Oscar Wilde

PROVINCETOWN - If Oscar Wilde were alive today, he’d probably revel in Provincetown, roaming the streets with a swagger. It’s with that knowledge - and, hence, a particular passion - that Counter Productions dramatizes the darkest days of Wilde’s life in Victorian England, where he was convicted, imprisoned, and relegated to financial ruin for the crime of having trysts with younger men. Like his most famous work, “The Laramie Project,’’ playwright...

Art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him. Oscar Wilde

My first impressions of people are never wrong. Oscar Wilde

Society is a bore to be in, Oscar Wilde wrote, but a tragedy to be out of. Louis Auchincloss, novelist, lawyer, and heir to generations of New York high society — all eight grandparents were native New Yorkers, and rich — makes the Wilde quote from “A Woman of No Importance’’ so much his own that he cites it twice in this brief memoir. He wrote it when he was 90, shortly before his death last year. “A Voice from Old New York’’ both bites and feeds from the parchment hands that bred him. He has sardonic things to say about the uptight, often self-punishing patrician world he was born to; at the...

NEW YORK — Oscar Wilde and James Joyce have not lost the power to shock, at least on the iPad. Apple said yesterday that it was mistaken in restricting images for apps for Robert Berry’s comic book edition of Joyce’s “Ulysses,’’ which contains nudity, and for panels showing two naked men kissing in Tom Bouden’s graphic novel of Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.’’ Spokeswoman Trudy Miller said developers had...

LENOX - More silly than scary, "The Canterville Ghost" is an ideal family entertainment for the fall spooky season. It won't frighten the little children, it won't bore the older ones, and it even provides a dash of simple but effective theatricality for the adults in the party. Irina Brook, who has just moved from Paris to Great Barrington to become Shakespeare & Company's first director in residence, adapted the piece from a short story by Oscar Wilde. Working with assistant director and adapter Anna Brownsted and with the show's cast, Brook has preserved the style and spirit of...

One bearded man in his late 60s, clad in dark slacks and a red shirt, seated at the piano, flanked by microphones, created some of the season's most powerful music theater last night. Frederic Rzewski closed his recital in Boston Conservatory's Piano Masters Series with one of his masterpieces, "De Profundis" (1992), a setting of texts drawn from Oscar Wilde's famous letter from Reading Gaol. Rzewski remarked that he regards "De Profundis" as a supreme example of English prose and "on a level with Shakespeare.

Conductor Gil Rose and his lively and indispensible band The Boston Modern Orchestra Project have stormed to the rescue of a significant but often overlooked genre -- music for solo voices and orchestra. The world premiere last night was Andy Vores's "Uncertainty Is Beautiful," a setting of passionate and direct love poems by Mary Oliver and Wislawa Szymborska. Vores's elegantly fashioned music is passionate and dodgy, which adds a layer of complexity. He wrote the cycle for soprano Kendra Colton, who shone most brightly in the quieter, high-lying sections; sometimes he...

GLOUCESTER — Though Oscar Wilde would probably shudder to hear it, the contemporary TV sitcom owes a considerable debt to him. The use of dialogue as a delivery system for one-liners, the skin-deep characterizations, and the set-up/joke, set-up/joke rhythms of shows like “How I Met Your Mother’’ and “Hot in Cleveland’’ follow a comedic template established, or at least perfected, by Wilde. The difference (apart from, you know, all those IQ points) is that Wilde delivered epigrams rather than mere punch lines, and his lapidary pen ensured that those...

STONEHAM -- There is only a hair's breadth between the brilliant past and the dull present, between eccentricity and obsessive-compulsiveness. In theatrical terms, the same hair's breadth is all that separates Oscar Wilde from Samuel Beckett. Richard Greenberg's "The Dazzle," in its regional premiere at the Stoneham Theatre, takes the bizarre story of the Collyer brothers as its jumping-off point. They grew up in a Harlem mansion in the first half of the last century, and as the neighborhood began to deteriorate, so did they.

GLOUCESTER — Though Oscar Wilde would probably shudder to hear it, the contemporary TV sitcom owes a considerable debt to him. The use of dialogue as a delivery system for one-liners, the skin-deep characterizations, and the set-up/joke, set-up/joke rhythms of shows like “How I Met Your Mother’’ and “Hot in Cleveland’’ follow a comedic template established, or at least perfected, by Wilde. The difference (apart from, you know, all those IQ points) is that Wilde delivered epigrams rather than mere punch lines, and his lapidary pen ensured that those glittering gems...

NEW YORK — Oscar Wilde and James Joyce have not lost the power to shock, at least on the iPad. Apple said yesterday that it was mistaken in restricting images for apps for Robert Berry’s comic book edition of Joyce’s “Ulysses,’’ which contains nudity, and for panels showing two naked men kissing in Tom Bouden’s graphic novel of Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.’’ Spokeswoman Trudy Miller said developers had...

My husband and I hadn’t been here in 25 years, and were only in Dublin now due to happy happenstance: a layover en route from Italy. We had only one night; what to do with such precious time? Any plan would have to include Irish music and a pint of Guinness. Our children (17 and 23) had never been to Ireland, so we also wanted to cram in some culture. The Dublin Literary Pub Crawl fit the bill: history, music, and literature, washed down with a pint. Led by two actors, the tour would take us to several pubs frequented by some of Ireland’s greatest writers, who are...

PROVINCETOWN - If Oscar Wilde were alive today, he’d probably revel in Provincetown, roaming the streets with a swagger. It’s with that knowledge - and, hence, a particular passion - that Counter Productions dramatizes the darkest days of Wilde’s life in Victorian England, where he was convicted, imprisoned, and relegated to financial ruin for the crime of having trysts with younger men. Like his most famous work, “The Laramie Project,’’ playwright...

LENOX - More silly than scary, "The Canterville Ghost" is an ideal family entertainment for the fall spooky season. It won't frighten the little children, it won't bore the older ones, and it even provides a dash of simple but effective theatricality for the adults in the party. Irina Brook, who has just moved from Paris to Great Barrington to become Shakespeare & Company's first director in residence, adapted the piece from a short story by Oscar Wilde. Working with assistant director and adapter Anna Brownsted and with the show's cast, Brook has preserved the style and...

Reprinted from late editions of yesterday's Globe One bearded man in his late 60s, clad in dark slacks and a red shirt, seated at the piano, flanked by microphones, created some of the season's most powerful music theater Tuesday night. Frederic Rzewski closed his recital in Boston Conservatory's Piano Masters Series with one of his masterpieces, "De Profundis" (1992), a setting of texts drawn from Oscar Wilde's famous letter from Reading Gaol. Rzewski remarked that he regards "De Profundis" as a supreme example of English prose and "on a level...