The Culture Show Podcast

Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart joins The Culture Show with a preview of the Pops’ spring season, running May 8 through June 6 at Symphony Hall. The season includes appearances by Ray Chen, Jon Batiste, Leslie Odom Jr., St. Vincent and more, along with film nights, Pride Night and Gospel Night. To learn more, go here. Tony Award–winning director Diane Paulus, Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theater, joins us to talk about “Masquerade,” an immersive reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera.” Set in a five-story former department store on West 57th Street, the production turns the Paris Opera House into a candlelit maze of salons, staircases, and hidden rooms, bringing audiences in masks inches from the show’s spectacle and romance. To learn more go hereSteve Biondolillo, founder and president of the National Baseball Poetry Festival, and Sarah Connell Sanders, teacher, writer and organizer of the festival’s youth poetry contest, join us ahead of the festival’s return to Worcester. Running May 7 through 10 at Polar Park, the festival brings together poets, baseball fans, students and families for readings, workshops, open mics, WooSox games, a ballpark tour and a sunset catch on the field. To learn more, go here.

On this edition of The Culture Show, Jared Bowen, Callie Crossley, and James Parker, staff writer at The Atlantic, go over the week’s top arts and culture headlines:The Venice Biennale is often called the Olympics of the art world, but this year its international jury made news before awarding any medals. The jury resigned, saying it would not honor artists from countries whose leaders face international criminal charges — a move effectively pointing to Russia and Israel, and throwing the exhibition into a political and cultural storm.Robert Indiana’s famous stacked-letter LOVE image has traveled far beyond the art world — onto posters, stamps, T-shirts, tote bags and coffee mugs. Now his legacy is at the center of a major legal fight, after the Morgan Art Foundation was awarded $102 million in a case involving forged works and disputed rights to some of Indiana’s best-known images.Nudes are nothing new in museums, from Degas’ bathers to Michelangelo’s David. But when performance artist Xandra Ibarra appeared nude in the MFA’s galleries, the reaction was very different — laying bare how complicated our feelings about the human body can be when art steps out of the frame and into the flesh.Jimmy Kimmel, Donald Trump and the FCC are back in the ring after Kimmel joked about Trump’s mortality and Melania Trump’s future during a mock White House Correspondents’ Dinner roast. The White House called the joke “violent rhetoric,” Trump demanded ABC fire Kimmel, and now critics are questioning the timing of an FCC review of Disney-owned ABC station licenses.

Michael Patrick MacDonald is the bestselling author of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie and Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion. He joins us to talk about The Rest of the Story, the trauma-informed storytelling program he created to help people use writing to reckon with what they’ve lived through.Jamie Bissonnette is a James Beard Award-winning chef, restaurateur, and founding partner of BCB3 Hospitality, the group behind restaurants including Coppa, Little Donkey, Somaek, ZURiTO, and now Willie’s on Beacon Hill. He joins us to talk about his new American Italian–inspired neighborhood restaurant, where pizza, pasta, and shared plates bring his lively, collaborative style to Charles Street.David A. Greene is president of Colby College, and Jacqueline Terrassa is the Carolyn Muzzy Director of the Colby College Museum of Art. They join us to talk about Colby’s growing arts presence in Waterville — from the museum and Lunder Institute for American Art to Greene Block + Studios and the Paul J. Schupf Art Center — and what it takes to sustain cultural institutions now.

Adele Bertei was part of the late-1970s downtown New York no wave scene, playing with The Contortions and later fronting the Bloods. In her new memoir, No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene, Bertei writes from inside that abrasive, cross-disciplinary movement — and restores the women artists, musicians, and filmmakers who helped define it. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Picturing Isabella traces how Isabella Stewart Gardner shaped her public image through photography, while Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self looks at artists who use the camera to construct alter egos and challenge fixed ideas of identity. Joining us are Pieranna Cavalchini, the Gardner’s Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art and co-curator of Persona, and Sylvia Hickman, Curatorial Associate at the Gardner and curator of Picturing Isabella.We close out National Poetry Month with Evan Wang, the National Youth Poet Laureate and author of the new chapbook Slow Burn: Poems. Wang will appear at Harvard Book Store on Wednesday, April 29 at 7 p.m., in conversation with Cindion Huang.

Tom Perrotta joins us to discuss Ghost Town, his new novel about memory, grief, and the long pull of the past. The Election, Little Children, and The Leftovers author returns to familiar New Jersey ground in a story centered on Jimmy Perrini, a successful writer drawn back to the hometown and the formative loss he thought he had left behind. Perrotta will appear at the Brattle Theatre on Wednesday, April 29, at 6 p.m. for a Harvard Book Store event; tickets are available through Harvard Book Store. What could Mayor Michelle Wu’s proposed FY2027 budget mean for Boston’s public art landscape? Culture Show contributor Julia Swanson joins us for that conversation. She’s a multidisciplinary artist, producer, and award-winning photographer, and the creator of The Art Walk Project, a series of self-guided micro tours exploring public art across Greater Boston and beyond. On April 23, traditionally observed as Shakespeare’s birthday, we mark the staying power of a writer whose plays continue to be staged, adapted, and reimagined around the world. Joining us is Regie Gibson, the inaugural Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a writer, performer, and educator whose work engages Shakespeare through spoken word — including his Hamlet-inspired poem “cry havoc (to thine own self be hip)”.

Geoff Bennett, co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS NewsHour, joins The Culture Show to discuss his new book, Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy from Vaudeville to ’90s Sitcoms. Bennett traces the long arc of Black comedy, from minstrelsy and vaudeville to Richard Pryor, In Living Color, and Living Single. Alison Hoagland, professor emerita of historic preservation at Michigan Technological University and a board member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, joins us to talk about the legal fight over President Trump’s White House ballroom project. The case, filed by the National Trust after the demolition of the East Wing, has become a high-stakes battle over preservation, presidential power, and the future of the White House grounds. Paul C. Ha, director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, joins us as the museum marks its 40th anniversary. We discuss the List’s role in bringing contemporary art into the life of MIT, and the exhibitions, performances, and public programs celebrating four decades of experimentation and artistic inquiry.

On this edition of The Culture Show, Jared Bowen, Lisa Simmons, and James Sullivan go over the week’s top arts and culture headlines. Lisa Simmons is the Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival and program manager at Mass Cultural Council. James Sullivan is a journalist and author specializing in popular culture and Americana. He’s also on the Emerson faculty.Hampshire College, the experimental Amherst campus built around independent thinking and academic rebellion, will close after the fall semester under the weight of declining enrollment and financial strain. Its loss is hitting alumni hard, including filmmaker Ken Burns, who called Hampshire’s model of experimentation profoundly transformative. Meta is reportedly exploring whether AI can do more than complete tasks — whether it can replicate executive presence itself. The company is said to be building a digital version of Mark Zuckerberg that could advise employees across the organization, raising questions about whether this is a new kind of access or a new kind of control. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s class of 2026 stretches across genres and generations, from Iron Maiden and Wu-Tang Clan to Sade and Oasis. It is a lineup that rewards longevity, settles a few old arguments, and reopens the question of who gets to define rock history. The Brady Bunch house has entered yet another phase of its afterlife. After HGTV rebuilt the interior to match the sitcom’s remembered world, the home now exists somewhere between landmark, attraction, and pop-culture shrine to the grooviest decade in television décor. At the MFA, Art in Bloom turns 50 this year, pairing works from the collection with floral arrangements inspired by them. The annual event brings together floral designers, garden clubs, and museum volunteers for one of the museum’s most colorful spring traditions.

Providence-based six-piece Sharks Come Cruisin’ joined The Culture Show with their sea-shanty-driven sound, drawing on maritime music, group singing, and an instrument lineup that includes guitar, bass, banjo, fiddle, accordion, and melodica. The band also hosts the regular PVD Shanty Sing at The Parlour in Providence on May 8 and has a duo set at Aidan’s Pub in Bristol on May 10. A century after Robert Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts, Vanessa Bumpus, exhibition coordinator at the Museum of Worcester, joined us to discuss Worcester to the Stars: The Goddard Rocket Centennial. On view through August 1, the exhibition traces Worcester’s place in the history of American rocketry through artifacts and images from Clark University, NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, and other collections. Then we turned to the other Boston marathon: the Boston Theater Marathon XXVIII, a full-day relay of 50 new ten-minute plays staged by New England theater companies at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre on May 3. Nathan Alan Davis, Director of the MFA Playwriting Program and Associate Professor of the Practice of Playwriting at Boston University, joined us to talk about the event’s staying power and its broader role as a gathering point for the region’s theater community, with proceeds benefiting the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund.

Historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder joins The Culture Show to discuss how democracies weaken, how authoritarianism rises, and what freedom actually requires. Snyder, the inaugural Temerty Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto, will be honored on April 26 at the Literary Lights Gala. Boston Youth Poet Laureate Ailin Sha joins us as our National Poetry Month celebration continues. Originally from Beijing and now a first-year student at Harvard College, Sha writes about migration, language, and belonging — themes that have helped shape both her poetry and her public work across the city. As the Boston Symphony Orchestra heads into a major leadership transition, writer, composer, and director Bill Barclay argues that the conversation about classical music audiences is overdue for a reset. He joins us to talk about why he believes the future audience for live classical music is younger than many people think — and about several upcoming performances: the BSO’s Explorer Concert on Beethoven’s Fifth on April 14, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players’ All-Stravinsky program on April 24, and Boston Baroque’s Idomeneo on April 24 and 26.

Cady Coleman joins The Culture Show to discuss Artemis II, NASA’s first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years, and what the mission represents for the future of deep-space exploration. She reflects on the ambition, risk, and sense of shared purpose that still make a moon mission feel like a true moonshot. Coleman is a retired NASA astronaut, U.S. Air Force colonel, scientist, pilot, and musician. Her latest book is “Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change.”Culture Show contributor Pedro Alonzo returns for “AI: Actual Intelligence” with impressions from a recent trip through London’s museum scene. He shares highlights from the city’s current cultural landscape, including a major retrospective devoted to Wes Anderson.Igor Golyak joins The Culture Show to discuss “Our Class,” the award-winning play based on the 1941 massacre of Jews in a small Polish town, and why its story of friendship, betrayal, and violence continues to resonate. He also reflects on what the production’s national success means for a regional theater company. Golyak is founder and artistic director of Arlekin Players Theatre based in Needham.

Nineteen-time Grammy winner Béla Fleck joins The Culture Show ahead of his April 18 performance at The Cabot in Beverly with harpist Edmar Castañeda and drummer Antonio Sánchez. He talks about musical risk, unlikely combinations, and a career that has taken the banjo from bluegrass to jazz, classical music, and beyond. Richard Hayden, Senior Director of Horticulture at New York’s High Line, joins The Culture Show to discuss the elevated park that transformed an old freight rail line into one of the city’s most influential public spaces. He talks about caring for the gardens that help define the High Line’s identity and what it takes to steward a landscape shaped by both design and self-seeded wildness. Virginia Pye joins The Culture Show to discuss “Marriage and Other Monuments,” her new novel set in Richmond during the reckoning over Confederate memory in 2020, where public conflict spills into the private lives of two sisters and their marriages. She’ll appear at Newtonville Books on Wednesday, April 8 at 7 p.m. to talk about the book.

On this edition of The Culture Show, Jared Bowen, Callie Crossley, and Lisa Simmons, go over the week’s top arts and culture headlines.First up, Italian authorities are searching for four masked thieves who stole a Renoir, a Cézanne, and a Matisse from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation outside Parma in a raid that took less than three minutes. The theft, valued at about $10.3 million, has renewed concerns about how vulnerable museums remain to fast, highly organized art crimes. From there, a truck carrying more than 400,000 KitKat bars vanished on its way to Poland, leaving Nestlé trying to solve a very different kind of heist. The stolen shipment weighed 12 tons, turning a candy delivery into an international mystery. And Boston’s arts community is remembering Candelaria Silva-Collins, who died at 71. As the first director of ACT Roxbury, she helped build lasting cultural infrastructure in Roxbury, from Roxbury Open Studios to the early Roxbury Film Festival and the transformation of Hibernian Plus Celine Dion will return to live performance this fall with a 10-show run in Paris, her first full concert engagement in six years. The comeback follows her diagnosis with stiff-person syndrome, which forced her to step away from the spotlight. Finally, “The Pitt” will bring its season finale to Alamo Drafthouse on April 13 as part of a one-night Healthcare Appreciation Week event. It is another example of television being repackaged as a theatrical experience.