The Palm Beach Opera is closing its three-year survey of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas with a somewhat minimalist but well-staged and ably sung production of Così fan Tutte.

Friday night found a cast of young, handsome singers working inside a Stephen Lawless reading of the opera that was easy to understand, almost plausible, and full of smart, interesting stage business that added depth to the action without overwhelming it or detracting from the elegance of the late-Mozart score.

If there wasn’t much exceptional singing Friday night, there nevertheless was plenty of good vocal work from each of the characters, particularly in the second act, which was noticeably more confident and lively than the first.

The Slovenian soprano Sabina Cvilak, making a return appearance to the house after her turn as Desdemona last season in Verdi’s Otello, made a good Fiordiligi, especially in her moments of peak emotional crisis in the second act. She has a strong, round voice with a nice darkness in the lower registers, and a highly polished finish throughout its compass.

Her work in the big second-act aria Per pietà ben mio was very impressive, with clean shifts in the jumps from top to bottom, and a persuasive interpretive sense of psychological turmoil. Her voice blended beautifully with that of her operatic sister, Lithuanian mezzo Jurgita Adamonyte (beginning with the Soave sia il vento in Act I), and she managed to make the most of a rather cool stage temperature.

Adamonyte, as Dorabella, was considerably warmer, in part because the character calls for it, but she also is an appealing actress who made her second-act duet with Guglielmo (Il core vi dono) delightful to watch. Like Cvilak she has a strong, well-rounded voice, and one with a little more presence.

Her E amore un ladroncello was charmingly sung, and her flirty, happy interpretation of it an excellent match for Dorabella, who too often is asked to present this aria through a sadder-but-wiser scrim of hard-won knowledge.

The men were equally solid. Tenor Norman Shankle, last season’s Cassio in Otello, has a lightly colored but forceful and flexible voice that’s ideal for Mozart. The added heat he brought to his singing in the crucial duet with Fiordiligi added a fresh, nervous color to the voice that was quite attractive.

Baritone David Adam Moore was a fine Guglielmo whose voice also has the right kind of weight and suppleness for Mozart. His acting was good, both solo and with Shankle, and his Donne mie, la fate a tanti had a definitive quality to it that made it memorable.

As Don Alfonso, the Italian bass Matteo Peirone was absolutely on point. He had just the right kind of smirky knowingness as the moral philosopher who sets this comedy in motion, and the conversational style of his firm, warm voice embodied the character every bit as much as his acting.

The role of Despina is a gift for a comic singer, and mezzo Abigail Nims was marvelous at it. She has a big voice with a sharp, cutting sound when she needs it, and she got the second act off to a wonderful start with her Una donna a quindici anni. The quality of her singing was apparent early in the first act, and not just with In uomini, in soldati: In the sextet before Fiordiligi’s Come scoglio, you could hear Nims tossing off those fast leaps at Io non so, se son Vallachi with pinpoint accuracy.

It’s worth pointing out here that this company has benefited in its last couple productions from the casting choices made by David Blackburn, the director of artistic operations. This Così cast was shrewdly assembled using voices of different colors, but with a broad unity of weight and agility; Nims’s voice, which had the tightest focus, added the perfect standout spice to the mix.

Italian conductor Gianluca Martinenghi led the fine Palm Beach Opera Orchestra very carefully, and in the first act kept the volume level way down beneath his singers. It struck me as something too cautious, with the result that some of Mozart’s wit and vigor were drained out of the music. One missed the usual fire of principal conductor Bruno Aprea, though Martinenghi did an expert job of keeping things moving, and the orchestra played quite well for him.

Stage director Lawless, a veteran of the Glyndebourne touring company, working with a simple, almost severe set from Peter Dean Beck and scenery from the Altanta Opera, fills the space with intelligent choices. When Dorabella and Despina hear out Fiordiligi’s anguish in Act II, they do so lying on a bed next to each other, heads to the audience and feet toward on the headboard, as Fiordiligi stalks the room. It adds a whimsical Tiger Beat feel to the scene that beautifully sums up the two points of view on the fidelity issue, and makes the situation believable for a modern audience.

Other clever bits include Benjamin Franklin’s key-and-kite lightning deliverer as a substitute for Dr. Mesmer’s magnet, and a continuing bit with two colored sashes worn by the women, which for Fiordiligi becomes something of a set of worry beads, and for Dorabella becomes an object of playful seduction in her duet with Guglielmo, which Friday night actually raised some sexual heat.

Greg Ritchey’s chorus was solid and effective, and Kathy Waszkelewicz’s costumes were excellent – elegant and lovely at all times for the women (even their undergarments at the opening of Act II), and getups for the “Albanians” that almost made them convincing.

Così fan Tutte will be performed at 7:30 p.m. today at the Kravis Center, with Caitlyn Lynch as Fiordiligi, Patricia Risley as Dorabella, Andrew Schroeder as Guglielmo and Joel Prieto as Ferrando. Friday night’s cast will return at 2 p.m. Sunday, and tonight’s cast will return at 2 p.m. Monday. Tickets start at $23. Call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org, or call 832-7469 or visit www.kravis.org.

Music: Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote three operas with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Palm Beach Opera has presented the first two – Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni – over the past two seasons. Tonight, the company presents the last of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas, Cosi fan Tutte. In some ways the most important and radical of the three, it’s written to an original libretto and deals with questions of fidelity in a comic, but ultimately adult, way. Glyndebourne Festival veteran Stephen Lawless helms the production, which features Sabina Cvilak and Jurgita Adamonyte as Fiordiligi and Dorabella, and Norman Shankle and David Adam Moore as Ferrando and Guglielmo. That cast will appear tonight and Sunday afternoon; the alternate cast features Caitlin Lynch and Patricia Risley in the two female leads, and Joel Prieto and Andrew Schroeder as their male foils. Curtain is 7:30 at the Kravis Center, with tickets starting at $23. Call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org, or reach out to the Kravis at 832-7469 or www.kravis.org.

One of the finest violinists in the nation is Hilary Hahn, a prodigy whose first recording at 17 was a daring survey of the Bach solo literature, a choice that is most unusual but reflects the considerable intelligence of a woman who moonlights as a journalist for the great contemporary music Web portal Sequenza21. She appears in recital tonight at the Lyric Theatre in Stuart with the fine Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa. The two have been touring with the Beethoven Spring Sonata as well as sonatas by two American mavericks: Charles Ives (Sonata No. 4) and George Antheil. Hahn has been a good advocate for American music since she recorded Edgar Meyer’s concerto on a disc with the Barber concerto, and her newest disc features the concerto of Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Higdon, so expect musical empathy and impressive mastery of difficult material. Tickets for the 8 p.m. Ovation Concerts show are $75. Call 772-286-7827 or visit www.lyrictheatre.com.

Film: Just in time for you to fill out your Oscar ballot is the local opening of Outside the Law, a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film from Algeria. It is a look at that nation’s struggle for independence from France, as seen through the personal battles of three brothers. One is a soldier, another an imprisoned revolutionary and the third a money-grubbing hustler. In this epic film -- one of the most expensive ever made in Algeria -- they seek bitter revenge for the way they were thrown off their land as youngsters, with family and country as the priorities. Within that context, the well-acted, involving film takes the shape of a gangster picture. Opening today. – H. Erstein

Theater: Palm Beach Dramaworks usually trafficks in heavyweight classics from writers like Shaw, O’Neill or Ibsen, but they now turn to a contemporary master, Donald Margulies, and his Pulitzer Prize winner from 2000, Dinner with Friends. Dramatic, but with plenty of painful humor, it is the tale of two couples, longtime friends whose lives are deeply affected in unexpected ways when one couple splits up over an act of infidelity. Resident director J. Barry Lewis helms a production that features Erin Joy Schmidt and Jim Ballard as nurturing food writers and Sarah Grace Wilson and Eric Martin Brown -- married in real life -- as the divorcing couple. Opening today and running through April 17. Call (561) 514-4042 for tickets. – H. Erstein

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More than a year and a half ago, Caldwell Theatre co-founder Michael Hall handed off the artistic reins of the Boca Raton stage company he had run for 36 years. But he suspected it was just a matter of time before we would be back directing a production there, and that time is now.

Opening Friday evening is Hall’s staging of Next Fall, the Tony Award-nominated play from last season that he has been itching to direct since he happened upon it off-Broadway in 2009.

As he often did on scouting trips to New York, he called up two of his favorite actresses -- Pat Nesbit and Vicki Boyle -- who had appeared often on the Caldwell stage over the years, and asked them what they should see.

“Nesbit said, ‘Well, a friend of mine has written a play. I was on tour with him in ‘Biloxi Blues.’’ So they bought tickets and we went, not knowing anything about it. At intermission, we just kind of looked at each other, saying, ‘Wow, this is wonderful,’ ” and Hall began working on getting the performance rights to Next Fall for the Caldwell.

Nesbit’s friend is Geoffrey Nauffts, artistic director of the Naked Angels theater troupe, and his play concerns an unlikely gay couple -- 15 years apart in age, one a devout Christian fundamentalist, the other a staunch atheist. As the play begins, the younger partner, Luke, has just been in a car accident that lands him in an intensive care unit, as relatives and friends hold vigil in the hospital waiting room.

Over the course of 15 scenes that flash back and forth cinematically over a five-year span, we get to know Luke, his lover Adam, Luke’s homophobic father Butch, his divorced mother and Adam’s boss at a candle shop, where he is underemployed.

The Caldwell seems a natural fit for the play, since Hall has long championed gay-themed works there, from Bent to The Boys in the Band to Gross Indecency: The Trials of Oscar Wilde to Take Me Out. As Hall recalls, “The first time we did ‘Bent’ we were terrified, but that was a long time ago. And it was a standing-ovations screaming success. So we knew then that subject matter would not be a problem here.”

Besides, Hall does not consider Next Fall to be a gay play. “I think it’s a play about religion or lack of it. I think this play really is about someone who totally and truly believes in a faith and someone who really does not,” he says. “While, yes, two of the characters are obviously gay, but it could be two genders. There are other major issues in the play and it’s very today. Times have changed. I think the majority of people think, ‘We’re not going to be shocked anymore. That’s just a part of life.’ And ‘Next Fall’ isn’t trying to shock anyone.”

If anything, the play wants the audience to consider its own view on religion and faith. “You’re not going to change your feelings, but I think you will question what is possible,” says Hall. “And who doesn’t wonder, regardless of whether you were brought up religious, or agnostic or atheist, who doesn’t think about what happens and why are we here? Nobody’s going to preach to you, but there are some very big questions being asked.”

Ask Hall which side of the religion issue he personally comes down on and he will launch into a memory that he shared with the Next Fall cast.

“When I was a teenager, I was chosen to be one of thousands of Presbyterians from around the world to go to Grinnell, Iowa, to attend an international conference of Presbyterian youth. We were housed in Grinnell College, a religious school. And after the first day of all this singing and such, there was a little movie theater across the campus. I wandered over and on the marquee it said, ‘Grinnell Native Jean Seberg in Saint Joan.’ Well, guess who went AWOL (from the conference).

“That was a pivotal moment in my life, because of Shaw, Saint Joan, the movies, Jean Seberg -- even though I didn’t know who she was at the time. I guess the theater is my church. And so, where am I coming from? Lots of questions, no certainty at all, but with a great regard for people who believe. I wish I could be that.”

As to what speaks most forcefully to him in Next Fall, Hall ponders for a minute and says, “I think I find it very intriguing how people who come from totally different beliefs, ages and places, if they allow themselves to listen to each other, there will be hope for growth and peace in the world. I think it happens to Butch in the play, because finally he is willing to realize that certain things are true that he didn’t think should be or could be.”

If there is one thing that Hall is certain of, it is that he has enjoyed getting back into the director’s chair. “It’s sort of like old times, because I never really left. I’m usually here once or twice a week,” he says of the Caldwell. “(New artistic director) Clive (Cholerton) and I find ourselves e-mailing at 3 o’clock in the morning. It’s been really good to be able to do the things that I have wanted to do, and then be able to step back and direct a play.”

And if he could direct one production a season, that would be ideal, says Hall. “We’re talking about next season. One a year would be really great. That would give me the time to really prepare it and cast it, which usually takes more time that you have.”

He is enjoying retirement, which has included travels to Russia, France and Germany, as well as writing a family history. “I work as much, if not more, but I don’t have any deadlines,” Hall says with a satisfied smile. “I can write all day and don’t have to be somewhere for a meeting to raise money.”

NEXT FALL, Caldwell Theatre Co., 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Sunday, Feb. 20 - Sunday, March 27. Tickets: $27-$75. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.

The old saying, attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald, declares that there are no second acts in American life.

But West Palm Beach’s Steve Caras has had a second, third and fourth life, re-inventing himself at regular intervals or at least tackling and mastering new careers.

He began as a classical dancer in the New York City Ballet, mentored by the great George Balanchine as what Caras calls “his youngest male, least-trained dancer.” Then Balanchine had a hunch about Caras’s talent with a camera, so he encouraged him to become the company’s photographer.

When he moved to South Florida, he taught classes and became the ballet master for the Miami City Ballet. Eventually, he specialized in fund-raising for Edward Villella’s troupe, a skill he later employed for Palm Beach Dramaworks.

But he has had to put that job on hold for yet another one, assisting filmmakers Deborah Novak and John Wittig in the creation of a documentary about himself, Steven Caras: See Them Dance. It receives its first public viewing Thursday at the Kravis Center’s Persson Hall, before airing at various public television stations around the country. Caras estimates he will be busy appearing with the film on pledge breaks for the next three years.

This cinematic journey began nearly two and a half years ago, when Caras got a phone call from Novak asking to meet with him. He assumed they wanted to use some of his photos for a project, a frequent request.

“Deborah did most of the talking and she started to tell me in detail about my life, since my starting dancing at 15, the bullying that accompanied it, the issues with my father about it, then my getting into the New York City Ballet just three years later,” Caras recalls. “And she went on and on. It was puzzling that she knew so many personal things about me.

“She had been fascinated quietly with my career and has watched me reinvent myself over and over again, in order to remain in reach of my beloved ballet world,” he says. “I was kind of stunned when they said they would like to profile my life, saying it’s an interesting story, very Billy Elliot-esque in my beginnings. Against all odds at a time and at a place when ballet was not what boys dove into without consequences.”

Caras’s reaction to the idea? “At first I thought it was my friend Sean fooling around. And then I recognized it was for real and I was stunned. But thrilled.”

He liked the filmmaking husband-and-wife team from the start, and simply went with his initial positive impression. He is glad he did, saying, “Very much so, which is not to say that there haven’t been tense moments. Because unlike a major motion picture, there is a very lean team and the budget coincides with the leanness of the team.”

Caras estimates he was interviewed and filmed in action -- on a photo shoot and conducting a dance class -- for about 12 hours, most of which wound up on the cutting room floor. In addition, the film features dancers and choreographers Peter Martins, Jacques D’Amboise, Virginia Johnson, Kay Mazzo, Allegra Kent and Sean Lavery, as well as fine art and photography expert appraiser Sarah Morthland, the executive director of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, Jacqueline Z. Davis and Mia Michaels from TV’s So You Think You Can Dance, all talking about Caras.

The Kravis premiere screening came about because of a special request by Caras. “I had asked early on if it was possible, before it airs on television, to do a screening in my hometown, because I have really embraced South Florida as my home,” he explains. “And they said yes and the Kravis Center said they would love to put it on their calendar.”

Following the screening, Caras and Novak will be interviewed live by Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout.

And Caras made one more request that was granted -- each couple in attendance will receive a DVD of See Them Dance, unavailable in stores, but destined to be a coveted public television pledge thank-you gift.

“On the DVD is a bonus feature called, ‘All About Steve.’ It’s me speaking at an informal lecture about my life,’ he says. “Can you believe it?”

STEVEN CARAS: SEE THEM DANCE, Kravis Center, Persson Hall, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Thursday, Feb. 24, 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $20. Call: (561) 832-7469.

Certain media, subjects and sizes benefit an artist more than others. And something in the creation process usually gets lost, while going from one to another. Some highlight skill while others harm it. Some encourage innovation while others enforce limits.

It is hard to be consistently extraordinary. But the Flagler Museum’s current show focuses on a man who was.

Named appropriately The Extraordinary Joseph Urban, running through April 17, the show gently introduces us to the world created by an architect, illustrator, set designer and artist who went on to design sets for the opera stages of Boston and New York and for the Ziegfeld Follies, as well as buildings throughout the world.

The exhibit is housed in three gallery rooms and consists of watercolor design drawings, illustrations, sculptures, set models and some furniture pieces designed for hotels and restaurants. We find the occasional photographs of the artist and the only surviving rendering of the demolished Oasis Club, in Palm Beach (here in the second room). It is a 1926 piece done in watercolor over pencil on board. There are also the only surviving vintage copies of Urban's elevations of the Mar-a-Lago estate.

All in all, the show is a tiny drop of a brilliant career that officially began at age 19 with a commission to design a new wing for the Abdin Palace in Cairo. Consider that by the time he died, in 1933, Urban had designed more than 500 stage sets for more than 168 productions.

Urban (1872-1933) could not have been born in a better place at a better time. The Vienna of those years saw an artistic explosion that included, but was not limited, to artists, composers, poets and philosophers. Inner exploration, the search for the true self and the true mind were no strange practices either. It has been suggested that Urban was influenced by some radical theories that were starting to circulate then, courtesy of Dr. Sigmund Freud.

He trained as an architect and admired personalities such as Gustav Klimt and architect Adolf Loos. In fact, hints of Klimt are found in numerous small pieces here but are most undeniable in the figural wooden sculpture from 1904 standing in the second room. It is not just the touch of gold here and there on this piece that makes us think of the painter, but the shape of the hair and the posture of the half-naked woman. This reminds us of Klimt’s Salomes or Judiths.

The connection is there again, on the hairpiece of the female dressed in black in Urban’s 1909 drawing titled: Costume Designs for Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin at Stuttgart’s Hofopera. Take a close look at the golden, circular patterns. Look familiar?

Adorable illustrations that Urban created for the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale books and calendars as well as for Hans Christian Andersen books, figure in the first room. They are soft and no doubt intended for a young audience, but in them no detail is forgotten and no expression is faked.

In his drawing titled Snow White, the loving prince dressed more as a knight, places his right hand on the glass capsule containing his beloved dead princess. Rather than muscular, dressed in golden armor, he is slim, consumed by grief or love. You can see the resignation taking over him while he stares at her. The gloomy scene is framed by a leaf motif that adds to the sense of death that is already present in the image.

Even if the main subject is a thing of legends (a mermaid) as in The Little Mermaid, why should Urban surrender the towering thick structure or the wooden medieval bridge to a fantastic world, too? No. He paints them old, humid, showing the effects of a real world: cracks and erosion. Meanwhile, the mermaid is a fragile little being with flowers over her long blonde hair looking toward the distance and away from us. She could not be more magical. Realistic spaces can house imaginary things.

Coming from the first room of fairy tales, the second room appears, at first, too serious.

In a watercolor drawing from 1929 titled Elevation of the New School for Social Research Façade, everything is gray and calculated. No decorations or color here. Just the right number of windows and the right number of doors gives it a sleek/modern look. Nothing about it surprises. Not even the fonts chosen for The New School.

But as your eyes travel to the bottom of the building, there you see what Urban imagined would greet visitors and students at the entrance: books inside glass cases. Some of them are shown opened while others show off their colorful covers. A lamp, a curtain, chairs or a fruit basket are elements he uses even when he does not have to. Throughout the evolution of his buildings, he is keeping everything in mind. Buildings, after all, also have an audience, their own language and can evoke feelings, reactions. They are not created simply to store people or stuff.

In 1912, Urban moved to the United States to become the art director of the Boston Opera. Two years later we find him in New York, where his refreshing use of color and line quickly made him many stage directors’ dream in the flesh. He was the perfect combination: a wild dreamer, studied and disciplined.

The third gallery room focuses on this period of his career and includes about 34 works, excluding set models and a fragment of the 1923 film Little Old New York, whose sets carry the Urban touch. At the time, it was the highest-grossing film, selling more than 200,000 tickets (to complement the exhibit, the museum has organized a special screening of it, at 7 p.m. on March 3 in The Grand Ballroom).

One design drawing in particular is of the Klingsor’s Garden and was done in 1920 for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Wagner’s Parsifal. An explosion of flowers of colors takes over the stone structures, advancing over and between them, spreading like a good disease. To the right, a plant of lavender tones drops down like a delicate rain.

A less dramatic piece is Design Drawing of the Black Elephant scene (done for the Cohan Theatre’s production of Pom-Pom the Pickpocket). The scene is set by arches and two elephant heads made of stone that appear facing one another; their trunks rest on the ground, near treasure chests. The symmetry is broken down with colorful fabrics, banners and ribbons hanging from balconies and lamps. The steps in the middle, illuminated by what appears to be daylight, seem to be the way out. One can imagine an actor will enter the picture anytime now, running, jumping up and down.

That is pretty much how we leave the show: up and down. That is, we are overwhelmed by his superior skill (which we could never match in quality or magnitude) and yet we feel enchanted. Once the three gallery rooms are consumed, it is still very hard to distinguish exactly what was Urban’s weakness. What size? Medium? Subject? At what point do we see a slight decrease in quality?

Another distinction that this show makes impossible to make is the moment in which the artist stops and enters the architect. The two never seem to separate. There is a dramatic effect to his architectural drawings, which from time to time contain little playful details that perhaps would not have been considered by a more serious, less dreamy, architect.

At the same time, Urban’s stage designs, which are based on fictional places and fictional characters, have a touch of reality. As dreamy and fictional as they appear, there is also the suggested possibility that they exist.

This is an intimidating show, the kind that leaves one speechless because the best thing one could say would still do a lame job of describing the works. As you walk the show, keep in mind that before you is not just an artist who took on every project that came his way but one who delivered, extraordinarily, again and again and again.

THE EXTRAORDINARY JOSEPH URBAN runs through April 17 at the Flagler Museum on Palm Beach. Admission is free with a ticket to the museum. Adults: $18; $10 for youth ages 13-18; $3 for children ages 6-12; and children under 6 admitted free. For more information, call 561-655-2833 or visit www.flaglermuseum.us.