. It's all in honor of Frederick Law Olmsted, known as the father of landscape architecture. This year marks the bicentennial of his birth.
After a varied career as a farmer, journalist and secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Olmsted settled into his landscape design career in Brookline, Mass. His home and office became a hub of landscape design — an office that some 5,000 parks across the country ultimately came out of through his successors.
The Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site and The Emerald Necklace Conservancy partnered to create Olmsted Now, examining Olmsted's vision and the accessibility of outdoor spaces. Among his most celebrated works is the Emerald Necklace, which stretches from Franklin Park to the Charles River. "We're in a moment in this city where we see so much building, we see gentrification, we see open space — to some degree — swallowed up," Bowen says.
Concord Museum Renovation
Open to the public as of September 2021.
"If people aren't aware of the Concord Museum, this is an extraordinary treasure in our community," Bowen says.
The Concord Museum's collection goes back over 100 years to the time of Henry David Thoreau, an American naturalist, essayist, poet and philosopher from Concord, Mass. The $16-million renovation reorients visitors with its telling of the American Revolution. Using legal documents and firsthand accounts, the museum highlights Indigenous culture, Concord settlers and the abolitionist movement.
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