The Boston Globe's Living Arts Section on February 2 featured reviews of work by three different MIT-affiliated artists. In a review of the Cantata Singers' performance of Professor Peter Child's Estrella, Richard Buell deemed the piece "ample and varied and continuous, a musical canvas you couldn't take in all at once but whose cumulative impact, patiently nurtured, was strong, serious, impressive." Richard Dyer critiqued Professor Edward Baron Turk's biography of Jeanette MacDonald, Hollywood Diva, calling it "one of the most thorough, intelligent, and sensitive books ever written about a movie star." Bill Marx reviewed the Wheelock Family Theater production of Once Upon a Mattress, which featured alumna Grace Napier (SB 1980, music) in the role of Lady Larkin.
Woody Pak (SB 1994, music), has garnered favorable attention for his score for Making Tracks, a new rock musical that celebrates the Asian-American immigrant experience. "The show comes to life in the group musical numbers and there is, on occasion, a hint of the energy and hopefulness of Rent," wrote the New York Times of the production, which recently played at off-off-Broadway's Taipei Theater in New York City.
The MIT Museum fared well in The Tab's "Top 10 Exhibits of 1998," which ranked Gestural Engineering: The Sculpture of Arthur Ganson at number three. "The ongoing and ever-evolving exhibit serves as a Willy Wonka-ish lab for Ganson's weird and wacky kinetic machines." The Tab also honored Mikhail Baryshnikov's "HeartBeat" as seventh on their list of Top 10 Dance Performances. Interactive architecture artist and composer Chris Janney (SM 1978), created the work's soundtrack. In a Boston Globe article headlined, "The superb and the shoddy," Professor Krzysztof Wodiczko's Bunker Hill Monument projections of bereaved Charlestown mothers was proclaimed the best of the four inaugural projects undertaken by the Institute of Contemporary Arts' "Vita Brevis" series.
A version of this article appeared in the March 10, 1999 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 43, Number 22).
