Weekend Arts Review: Imagination Inspires a Second Look

By Jared Bowen

July 12, 2012


BOSTON — A first-time director and established photographer give you new views of the world around them, offering inspiration from imaginative ways of looking at familiar scenes.

Beasts of the Southern Wild
In theaters now

In a bayou community cut off from the rest of the world by a sprawling levee, a six-year-old girl with an extraordinary imagination believes that the natural world is in balance with the universe until a fierce storm changes her reality. Desperate to save her ailing father and sinking home, this tiny hero must learn to survive catastrophe. This extraordinary film starring first-time actors and crafted by a first-time director tells a remarkable story and conveys the power of home and community that has helped many in Louisiana overcome Katrina's devastation.

>>Watch an interview with the actors and read Jared's complete review.


Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage
On view at the Concord Museum
Through September 23

Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage charts a new direction for one of America’s best-known living photographers. Unlike her staged and carefully lit celebrity portraits, the photographs in this exhibition are composed by how Leibovitz was moved by each subject, from dramatic landscapes to quiet interiors of living rooms and bedrooms, and objects that are talismans of past lives. The exhibition, which includes approximately 70 photographs taken between April 2009 and May 2011—nine of them taken in Concord, Massachusetts—will be on view at the Concord Museum through September 23, 2012.

>>Watch a video interview with Leibovitz and read Jared's complete review.


Roller Disco The Musical
Oberon Theater
Through August 30 
expected to open off-Broadway in Spring 2013

In 1979, the film event that shook America to its core wasn't Apocalypse Now, Kramer vs. Kramer, or even Xanadu—it was Roller Boogie. Now the cinematic epic comes to the stage in the balls out musical parody Roller Disco, featuring 14 original songs—like Love on Wheels, Chase Scene!, and Skating is Sexy. You'll be tempted to boogie and certaily get a laugh from this musical event…on wheels.