World City Guide

Culture

Boston prides itself on being an extremely cultured city. Listings for the exhaustive number of cultural events that prove this can be found in the Thursday editions of the Boston Globe and the Boston Phoenix and the Friday edition of the Boston Herald. The Boston magazine (website: www.bostonmagazine.com ) has a monthly overview of the city’s events as does Where (website: www.bostonwhere.com ) which is usually found in hotel guest rooms.

Ticketmaster (tel: (617) 931 2000; website: www.ticketmaster.com ) sells tickets for all cultural events. Bostix (tel: (617) 723 5181, recorded information), whose kiosks are located at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Chatham Street and Copley Square, sells ‘same day’ half-price tickets for cash from 1100, as well as the usual ticket sales. The kiosks are open Monday-Saturday 1000-1800 and Sunday 1100-1600.

Music: The Boston Symphony Orchestra plays at Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue (tel: (617) 266 1492; website: www.bso.org ). Perhaps their most widely known event is the 4th July Concert or ‘Boston Pops’. The venue for the occasion is the Hatch Memorial Shell, at Esplanade off Storrow Drive, often stages free concerts throughout the summer. The Symphony Hall is also the base for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.

The Boston Philharmonic (tel: (617) 236 0999; website: www.bostonphil.org ) performs classical music at three different locations: Sanders Theatre, Cambridge and Quincy Streets, Cambridge (tel: (617) 496 2222), Symphony Hall, (see above) and its home, the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street (tel: (617) 536 2412). Built in 1903 and renowned for its acoustics. The Boston Chamber Music Society (tel: (617) 349-0086; website: www.bostonchambermusic.org ) performs at Jordan Hall on Fridays and Sanders Theatre on Sunday. Another acoustic gem is the King’s Chapel, 58 Tremont Street (tel: (617) 227 2155).

Opera is provided by the Boston Lyric Opera Company, 45 Franklin St (tel: (617) 542 6772; website: www.blo.org ), with performances at the Shubert Theatre in the Wang Center for the Performing Arts, 270 Tremont Street (tel: (617) 482 9393; website: www.wangcenter.org ). The country’s oldest musical organisation, with performances on record from 1815, is the Handel & Haydn Society, 300 Massachusetts Avenue (tel: (617) 266 3605; website: www.handelandhaydn.org ).

Theatre: The Theater District is on the south side of Boston Common, centred along Tremont, Boylston, Stuart and Washington Streets. The Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street (tel: (617) 426 5000; website: www.bcaonline.org ), is a complex with three small theatres. Other options include: the Charles Playhouse, 74 Warrenton Street (tel: (617) 426 6912; website: www.broadwayinboston.com/html/theatres/charles ) which is the home to the long running Blue Man Group; the Colonial Theater, 106 Boylston Street (tel: (617) 426 9366; website: www.broadwayinboston.com/html/theatres/colonial ); the Emerson Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont Street (tel: (617) 824 8000; website: www.maj.org ); the Shubert Theatre in the Wang Center for the Performing Arts (see Music above); and the smallest of the District’s traditional theatres, the Wilbur Theatre, 246 Tremont Street (tel: (617) 423 4008; website: www.broadwayinboston.com/html/theatres/wilbur ).

Over in Cambridge, the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street, Harvard Square (tel: (617) 547 8300), has two theatres and is the home of the American Repertory Theater.

Dance: The city’s top classical dance company is the Boston Ballet, 19 Clarendon Street (tel: (617) 695 6950; website: www.bostonballet.org ), which performs at the Wang Center for the Performing Arts (see Music above). The season runs September-May. Every Christmas there is a special performance of The Nutcracker. There is also the Jose Mateo’s Ballet Theatre (tel: (617) 354 7467), a nonprofit professional performance company and school which performs mostly classical and contemporary dance at the Emerson Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont Street (tel: (617) 824 8000). Art of Black Dance and Music (tel: (617) 666 1859), perform African and Latin American-style dance at various venues.

Film: All the latest Hollywood releases show throughout the city, but Boston also has a strong alternative and art-house scene. Try the Sony/Loews Theater, 100 Huntington Avenue (tel: (617) 266 1300), The Brattle Theater, 40 Brattle Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge (tel: (617) 876 6837), the Harvard Film Archive at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge (tel: (617) 495 4700; website: www.harvardfilmarchive.org ) and the free showings at the Hatch Memorial Shell, at Esplanade off Storrow Drive.

Boston is a very popular location for film sets. Movies shot there over the years include: The Thomas Crown Affair (1967), Still of the Night (1981), The Bostonians (1983), From the Hip (1986), Field of Dreams (1988), Glory (1989), Malice and The Firm (both 1993), Good Will Hunting and Amistad (both 1997), Legally Blonde (2000) and Mystic River (2003). Due out for release in 2004 are The Human Stain, Stuck on You, Passionata and Mona Lisa Smile, all set and shot in or around the capital of Massachusetts.

Cultural Events: The summer is a popular time for large festivals. In June, there is the Boston Globe Jazz and Blues Festival, with performances across the city throughout one week. On odd-numbered years (2003, 2005), the Boston Early Music Festival takes place at various venues throughout the city with concerts, Renaissance costume shows and exhibitions. On 4 July, there is the now annual Boston Pops spectacular at the Hatch Memorial Hall, complete with fireworks and cannon fire. In early September, the Boston Film Festival occurs, while Newbury Street is usually closed to traffic for the weekend after Labor Day (first Monday of September) as around 30 galleries allow unlimited access for Art Newbury Street.

Literary Notes: Writing and Boston are inseparable from around 1840, before which Philadelphia was pre-eminent. From this time on, Boston was talked of as the ‘Athens of America’, drawing writers and artists from everywhere. The writer Bret Harte (1836-1902) commented that if an arrow were shot across the Charles River into the Cambridge area it would inevitably bring down a writer. In its heydays of the 1850s, several of America’s major works appeared from writers based in and near the city: The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), who lived on Charles Street; Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville (1819-1891), who lived for a time at New Bedford; Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), who had lived just outside west Boston at South Natick; Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who built himself a cabin on Walden Pond to ‘front only the essential facts of life’. The small town of Concord (see the Excursions section in Sightseeing) was home at various times to Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and the Alcott family, including Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), author of Little Women (1868). Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was born in Boston. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Harvard professor of modern languages, lived at Craigie House (now known as the Longfellow National Historic Site) and published his famous poem ‘Hiawatha’ in 1855. In the 1850s, The Saturday Club, based at the Parker House Hotel, became a meeting point for the lions of literary society, including Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes and members of a group calling themselves the transcendentalists, a term applied to Waldo Emerson’s ‘back to nature’ writing such as Nature (1836). Henry James (1843-1916) published The Bostonians in 1886.

Boston remained almost unchallenged as the cultural and literary centre of the country until the new century. Cambridge has been home to two world-renowned poets. T S Eliot (1888-1965) studied at Harvard and e e cummings (1894-1962) was born in Cambridge and also studied at Harvard. Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) studied playwriting at Harvard in 1914. Both e e cummings and O’Neill are buried at Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills Venue. The city’s beloved baseball features in Dan Shaughnessy’s The Curse of the Bambimo (1991), which recounts the shudders that went through Boston society when the owner of the Red Sox sold the legendary ‘Babe’ Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1918.