What have you been doing in the arts?

If your life (like mine) goes by the school calendar, then summer 2012 is almost over. And what a summer it’s been! Concerts, plays, gallery openings — you name it! How have the arts been part of your season?

EPAC’s ‘Shrew’ is pleasant trifle

Reviewed by George Basler

The Taming of the Shrew is one of William Shakespeare’s more controversial plays, as well as one of his best known. If taken seriously, the misogynistic tone and message of female submissiveness can be grating, even offensive, to modern audiences.

Thankfully, the Endicott Performing Arts Center’s production, which opened Thursday (Aug. 16) and will run through Sunday (Aug. 19), doesn’t take itself seriously. The show is a pleasant, if not exactly memorable, diversion for a warm summer’s evening.

Marvin Hamlisch: An appreciation

Award-winning composer Marvin Hamlisch was scheduled to conduct a performance of his music with the Binghamton Philharmonic late last month.  The show would have taken place at the Anderson Center for the Performing Arts on the Binghamton University campus.  But about a week before the much-anticipated show, word came that Mr. Hamlisch could not travel due to a fall.  Today (August 7) came the news that Mr. Hamlisch has died.  He leaves a singular legacy of glorious music.  Read more and listen to NPR’s appreciation at:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/08/07/158364635/marvin-hamlisch-movie-and-broadway-composer-has-died

Feared, revered art critic Robert Hughes dies at 74

At some early point in his long career, more than three decades of it spent at TIME, Robert Hughes became the most famous art critic in the English-speaking world. This happened because he was also the best — the most eloquent, the most sharp-eyed and incisive, the most truculent and certainly the most robust. He was 74 when he died on Aug. 6, in New York City. As Auden put it after the death of Yeats: “Earth, receive an honoured guest.”    Read more at:

http://entertainment.time.com/2012/08/07/the-art-of-being-critical-robert-hughes-1938-2012/#ixzz22uQtf8V3