With a promise of puppets, dancing, political subversion and free bread, Bread & Puppet Theater’s fourth annual installment of their Boston residency attracted a crowd Friday, the second night of the “Tear Open the Door of Heaven” performance. Audience members braved the cold to come out to The Cyclorama building, part of the Boston Center for the Arts in the South End, which proves to be a perfect venue for the visually arresting style of this Glover, VT based theater troupe. “Tear Open the Door of Heaven” packs a punch into an hour-and-a-half long piece, charged with director Peter Schumann’s stark anti-war message and his anti-elitist, community approach to creating art. It leaves one with an equal amount of despair and inspiration.

Michael Moore has wrestled with Congress, insurance companies, the National Rifle Association, General Motors, and various players in the “military-industrial complex."

But Goliath has never been this big…

In his new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story” which opened nationwide on Friday, Michael Moore (playing David) “volunteers” to save his tribe by taking on the behemoths that sit atop our economic system; i.e. the banks and mega-financial services corporations – companies such as AIG, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs – who many believe are responsible for the global economic disaster that erupted into public view 18 months ago.

Cambridge, MA - Fresh from her triumph at the New York International Fringe Festival where she won the award for Outstanding Solo Show (what would that be, a Fringe D’Or?) and extended by popular demand, Gioia (Joya) De Cari’s new autobiographical play "Truth Values, One Girl's Romp Through M.I.T.'s Male Math Maze" continues through Sunday, September 27th at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge.

Next year marks the centennial of the Mexican Revolution. Still, the country seems forever in flux. Two exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, present views of Mexico that not only differ from each other, but also from the pictures we’re used to seeing on travel brochures and in magazines.

Mexico has been called Edward Weston’s Paris. It is the only country the American photographer ever visited, and Viva Mexico! is about how he thoughtfully explored new techniques there in the 1920s and 1930s. By contrast, the companion exhibition, Vida Y Drama: Modern Mexican Prints presents bold, emotional images inspired by a long, tumultuous history.

Call it what you will, a staycation, a mini-vacation, or a day trip, the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton is a delightful spring destination. Although barely an hour out of Boston, the museum is situated on twenty-two acres of woodland lining the shores of Potter’s Pond. The setting offers an irresistible invitation for a country walk. More sedentary nature lovers, however, may enjoy the water views and sculpture garden, dining /al fresco/ on the patio. Either brown-bag it or do take-out from the museum’s new café.

New England’s only museum devoted to contemporary craft currently features two major exhibitions: Craft in America: Expanding Traditions; and Days of Spring: Memories of Intimate Connections.

Art is often subversive. Hitler knew it. Stalin knew it. And Mao Zedong knew it. Dictators regard ideas expressed by art for art’s sake as a threat. They use art as propaganda, a tool to glorify the state. They prevent artists who do not hew to the party line from exhibiting their work in public. Some of the groundbreaking Chinese artists who made the works currently on view at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), Salem, still aren’t allowed to show in their own country.

Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection “is ultimately a way of accessing China,” says Uli Sigg, the Swiss businessman who participated in China’s first joint venture with the West and later served as Switzerland’s ambassador to China and North Korea.

Students from the Zumix Radio Journalism Group have produced audio reviews of the Prison Break TV show and the Twilight book franchise. Listen to the reviews with the embedded Internet Archive players below, or download the original files in mp3 format directly from the Internet Archive by clicking the links below each player.

I was surprised to find myself at “Defending the Caveman,” – a long-running one-man comedy show written by Rob Becker that brags about looking at relationships between the genders “without taking sides.” Starring Michael Van Osch, who has been doing this since 2004, it is playing at the Wilbur Theatre through March 15. Based, as my companion put it, on “the humor of recognition,” this performance piece claims to be “the longest running solo play in Broadway history,” and has been translated into 16 languages and performed around the world by a variety of comics.

Duke Ellington once said, “There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.” He always felt his music was too organic and too free to fit in clear cut categories with trendy sounding names. In an industry where labeling one's sound is all but essential, in comes Elizabeth and the Catapult, a band who prefers to be told what genre they fit into since they have trouble figuring it out for themselves.

Superpowers are a fact of history. Before the Soviet Union and The United States, the British Empire was the world superpower. The Brits assumed “the white man’s burden” and carried back to England treasures to fill its museums with booty from many lands, most famously Greece, Egypt, and the Mideast. Skimming the cultures of less powerful people is not looked upon kindly as recent headlines illustrate. Yet, objects in British museums often fare far better than those left in their native country, especially in war torn areas of the globe. The National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad was one of the first casualties of the war.