Are there crimes so heinous that their perpetrators are beyond redemption? Fritz Lang’s 1930 movie M, starring Peter Lorre as a kindermörder — “child murderer” — ends with doubts about […]
THEATER REVIEW
Love in the Time of Plague
Robert Chesley’s Jerker arrives in Provincetown
If you didn’t live through it, it’s difficult to imagine the extreme sense of urgency and doom that the gay community experienced in the early ’80s, when AIDS hit. The […]
THEATER REVIEW
In Gary, a Shakespeare Sequel, WHAT Slays the Summertime Blues
Taylor Mac’s comic riff on Titus Andronicus is bloody good
Back in the early 1960s, when movie legend Stanley Kubrick began writing a screenplay based on the novel Red Alert, a tense thriller about the potential for nuclear apocalypse between […]
THEATER REVIEW
‘The Ballad of Bobby Botswain’ Takes Two to Cure All Ills
A world premiere at Wellfleet’s Harbor Stage
Pretty much anything can happen when two guys start chatting over flamingo-tinis at a bar in Fort Worth, Texas. Or so it might seem, in the marvelous two-hander The Ballad […]
THEATER REVIEW
Hooking Up With ‘Marry Me a Little’
WHAT offers a living ode to the late Stephen Sondheim
When Stephen Sondheim died last November, the loss to the world of musical theater was incalculable. Jerry Herman (Hello, Dolly!; Mame; La Cage aux Folles) may have been the master […]
THEATER REVIEW
Gender Is the Thing in ‘The Lady Hamlet’
Sarah Schulman’s witty new play premieres at the Provincetown Theater
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not the manliest of tragic heroes. When the ghost of his father, the former King Hamlet of Denmark, accuses his brother Claudius, now king and Hamlet’s stepdad […]
THEATER REVIEW
The Harbor Stage Disinters Sam Shepard’s ‘Buried Child’
Catch a modern classic about a family’s painful decline
When Buried Child was first performed in 1978 in San Francisco and New York, its hipster playwright, Sam Shepard, was a fixture of the downtown arts scene, best known for […]
FILM FESTIVAL
The Inimitable Film Craftmanship of Luca Guadagnino
Honoring this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge
If you’ve never heard of Italian director Luca Guadagnino — who will receive the Filmmaker on the Edge award this Sunday at the Provincetown International Film Festival — you are […]
MOVIES
Get Seated: Provincetown’s Film Festival Returns
Film Society chief Anne Hubbell welcomes locals and visitors back to the cinema
“It’s sort of a re-launch,” says Anne Hubbell, the Provincetown Film Society’s new executive director, of the upcoming 24th annual Provincetown International Film Festival. The event was shut down and […]
THEATER REVIEW
Straight White Men: A Spectacle of Privilege Deconstructed
WHAT opens its season with a play by Young Jean Lee
The current culture wars — in which straight white men are born privileged and BIPOC and queer minorities and women demand rights and representation — are all about power. The […]
BOOK REVIEW
Refusing to Go Gentle Into The Kingdom of Sand
Andrew Holleran’s new novel is a latter-day queer classic
In his new novel, Andrew Holleran writes, in a scene set at a North Florida Thanksgiving dinner attended by older gay men, “There is a delicate undercurrent beneath get-togethers among […]
THEATER REVIEW
Doing the Time Warp in Mae West’s ‘The Drag’
In the 1920s, having a gay old time was kind of complicated
“This side’s Friday,” vamp extraordinaire Mae West once quipped, pointing to her upper right thigh, then, pointing to her left thigh, “This side’s Sunday. Why don’t you come see me […]
FICTION
Twists of Fate That Aren’t Simple
Randi Triant’s new novel, What We Give, What We Take, traces the lives of a mother and son
“I’ve known women and men — it’s kind of genderless — who think they’re making the right decision, then realize it was one of the worst,” says Provincetown author Randi […]
MUSICIANS
Jon Richardson Composes an Ode to Gay Old Provincetown
Songs from his musical-in-progress, Jack of Hearts, will get a public hearing
“My first love is theater,” says Jon Richardson, a Provincetown musician known for his piano bar gigs at Tin Pan Alley and the Crown & Anchor. Or, perhaps, you may […]
INDIE SCREEN
A Mixed Bag of Oscar Hopefuls
Spanish moms, a pretender to the Scottish throne, and a child of deaf adults
As fans of Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar well know, his films combine personal narrative obsessions and familiar stylized production design with a kind of raw, emotional reality that we all […]
