The anxieties of 21st century working-class lives has become a major theme of theater. I saw two emotionally powerful plays at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival. You can see such productions next August 4 to 28,… (more)

If you care about theater and arts, you need to put the Edinburgh Festival Fringe on your travel plans. Every August, that Scottish city hosts the word’s largest arts festival. The next, August 4 to 28, 2017, is its 70th… (more)

Theater at its best tells history. That is always the case at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival. The next Fringe, August 4 to 28, 2017, features 30,000 performances of over 3,000 productions of drama, musical, and… (more)

Politics have animated theater since ancient times, presenting stories of war, brutality, government oppression, and national identity. These themes were powerfully represented in August at the 2014 Edinburgh Theater Festival Fringe which hosted performing arts groups from all over the… (more)

The best modern theater and dance is often about ideas. That was true in works at this year’s Avignon Theater Festival, held every July in the medieval city where Catholic Popes ruled from 1309 to 1377. Several performances I saw… (more)

Jackson Pollack, the great pioneer of abstract expressionism, was a struggling carpenter until the avant-garde Peggy Guggenheim discovered him and made his paintings famous.  Following her death in 1979, her Grand Canal palazzo became a museum, the Peggy Guggenheim… (more)

The rich five hundred-year history of the Swedish Royal Family blends with egalitarian politics to create an enchanting country. Elegance is combined with an absence of royal snobbishness. For example, visitors are welcomed into the inner courtyard of the Stockholm… (more)

Jewish culture in Central Europe is in the midst of a dazzling renaissance stimulated by the fall of communism and the enlargement of the European Union. Nowhere is that more evident than in Berlin, the heart of Germany, and Krakow,… (more)

The capital of Germany has two powerful personalities — the youthful urbane sophistication of former West Berlin and the 19th-century heritage of East Berlin overlaid by 45 years of communism. Louisa’s Place manifests Berlin’s combination of old and new. It… (more)

The crown jewel of Basel’s forty art museums is the architecturally acclaimed Fondation Beyeler Museum. It was designed to showcase the splendid personal collection of Hildy and Ernst Beyeler, who owned an art gallery for nearly fifty years. The spiritual… (more)