The Boston Castrato

“The Boston Castrato” does for 1920s Boston what E.L. Doctorow did for New York in “Ragtime:” it grabs a city out of history, mixes in some fiction and makes it vivid. Be it the high style of Boston’s Parker House Hotel; the flagrant, fragrant set who dance attendance on the poet Amy Lowell; the scientists and shipbuilders and politicians; it all shimmers into reality as an outsider leads us into its quaking heart.