| 28 November 2009
Pamela Roza, Dave Corey, Erik Fabregat and Nick Duckart in Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them.
Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre has excellent taste in playwrights, but it is much more erratic when it comes to selecting plays from their catalogues. The result is second-rate work from such first-rate writers as John Patrick Shanley (Dirty Story), Neil LaBute (Wrecks) and now Christopher Durang (Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them).
Under that amusing tabloid title, Durang has written a scattershot send-up of America’s paranoia over the terrorists among us. Durang has long taken aim at social extremism with an exaggerated voice that is usually both tart and smart. Think of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You or Beyond Therapy or The Marriage of Bette and Boo.
With Why Torture Is Wrong, though, he settles for mere silliness, gathering a gallery of cartoonish character for easy laughs, without ever making much of a point. And by late in the second act, after painting himself into a corner, Durang throws up his hands and wraps up his play with a musical number that reeks of desperation.
The evening starts promisingly enough, as Felicity (Sharon Kremen) wakes up in a hotel bed next to a guy she can barely remember from the night before. He is dark-bearded, quick-tempered Zamir (Nick Duckart), a dead ringer for a Middle Eastern terrorist by any racial profiling, even if he does insist that he is Irish. What is worse for Felicity, he reminds her that they were married the previous night in an alcoholic haze.
The comic possibilities get even better when Felicity takes Zamir home to meet her parents, who are no one’s idea of grounded, nurturing or open-minded. Luella (the inspired Barbara Bradshaw) lives in a cloud of memories of her peak Broadway viewing experiences, which allows Durang to skewer such targets as Tom Stoppard and the musical Wicked because, oh, why not? To occupy her hands, Luella perpetually knits, often in colors that happen to match her wardrobe. And when at one point, Luella faints into unconsciousness, her fingers reflexively keep knitting away.
Felicity’s dad, Leonard (Dave Corey), is your standard right-wing xenophobe. He fancies himself a butterfly collector, but that turns out to be code. What he really collects is guns, ammo and other weapons of interpersonal destruction, which he keeps in a second-floor arsenal that soon will be the scene of Zamir’s extraordinary rendition.
Are you laughing yet? It is not that torture and terrorism are unfit subjects for comedy, just that most of Durang’s humor comes from the tangential quirks of his supporting characters.
For instance, there is a well-meaning Republican underling named Hildegard (Pamela Roza) who, when the action flags, manages to have her underpants slip down around her ankles. Or Erik Fabregat, who narrates the play, and shows up as a waiter, a lounge singer and, most giggle-inducing, as a henchman to Leonard who speaks only in Looney Tunes character voices. So much for trenchant satire.
Resident scenic designer Sean McClelland has come up with an attractive series of sets that satisfy Durang’s multiple-location requirements, and director Richard Jay Simon knits the wackiness into as cohesive a whole as possible.
But it does make one wonder what Mosaic Theatre could come up with if it selected a play worthy of the care and attention it has lavished on Why Torture Is Wrong.
WHY TORTURE IS WRONG, AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM, Mosaic Theatre, American Heritage Center for the Arts, 12200 West Broward Blvd., Plantation. Continuing through Dec. 13. Tickets: $37. Call: (954) 577-8243.
| 27 November 2009
Domestic Deity, by Bethany Krull.
Bethany Krull.
Art: Sculptor Bethany Krull's technical expertise is matched by the strength of her intellectual concepts, which focus on the relationship of humans to the natural world. This Saturday evening, Mulry Fine Art in Palm Beach hosts the opening of a solo show by Krull called Dominance and Affection. "It seems that the most intimate connection we have with nature is with those animals we have chosen to keep as pets,” said Krull, who holds a master of fine arts from the School for American Crafts in Rochester, N.Y. “The intense love and affection we feel toward these creatures does not erase the fact that the success of the relationship lies in our complete domination over all aspects of their existence." The opening lasts from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., and the show runs through Dec. 18. Regular hours for Mulry Fine Art, which is in the Paramount Building on North County Road, are from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Call 382-8224 or visit www.mulryfineart.com.
Further south on the island, Sarah Gavlak is debuting the new location of Gavlak Gallery at 249B Worth Ave. Its opening reception is set for 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday, and will feature works by Rob Wynne, whose art is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, The Whitney and private collections. Call 833-0583 or visit www.gavlakgallery.com.
Cloud Nine, by Elayna Toby Singer.
Elayana Toby Singer.
For the third year, the artist who calls himself Jefro and Studio 1608 are presenting Visions+, a one-night show featuring 42, in order to show and sell their work. The list of artists reads like a Who’s Who of accomplished Palm Beach artists, several of whom have won the coveted South Florida Cultural Consortium. Some are FAU art professors; others also teach at the Armory Art Center, while others are regulars on the gallery scene:
Paul Aho, Elizabeth Close Atterbury, Harvey Baron, Bhavana Bhen, Debra Bigeleisen, Clemente, Joel Cohen, Phyllis Cohen, Mary Brittain-Cudlip, Damon Dupree Fuller, Ruben Hale, Walter Hynatsh, Bill Janice, Jefro, Steve Johnson, Karyl Mae Karpinos, Helmut Koller, Kate Kuhner, Chris Leidy, Natalie Levine, Ellen Liman, Cheryl Maeder, Michelle A. M. Miller, Carolyn Nelson, Dan Newman, Nuné, Josphine (Jo) Pratt, Sam Perry, Patricia Peters, Montana Pritchard, David Redelhiem, Terre Rybovich, Scarmato, Sebastian Thibadeau, Elayna Toby Singer, Victoria Skinner, Nancy Tart, Thomas Tribby, Joanie Van Der Grift, Rene Von Richthofen and Kat Winoker.
Singer, director of Palm Beach County's Art in Public Places program, will be displaying her mixed-media designs, which incorporate found objects, architectural salvage, construction debris, vintage tools, natural materials, beads and wire into kinetic artworks. The event will run from 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday at 1608 S. Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach. For more information on Visions+, call (561) 596-1180.
Help, by Astrid Mora.
mora
Paintings and drawings by Astrid Mora are on exhibit through Dec. 3 in the lobby of the Eissey Campus Theatre on the campus of Palm Beach Community Coll ege in Palm Beach Gardens. A native of Colombia who now lives in West Palm Beach, Mora has a master's degree in art history and exhibited in galleries, group shows and museums.
Mora teaches elementary school in Palm Beach County, and has studied painting at Palm Beach Community College with Wayne Stephens and Alessandra Gieffers.
“Astrid is a tireless worker, spending long hours developing her technical skills as a painter, as well as teaching young children,” Gieffers said. “She paints with sophistication: her color is hot and emotional, yet controlled." The Eissey Campus Theatre is open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and during performances. For more information, call 207-5905, or visit http://www.pbcc.edu//x13034.xml -- K. Deits
From The Fantasic Mr. Fox.
Film: With quirky, but ultimately unsatisfying films like The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, director Wes Anderson seemed an odd choice to go animated, but he scores a surprise success with The Fantastic Mr. Fox, based on a wily tale by Roald Dahl about a furry family of carnivores. He enlists such A-list voice talent as George Clooney and Meryl Streep, proves himself technically proficient at stop-motion low-tech kinetics and his script (written with Noah Baumbach) has plenty of adult humor to amuse grown-ups. Expect this one to be in the running for Best Animated Feature come Oscar time. In area theaters now. -- H. Erstein
Tom and Dick Smothers.
On stage: Yes, the Smothers Brothers look a lot older than they did in their Vietnam-era heyday, but their mom-liked-you-best, twisted-folk-songs shtick has a timeless quality. And when they take the Kravis Center stage Saturday night, here’s hoping they will have a few political barbs on our current state of war-waging. Perhaps to make themselves look young by comparison, Dick and Tom have enlisted the aid of comic Norm Crosby as a warm-up act. Tickets: $20-$55. Call: (561) 832-7469. – H. Erstein
Music: The Masterworks Chorus of the Palm Beaches opens its season this weekend with three works of the Italian Baroque: the Gloria of Vivaldi, the same composer's Beatus vir, and the great Magnificat of Pergolesi. Soloists are soprano Hilary Ryon and mezzo-soprano Ceci Grasso Dadisman. This season also will be the last for founding music director Jack Jones, who is retiring. The concert is set for 5 p.m. Sunday at St. Edward's Catholic Church on Palm Beach. Tickets: $20, $10 for students. Call 845-9696 or visit www.masterworkschorusofthepalmbeaches.com for more information.
Pianist Kemal Gekic and cellist Iris van Eck have just released a disc of music by Gabriel Faure.
This season, chamber music groups such as the Delray String Quartet are expanding, not contracting. The same goes for Chameleon Musicians, a Fort Lauderdale-based chamber group founded by cellist Iris van Eck that regularly plays at the Josephine Leiser Opera Center off Las Olas Boulevard. This Sunday afternoon, van Eck appears with pianist Kemal Gekic for a recital that will feature a piece from the duo's new disc devoted to the music of Gabriel Fauré: his Elegy. Also on the program are the Beethoven Sonata No. 5 (in D, Op. 102, No. 2), the A minor sonata (Op. 36) of Norway's Edvard Grieg, and the Rondo, Op. 94, of Antonin Dvorak. 3 p.m. at the Leiser Center. Tickets: $30, which includes a reception with drinks and tasty things to nibble on. Call 954-761-3435 or visit www.chameleonmusicians.com. – G. Stepanich
| 26 November 2009
Juliette Binoche and Romain Duris in Paris.
Reading the cliché-riddled description of Paris on the Website of the Lake Worth Playhouse, where the film opens Friday, you may want to roll your eyes.
This “valentine to the city of lights” is a “cinematic love letter to a city that seems to hide a story behind every shop window, small alley, street market or grand apartment building … the film explores the life and love possible only in Paris.”
Oh, please. You’d think you were entering the Paris of An American in Paris, all brightly colored cafes and picturesque strolls down the Champs-Elysées, nobody working and everybody happy. Paris is a much deeper movie than the idyllic travelogue this synopsis is apparently trying to sell.
Writer-director Cedric Klapisch’s (L’auberge espagnole) Paris is less like watching love burst forth from every corner market and apartment complex than it is about the lack of love; less a celebration of life than a meditation on death. Because in French cinema, nothing brings an estranged family together like impending death. Last year it was Catherine Deneuve in Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale; this year it’s Romain Duris as Pierre, a man waiting on a heart transplant to save his life. He uses the crisis to reconnect with his sister Elise (Juliette Binoche), a romantically frustrated social worker and single mother who looks about half her age.
Pierre uses his ailment to sulk, self-reflect and dig through his past (a call to a grade-school sweetheart leads to a tortured vomiting session), but mostly he spies on his neighbors, Rear Window-style, whose individual stories expand a multi-character mosaic.
There’s Roland (Fabrice Luchini), a professor and historian who deals with the trauma of his father’s recent death by anonymously texting bawdy Baudelaire poems to an attractive student; his brother Philippe (Francois Cluzet), an architect whose “perfect” life may be upset by the stress of his first child’s arrival; and a group of fishmongers at a local market dealing with their own romantic foibles. Everything is glued together by ping-pong editing that intercuts dual scenarios, urging us to draw our own connections.
Klapisch presents his flawed characters without judging them, lest the film run the risk of devolving into a redemptive morality tale. There are moments in Paris that are wildly off-base, like the juvenile, psychobabble dream sequence in which the happy cartoons from Pierre’s 3D renderings begin to complain about his designs, and a giant baby shows up at his worksite – if only his personal life was as perfectly calibrated as his buildings!
But mostly, Paris is a remarkable study of existential angst, with Death striking one character at random as another waits for his inevitable visit. It’s a film not without its lightness – Binoche’s clumsy striptease to a one-night-stand is an endearing and defining moment for her character – but its humor is most literally of the gallows variety.
Paris may be a multifaceted city of more than 2 million eclectic stories, and indeed many of them are the kind of shallow valentines to which the film’s synopsis alludes. But if that’s what you’re looking for, you might as well see Paris, je t’aime instead.
PARIS. Director: Cedric Klapisch; Distributor: IFC; Cast: Juliette Binoche, Romain Duris, Fabrice Luchini, Albert Dupontel, François Cluzet, Karin Viard, Gilles Lellouche; in French with English subtitles; Opens: Friday; Venue: Lake Worth Playhouse, 713 Lake Ave.
| 25 November 2009
The Diary of Anne Frank is arguably one of the most widely read and influential books of the last century.
Author Francine Prose has now penned a brilliant analysis, in which she asserts that the diary is a “work of literature” that has not been given its due.
“How astonishing,” Prose writes, “that a teenager could have written so intelligently and so movingly about a subject that continues to overwhelm the adult imagination."
Anne Frank was born in Germany in 1929. Four years later her family moved to Holland to escape the Nazis’ increasingly vicious anti-Jewish laws. In 1938 the Franks applied for visas to flee to the United States, but the waiting list contained 300,000 names. In 1943, as the Nazi roundup and deportation of Jews from Holland intensified, the Frank family and four other people went into hiding in a concealed second-floor annex, where 13-year-old Anne began writing.
Two years later, Nazi soldiers discovered the hiding place and shipped the occupants off to concentration camps, where Anne, her sister, and their mother died. The girls’ father, Otto, survived.
Francine Prose.
Prose argues that Anne was far more than a precocious teenager. The young diarist savored books and literature and longed to be a published author. She labored over the diary, rewriting and polishing early entries, while also devouring works of history and biography, as well as a children’s Bible, and a five-volume history of art.
Part of the diary’s appeal to young readers is Anne’s honestly about emotions that teenagers often keep private. She describes her growing love for Peter, the son of the other couple in the secret hideaway, as well as her devotion to her father and contempt for her mother.
The diary’s survival was a fluke. The text, including hundreds of loose pages, had been stuffed into a briefcase. A Nazi soldier dumped the contents on the floor so he could use the satchel to carry valuables. He could not have known, Prose notes, that he was discarding a literary “masterpiece."
After the war, Anne’s father edited the diary, which had been rescued from the hideaway by a family friend. Initially, every publisher rejected it. None could imagine that anyone would want to read a teenager’s musings. The book was first published in Holland in 1947. U.S. publishers were skeptical. Finally, Doubleday agreed to pay Otto Frank a $500 advance. The book soon became a blockbuster success.
Prose devotes 40 pages to a tedious description of the lawsuits and acrimony over how Anne Frank would be portrayed on stage and screen and who would have final authority over the scripts, a discussion not likely to interest many general readers.
The diary continues to sell, even though it is frequently banned in libraries and schools. Critics cite Anne’s discussion of her changing body, her rebelliousness and her love for Peter.
“Her tracking of the highs and lows of her erotic preoccupation,” Prose writes, “are still among the most accurate accounts of what it feels like to be a confused, romance-obsessed teen.”
Anne also addressed mature themes such as whether people are basically good or bad and why women are treated as inferior to men. And she displayed growing alarm about the fate of Jews, who in her words were being “sent to filthy slaughterhouses like a herd of sick, neglected cattle.”
Prose marvels at the amount of life packed into the diary’s pages. “Sex is part of it,” she writes, “as is death, love, family, age, youth, hope, God, the spiritual and the domestic, the mystery of innocence and the mystery of evil.”
To those who ask how a girl at age 13 to 15 could have written such a compelling work of literature, Prose notes that Mozart was composing music at age 5 and Keats was dead at 26. “The early appearance of genius,” Prose observes, “frequently obliges us to rethink our preconceived notions of age.”
Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife. By Francine Prose. 322 pp.; HarperCollins; $24.99.
| 24 November 2009
William Blake's A Poison Tree.
Starting a chamber music collective isn’t necessarily the easiest thing in the world to do, but in their debut concert Saturday at the Steinway Gallery in Boca Raton, the members of Vivre Musicale showed they have a good sense of what it will take for long-term success.
Founded by tenor Jorge Toro and clarinetist Berginald Rash, this five-member iteration of the group offered a varied program of song and instrumental music that took risks right from the outset, with a pair of demanding contemporary American compositions and a sly transition between two selections that tested whether the audience was paying attention.
Vivre Musicale got off to a bold start with Soliloquy, a piece for solo viola by the young American composer Martin Blessinger, who like Toro and Rash studied at Florida State University. Violist David Pedraza was the soloist, and he brought a virile, dark tone quality to this mildly interesting music, which charted a mysterious landscape of moody thematic fragments, abrupt silences, some sustained high-register work, and at the end, three pizzicato notes with which the piece expired rather than concluded.
That was followed by another contemporary American piece, For nothing lesse than thee, a cycle of three songs set by Zachary Wadsworth to texts by John Donne. Like the Blessinger, this is a highly professional composition, imbued with a kind of shadowy elegance that reflected the uncertainty of the poems. Toro has a strong, pleasant voice, quite effective in its lower reaches, though on Saturday it was a little ragged around the edges in parts of his register.
Accompanied by Rash and pianist Nastasa Stojanovska, Toro gave a sober reading of this well-crafted work, with Rash providing delicate support in the unison passages of the first song, The Legacie. A fast, sharply accented four-note motif dominated the second song, The Sunne Rising, and that music contrasted well with the declamatory passages of the tenor. The final song, The Dreame, began and ended with a decadent reminiscence in the piano of Schumann's Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, which Toro and Stojanovska used to propel themselves with only the slightest pause from Wadsworth into the actual Schumann song.
That kicked off a three-song set from Dichterliebe in which Toro's homey, warm voice could be heard to more traditional advantage, and he was at his best in the May-song and the Aus meinen Tränen spriessen that followed. The closing song, the well-known Ich grolle nicht, needed a brassier, more cutting quality than Toro's voice supplied, but he had prepared the songs well and the attentive audience applauded them warmly.
The final song cycle featured Toro and another FSU alum, oboist Evelyn Sedlack, in the Ten Blake Songs of the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. This is an unusual, difficult work, with its two monodic instruments working their way through Blake's otherworldly visions. Sedlack provided the best instrumental performance of the afternoon, playing with a big, fat sound that never thinned out, and in every way providing a real partnership with the tenor. This is particularly important because only with two firmly independent lines can the harmonies Vaughan Williams implies be heard.
And this was a good performance, with Toro doing a fine job of getting the lyrics across and Sedlack providing powerful counterpoint; the impression was of two thinkers ruminating on these remarkable poems, dipping into them repeatedly and coming back with insight and commentary.
The scheduled part of the concert closed with three of the Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola and Piano, written in 1910 by Max Bruch. Pedraza, Rash and Stojanovska worked well together as an ensemble, with evident unity of interpretive opinion. Rash was most persuasive in the first piece (No. 3, Andante con moto), playing the warm contrasting melody to Pedraza's dramatic opening with a tight, soft, sweet sound, an unexpected but nice choice, given that the writing here is tailor-made for a clarinetist to indulge his or her Romantic heart's desire.
Stojanovska demonstrated decent technique in the arpeggio cascades of the Romanian Melody (No. 5), and in the Night Song (No. 6), the last of the three Bruch selections, the trio played with taste and relative restraint.
As an encore, the three musicians played the final movement of the so-called Kegelstatt trio of Mozart (in E-flat, K. 498) as a tribute to a musician colleague killed in a motorcycle accident. This rondo movement showed signs of being underrehearsed, especially for Stojanovska, who had difficulty with the glittering piano part, a reminder that few composers are so logical on the page and then so treacherous in actual performance.
Still, it was an admirable gesture, and showed that Vivre Musicale is a group with plenty of heart. It also has a laudable attitude toward programming; it could have played its first concert much safer than opening with two 21st-century American pieces right in a row.
That bodes well for the musical adventurousness of the group, and will make them worth paying attention to. It remains now for them to pursue a higher level of performance polish to make their concerts memorable for consistent excellence, not just nerve and soul.
