| 30 July 2010
Julie Kent and Marcelo Gomes.
Dance: Julie Kent, long a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre, takes the title role tonight and through the weekend in Giselle, with the Boca Ballet Theatre at Florida Atlantic University’s University Theatre. Kent, one of the best-known ballerinas of her generation, partners with another ABT standout, Marcelo Gomes, for these three performances of the beloved 1841 ballet scored by French composer Adolphe Adam. It’s a story of selfless love, as a poor village girl who falls in love with an unattainable man, then dies, comes from beyond the grave to save him from a certain death by dancing at the hands of the Willis, spirits of girls who have died before their wedding day. This is one of the staples of the repertoire, with charming, elegant music, a dramatic story, and the kind of dance that epitomizes what classical ballet is all about. The shows (with recorded music) begin at 7 p.m. today, 8 p.m. Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday. Call 995-0709 or visit www.bocaballet.org. – G. Stepanich
Dave Matthews in concert at the Cruzan in August 2009. (Photo by Thom Smith/Palm Beach ArtsPaper file)
Music: The South African-born singer-songwriter Dave Matthews and his band return to the Cruzan Amphitheatre for two shows, tonight and tomorrow (Saturday night’s show is sold out, according to the band). Matthews’ politically conscious jam-band style has won him a devoted core of followers, and he’ll be joined at the Cruzan by the festival favorites Gov’t Mule, the Allman Brothers Band offspring featuring Warren Haynes. The concerts, if you can get in, start at 7 p.m. Tickets are $40-$75, and are available through Live Nation.
Then on Sunday at the Cruzan, it’s a visit from two of the rock titans of the 1970s: guitarist Carlos Santana and keyboardist Steve Winwood. This is a classic Boomer show, and while there will no doubt be much new music from these busy artists, lots of the crowd will have come to hear Black Magic Woman and Gimme Some Lovin’, among other favorites from these performers’ large catalogs. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Sunday; tickets are $25.50-$125.50 and are available through Live Nation.
Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848).
It’s the final weekend of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, and the musicians will end their 19th season with a world premiere and several of the rarities for which this concert series has become known. Composer Clark McAlister, who has produced each of the festival’s six CDs, offers Odyssey, a work for flute, clarinet and bassoon written in honor of the series’ three founders: Karen Dixon, Michael Forte and Michael Ellert. Also on the program are pieces by Donizetti, known primarily for his operas but also a prolific chamber composer earlier in his career (a Trio for flute, bassoon and piano), France’s Albert Roussel (a Duo for bassoon and double bass), German-born American composer Ingolf Dahl (Concerto a tre for clarinet, violin and cello), and the beautiful String Quintet in G, Op. 77, of Antonin Dvořák. The concerts are set for 8 p.m. tonight at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall; 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach, and 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org. – G. Stepanich
Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone.
Film: For those who appreciate the excitement of a breakout performance, see the new independent film Winter’s Bone and be stunned by the emergence of young Jennifer Lawrence. This impressive young actress plays a teenager trying to hold onto her homestead in backwoods Missouri, threatened with foreclosure by the disappearance of her deadbeat, drug dealer dad. So she heads off on an odyssey in the Ozarks to find him and, of course, encounters more than she bargained for. The film, a sensation at Sundance, is directed and co-written by Debra Granik, who made a similarly bleak feature called Down to the Bone a few years ago. The release of Winter’s Bone in the summer is more than a little puzzling, but do not let that stop you from seeking out this small, low-budget gem. At area theaters beginning this weekend. – H. Erstein
Felicia P. Fields and Mississippi Charles Bevel in Low Down Dirty Blues.
Theater: Sometimes a show’s cast is powerful enough to overcome the material’s shortcomings. The new musical revue Low Down Dirty Blues at Florida Stage’s new digs at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach is a dramatically lazy songfest, but its four-member company of performers is so entertaining, you will be willing to overlook the evening’s shapelessness. Instead, go and enjoy Sandra Reaves-Phillips, Mississippi Charles Bevel, Felicia P. Fields and Gregory Porter, four Chicago area fixtures who know their way around the blues and each get time in the spotlight to prove it. The show is not ideally suited for the Rinker Playhouse’s new thrust stage configuration, but with the expert sound design by Victoria DeIorio, the vocalists and band are a fine aural blend. Continuing through Sept. 5. Call (561) 585-3433 for tickets. – H. Erstein
From left: Hanna Thaw, Kendall Clark, Carolina Chavez, Julia Harvey and Maria Olea. (Photo by Kelli Marin)
Art: Next week, the Norton Museum of Art offers an exhibit of works by American artists such as Winslow Homer and Rockwell Kent from the West Palm Beach museum’s collections. The show, called American Masters: Prints and Drawings From the Norton Museum of Art collection, runs from Thursday, Aug. 5, to Oct. 1o, and was curated by the museum’s five summer interns. Those of us who’ve worked in companies that employ interns on a regular basis always look forward to the summer and collaborating with enthusiastic young people who so willingly and eagerly shoulder some of the burdens of the permanent staff. No doubt the Norton feels the same way about its quintet of helping hands, all of them young women from Palm Beach County, two of whom are still in high school and the others students at Florida State, the University of Florida and Dartmouth. Go see the show, which features 13 works on paper from the 19th and 20th centuries, as a way of honoring the interns in your own office, or as a tribute to the days when you yourself were a member of this honorable company of summer laborers. – G. Stepanich
In the Swamp (1917), by Charles Burchfield, from the upcoming Norton exhibit.
| 29 July 2010
Barbara Bradshaw and Peter Haig in The Gin Game.
Without the safety net of their subscriber bases, South Florida theaters often ease up on their missions in the summer with lighter fare. A case in point is Palm Beach Dramaworks, which just came off its most challenging season in its 10 years of existence, lowering its sights with the playing card-thin serio-comedy, The Gin Game.
The play brought instant recognition to its playwright, D.L. Coburn, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1978 for this tale of two elderly residents of the Bentley Home for seniors who meet and do battle over a series of gin rummy games. Some find this odd couple match to be profound, but Coburn’s real achievement was creating a couple of acting roles that two wily veteran performers could sink their teeth – or dentures – into.
There’s nothing wrong with that, and J. Barry Lewis, the company’s chief director, seemed to have cast the play well with Peter Haig and Barbara Bradshaw as the compulsive gamesman with a paramount need to win and the complete novice who stumbles into beating him, time after time. Individually, they are fine, but the play is a fragile duet and even after a week’s delay of the press opening, they seemed to be occupying completely different plays.
As curmudgeonly Weller Martin, Haig takes a broad approach, pumping his foot like a sewing machine pedal to the rhythm of his dealing, barking out the cards by number, erupting with foul-mouthed anger with each defeat. Bradshaw underplays straitlaced Fonsia Dorsey, subtly suggesting her thoughts through facial expressions as she goes from innocent glee to embarrassment to a new-found competitiveness as she plays.
Both performances are right for the characters, who are vastly different, but for the rhythms of the dialogue to work, the actors need to mesh better. Chances are that intangible quality known as chemistry will develop over time, but at the performance I saw, the added spark that the play so needs from its cast was not yet evident.
The Gin Game’s strength is in the clash of characters, though Coburn also tosses in some social commentary about the way we warehouse our elderly. Both Weller and Fonsia are guarded and secretive, so it is anything but surprising when their mutual protective armors get punctured in the second act and they are revealed to be different from their initial claims.
The entire play is set on the old age home’s porch, nicely realized by scenic designer Michael Amico. But with so much time devoted to the card games, the stage action is necessarily quite static. Lewis does what he can to counteract that problem, but the fact that the notion comes to mind suggests that the performances do not sufficiently draw attention away from the play’s limitations.
THE GIN GAME, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 322 Banyan Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Aug. 15. Tickets: $42-$44. Call: (561) 514-4042.
| 28 July 2010
Greenberg (Universal)
Release date: July 13
Standard list price: $18.49
If I were Roger Greenberg – the literate, perpetually disgruntled protagonist in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg – I would definitely be hand-writing a letter to Universal right about now that would go something like this:
Dear Universal Home Entertainment,
Eager to discover more about the motion picture featuring myself, I recently purchased your newly released digital video disc of Greenberg. But upon accessing the supplemental materials on the disc, I soon learned that the so-called “special” features were not special at all. Your DVD misleadingly advertises three featurettes on the back of its snap-case, withholding the vital information that the featurettes in question barely total two minutes each – and most of those miniscule durations are taken up by recycled clips from the film. Shame on you, Universal, for squandering an opportunity to provide in-depth analysis of this Criterion-worthy film in favor of lazily repackaging promotional fluff in the guise of three bonus features. Barring a dramatic change in your DVD production line, this will be the last Universal title I add to my collection!
Sincerely,
Roger Greenberg
But I’m not Roger Greenberg. Suffice it to say that the bonus features on Universal’s Greenberg disc are indeed pithy, generic and worthless, but the movie is worth owning no matter how bare-bones the DVD.
As the film’s irascible anti-hero, Greenberg (Ben Stiller) always has something worth complaining about, from the proliferation of horn honks in Manhattan to the leg room of his airplane seat, to the bland music piped through Starbucks’ speakers. Rather than let life’s little annoyances go, as most of us would, Greenberg writes letters to every person or company that has wronged him.
Like many characters portrayed by Larry David and Woody Allen before him, Greenberg is a privileged New York nebbish who may often be doing the right thing in principle, but his form and presentation are way off-base. As with Jeff Daniels’ pompous professor in Baumbach’s previous success The Squid and the Whale, I found myself agreeing with most of Greenberg’s observations while disparaging his woeful, elitist negativism. Walking a thin tightrope between enviably intelligent and disturbingly tactless, he’s a three-dimensional character more complex than those who dismiss him as simply an unlikable misanthrope, and Baumbach and Stiller deserve enormous credit for crafting this fascinating dichotomy.
When we’re introduced to Greenberg, he’s in a state of deliberate stasis. A former musician from a band he personally dissolved at the apex of its commercial breakthrough, Greeberg has just been released from a mental institution (his condition is never revealed, but depression, bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder are top candidates, not to mention crippling anhedonia), and he’s about to turn 41. Rather than confront aging with existentialist soul-searching (as Allen has done), Greenberg is postponing adulthood, maturity and the normalcy of midlife by “trying to do nothing for a while.” The opportunity to housesit in Los Angeles during his wealthy brother’s vacation in Vietnam provides Greenberg the chance to do just that.
Between meeting old friends from the band, building a doghouse for his brother’s pooch and, of course, mailing complaint letters, Greenberg begins to stumble through a relationship with his brother’s personal assistant Florence (mumblecore queen Greta Gerwig in a star-making turn), a beacon of life-changing joy next to Greenberg’s inherent dourness.
Equal turns authentically dramatic and wryly comic (To a guest at a party, Greenberg describes his life as “Middling – Leonard Maltin would give me two-and-a-half stars”), Greenberg is both an untraditional romantic comedy and an intimate homage to character-driven ’70s cinema whose depth and insights are large as its potential audience is small. Here’s hoping it has a strong cult afterlife.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (First Run Features)
Release date: July 20
SLP: $20.99
You know Daniel Ellsberg as the policy wonk who worked under Robert McNamara in the lead-up to the Vietnam War and later released the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page secret history of the war, to the media and the U.S. Congress, risking imprisonment to discredit a dishonest war machine. This documentary by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith profiles Ellsberg before, during and after his pivotal security breach, focusing especially on his transformations from hawkish employee of the Defense Department to outspoken leftist gallivanting with anti-war radicals such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. It’s obvious where Ehrlich and Goldsmith stand in this interesting but hagiographic portrait – Ellsberg himself narrates about half the movie, and an advertisement for his website and blog are included in the bonus features. Still, the history contained in the film is especially relevant to our extreme political climate, when those who don’t subscribe to one party’s dogma are ostracized as traitors by the other side and when the media are more content to cover fluffy non-stories than speak truth to power. The Most Dangerous Man in America is a reminder that dissent is patriotic – and that the media’s job is to question government, not echo its talking points.
Barking Dogs Never Bite (Magnolia)
Release date: July 20
SLP: $24.49
The first feature by popular South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho contains none of the delightfully schlocky self-consciousness of his B-movie throwback The Host, nor any of the psychological complexity of his recent The Mother. Instead, this overambitious genre mash-up meanders into thematic and aesthetic oblivion, and it takes a trying 110 minutes to do so. Barking Dogs Never Bite is essentially about an unlikable, part-time college lecturer whose murder of a yapping dog in his apartment complex leads to a series of canine-related calamities and threatens his plans to become a fully paid professor. There’s also some overwrought nonsense about a dog-eating basement dweller, a haunted boiler room and a pet-loving bookkeeper who longs to thwart a high-profile criminal and thus make it on public television. The film is every bit as disjointed as it sounds. Barking Dogs Never Bite is also available in Magnolia’s three-disc Bong Joon-ho Collection (SLP $46.49), packaged alongside The Host and The Mother.
Mystery Science Theater 3000: Vol. XVIII (Shout! Factory)
Release date: July 13
SLP: $39.49
The latest installment in the never-ending quartets of Mystery Science Theater episodes features four new ones to DVD. The box set includes the Season Two entry Lost Continent, a schlocky adventure picture about a group of scientists who land on a continent populated by dinosaurs; Season Four’s Crash of the Moons, a hilariously nonsensical sci-fi yarn; Season Six’s The Beast of Yucca Flats, a silly scientist-turned-beast monster movie whose episode is perhaps more notable for the preceding short Money Talks, about a kid who gains financial advice from a poorly bewigged Benjamin Franklin; and Jack Frost, an antique Russian Cinderella story whose title character doesn’t even appear until the end of the film. Special features include new introductions by MST3K cast members Frank Conniff and Kevin Murphy and a “Look Back at The Beast of Yucca Flats.” Sounds like hours of varied, sardonic fun from the world’s best riffers.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited after posting to correct a factual error and incorrect image.
| 25 July 2010
Vocabulary fans, the word for today is “zoetic.”
It’s an adjective, meaning “pertaining to life,” so it is not a bad name for a new live stage company, unless you happen to worry that theatergoers in South Florida will not buy tickets for a troupe it cannot pronounce or spell, let alone know what it means.
Still, welcome Zoetic Stage, the brainchild of producing artistic director Stuart Meltzer and his partner, playwright-designer-actor Michael McKeever. They have gathered a group of prominent local theater artists and established themselves with a lofty mission statement, promising to become “Miami’s theater company.”
Michael McKeever.
Meltzer, former artistic head of City Theatre, has certainly been able to lure some terrific talent to the venture. The roster includes Irene Adjan, Stephen G. Anthony, Jeffrey Bruce, Nick Duckart, Lela Elam, John Felix, Elena Maria Garcia, Maribeth Graham, Amy London, Margery Lowe, Amy McKenna, David Perez Ribada, Jerry Seeger, Kim St. Leon, Barry Tarallo, Laura Turnbull and Tom Wahl. Very impressive group.
Still, this is hardly an opportune economic time to start such an ambitious venture. But Zoetic already has a board of directors in place, headed by Stephanie Demos-Brown, wife of Christopher Demos-Brown, whose When the Sun Shone Brighter premiered at Florida Stage at the end of last season and who will be one of the company’s resident playwrights, along with McKeever.
Each will have a world premiere in Zoetic’s debut season, which is certainly one of the most promising in the region. Specific dates and venues are still being worked out, but the season will kick off with McKeever’s South Beach Babylon, a “wickedly funny and sexy” look at the lives of five fictional Miami artists in the weeks leading up to the Art Basel exhibition.
Second on the season slate is the Florida premiere of Stunning, by David Adjmi, the story of a well-to-do Syrian Jewish couple living in Brooklyn and their clash of cultures with their African-American maid.
Christopher Demos-Brown.
Next up is Demos-Brown’s Wrongful Death, a satirical take on the way the American civil justice system values human life as seen through efforts of a jaded personal injury lawyer to land the case of her career. The group’s first season concludes early next summer with Carlos Murillo’s Diagram of a Paper Airplane, a Southeastern premiere about four former best friends and their aftermath of the tragic death of one of them.
Besides all the logistical chores of starting a new company, a key priority is fund-raising. To fill its coffers and introduce itself to the public, Zoetic will be presenting a staged reading this Monday night (July 26) of seven of the prolific McKeever’s short plays under the puckish title of McKeever’s Briefs. Audiences at City Theatre’s Summer Shorts have seen a few of these plays, and three have been finalists in the 10-minute play contest at Actor’s Theatre of Louisville.
McKeever’s Briefs will play at the Caldwell Theatre, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton, beginning at 7 p.m. A $15 donation is requested. For more information on the fundraiser or Zoetic, call Meltzer at (954) 235-6208.
| 24 July 2010
Jacques Ibert (1890-1962).
At its most important, the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival is about discovery, in hearing something worthwhile that its musicians have brought out of the libraries or fresh off the stocks for its loyal audience of nearly two decades.
In the first installment Friday of its third week of concerts, the musicians returned in a largely French program to the work of Jacques Ibert, whose Deux Mouvements of 1922 the group performed and recorded 10 years ago. That work, for two flutes, clarinet and bassoon, got an encore performance Friday night at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall, but it was another composition by Ibert that really raised the temperature in the room.
The Trio for violin, cello and harp, written by Ibert in the dark year of 1944 for his harpist daughter, is an exemplary piece in whose second movement the ghost of Gabriel Fauré looms large, but which overall is a quintessentially French, marvelously colorful exploration of the timbres and capabilities of its three instruments. Harpist Kay Kemper was joined by violinist Mei-Mei Luo and cellist Christopher Glansdorp for this three-movement piece, which differs from the earlier Ibert work and much other of its ilk in its red-bloodedness, fire and drive.
The opening movement, marked Allegro tranquillo, was anything but laid-back in this performance; the first chordal snap in the harp was followed by a fierce athleticism from Luo and Glansdorp for the sinuous opening theme, giving the movement a headlong feel that the three players were happy to feed with plenty of fuel. Kemper provided strong rhythmic backing for her string partners, and offered impressive power in the fountains of glissandi that burst out in the middle of the movement.
Glansdorp demonstrated beautiful tone quality in the lovely second movement, a Fauré-style chanson from its harp ostinato to its melancholy harmonies and long-limbed melody, and Luo answered him in the same open-hearted fashion. The brusque energy of the opening was evident again in the closing Scherzando con moto, in which a chattering five-note motif was prominent and was effectively contrasted with a gentler secondary theme in the harp. The three musicians worked admirably well together, and their high-octane reading of this fine Trio made it stand out.
The Ibert Deux Mouvements that followed featured the same musicians that assembled for it a decade ago: flutists Karen Dixon and Beth Larsen, clarinetist Michael Forte and bassoonist Michael Ellert. This is a slighter piece than the Trio, and gains its attractiveness in its sly humor, exemplified by the two smirking-bassoon codas. This was an expert performance, distinguished by the fat, rich flute tone of Dixon and Larsen and its ensemble control, such as the skillful group diminuendo in the first of the movements.
Larsen and Dixon opened the second half with an old-fashioned Romantic-era display piece, a fantasy on themes from Verdi’s opera Rigoletto by the flutist-composer team of brothers Karl and Franz Doppler. It was designed to show off flute virtuosos, and in Larsen and Dixon it had two excellent players who gave us a good idea of why this kind of piece was so popular in its day.
Although this piece featured, briefly, La donna è mobile and Bella figlia dell’amore, much of it was built on the Act I aria for Gilda, Caro nome. The Dopplers surrounded these tunes with plenty of rapid chromatic scales in duet, or let one flute play difficult accompaniment figures while the other sang sweetly above it. There was no hint of any squeaks, honks or flubs in any of this, just two veteran players spinning out yards of silky smooth scales and dazzling filigree. Pianist Michael Yannette accompanied skillfully, and stayed well in the background.
Yannette, Forte and Ellert opened the concert with the other German work on the program, Mendelssohn’s early Concertpiece No. 2 for clarinet, bassoon and piano, written in 1832 but with the misleadingly high posthumous opus number of 114. The bassoon part of this work was originally composed for the now obsolete basset horn, and Forte hinted in remarks before the piece that real basset horns might show up on the festival’s concerts in its upcoming 20th anniversary season.
This is a modest but very attractive work, a chamber concerto for the two wind instruments that’s light on its feet. Both Ellert and Forte played with charm and suavity, with Ellert tackling a slightly more difficult part in that the second of the three movements required him to play the wide-ranging arpeggios supporting the clarinet tune, an Italian opera aria in everything but name. Both musicians were nicely in synch for the bubbling third movement, and they had good support from Yannette.
Like the second concert in the festival, the third ended with a major work from the string quartet repertoire, this time the String Quartet in F of Maurice Ravel. This sublime masterpiece contains not just wonderful music but also an object lesson in Ravel’s genius at orchestration; few composers before or since have been able to draw so much color and sound from only four instruments.
Violinists Dina Kostic and Rebecca Didderich (more familiar as a violist), violist Rene Reder and cellist Susan Bergeron joined forces for the Ravel, and did a more than respectable job. They were at their best in the most straightforward parts of the quartet, such as the tricky five-beat fourth movement, which sounded carefully and thoroughly rehearsed, and in the second movement, with its frequent time shifts and pizzicato punctuation.
And while this was a good presentation of the quartet in that it allowed listeners to appreciate the warmth of Ravel’s melodic writing and the richness of his sonic fabric, something subtle about the music seemed to elude this foursome. The closing bars of the third movement, for example, were deliberate where they might have been mysterious and dramatic, and the delicate, frequent harmonic changes in the first movement could have been played with a greater sense of surprise and mood.
What’s needed here is a little more of what makes Ravel, well, Ravel: An illusion of spontaneity and naked emotion carried out by means of an almost fearful precision.
The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival repeats this program at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre, Delray Beach, and at 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Tickets are $22. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org.
