Written by Amy Broderick | 17 June 2010

“Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting,” Willem DeKooning said of his fellow abstract expressionist, Jackson Pollock. “He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.” In the same way, William Kentridge has revolutionized the practice of drawing.

Using charcoal on paper, repeatedly erased and redrawn, as the vehicle for animation, Kentridge has revolutionized the form and brought it to a new level of regard, as an ambitious and respectable end-in-itself in the contemporary visual arts. In the process, the South African artist has emerged as one of the world's most prominent and relevant visual artists.

The intense physicality of Kentridge's work, in which his building up and breaking down of the surface, and his methodical rearrangement of elements, are clearly visible, mirrors the intensity of the content. The stories that unfold within his drawings, films, objects and performances explore complicated social struggles and national histories, as well as the efforts of individuals to locate themselves within these trying circumstances.

A major exhibition of Kentridge's work, William Kentridge: Five Themes, curated by Mark Rosenthal, adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Norton Museum of Art, is now touring the United States. The exhibit debuted in San Francisco and traveled to West Palm Beach, where it coincided with Art Basel: Miami Beach. It closed May 17 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Artist and professor Amy Broderick recently spoke by phone with Kentridge, who was at work in his Johannesburg studio. Intelligent and quietly pensive, he shared his thoughts about the risks and rewards of drawing without a plan, and how looking helps us to piece together who we are.

Amy Broderick: Drawing is so often seen as being something personal and intimate, really done by artists for themselves. In making your drawings for projection, were you consciously trying to shift the practice of drawing into a different, more public role?

William Kentridge: No, I think I was drawing because that's all I could do. I was no good as a painter, so it's got to be drawing or nothing. But the drawings for projection, those are drawings to be filmed, so they simply had to be of the right scale that I could work with. If they're too small, then all the lines become too crude. And because there is a lot of erasure in the drawings, the minimum thickness of the line was given by the thickness of an eraser.

So in other words, if I didn't want there to be a huge white line or huge expanse on a sheet of paper, it had to be a large sheet of paper, so it could register as a relatively fine line. So that it was a coming to terms with the fact that the drawings were about 4 foot-by-5 foot, rather than designed necessarily to work on that scale. But it also changes — when you're working with your knuckles or your wrist or your arm — the scale of a drawing. If you work really small, then you may be drawing with your knuckles, and that’s when you get very uninteresting.

Broderick: Given the fact that your drawings are so physical and so grand in scale that way, and it seems as if you draw with your whole body, I'm wondering how your theatrical training has influenced the way you use your body when you're drawing.

Kentridge: Well, I think it does, in the sense that it's very clear that when the drawings really happen, there are some gestures which are actually the sweep from your waist outwards, and there are some which originate more with your elbow, and some which do happen just in the wrist or the knuckles. But generally speaking, it's at its best when there is a much less conscious connection between your body and the charcoal, and you take it on trust that somehow your range of muscles is going to get the charcoal to move in the right way, rather than knowing a predetermined path and programming your muscles to move the charcoal along that path. Relaying that somewhere between your eye and the hand, there's a different intelligence at work.

Broderick: That makes me wonder that when you're at the paper working, how is your drawing mind different from your everyday mind? How does your frame of mind change when you're actually in the process of making?

Kentridge: It changes a lot. For example, if I have to sit and work at my desk, sitting at the desk like I'm sitting now, there is a very limited range of ideas that come to me, and all ideas that come are ones that I've already had. Some people are able to sit at a table, writers for example, and construct new images and new worlds through their activity of internal contemplation. For me, that's something that might happen through the physical activity both of drawing at the paper, but particularly with the films with the stalking of the drawing — the walking backwards and forwards, walking around the studio, the approaching the paper, the walking back to the camera, reapproaching the paper — that somewhere in that walk is a generation of ideas.

And secondly, very much from the actual marks on the paper, new ideas suggest themselves, sometimes connected to the drawing that you're working on, sometimes absolutely connected to a drawing that may come much later in the film, or may not be in the film at all.

Broderick: The way you talk about the physical activity that happens in between the marks that you make, I often think about your drawings, your sheets of paper, the way printmakers think of plates. The way you work them and build them up and break them down.

Kentridge: There is a similarity between printmaking and this kind of drawing. Obviously, with an eraser it's easier to alter a drawing than it is with a burnisher and scraper to alter an etching, but it's not essentially different. Both of them are about a built-in provisionality. The image is provisional through quite a late stage in its process. Now, etching requires an interesting division between the drawing and the print, between what you're are drawing on the plate and what comes back on the print. And there it goes through kind of a strange alchemy of pressure on the etching press. With these drawings for film, you have got the strange alchemy of the drawing, and then the filmic mode, whether it's captured digitally or captured on celluloid, and then its projection. So in each of them is kind of a distancing that happens between the drawing and the finished object, film in one case, the print in the other. That's an important kind of syllogism.

Broderick: Thinking about the provisionality and the way these drawings exist to be looked at, I'm struck by how you employ a lot of machines for looking — the camera, the stereoscope, the telescope — and how making animations seems very democratic, since these films can essentially be viewed by vast numbers of people all at once. But on the other hand, when a person looks through one of these machines like a telescope or stereoscope, the view is only available to one person at a time.

Kentridge: That's an interesting thing you say that the telescope is only there for one person at a time. It is. There's a strange — not anomaly, because it's not anomalous at all; it's the way the world is — the strange separation between objectivity and subjectivity in all, the whole category, of sight. For example, you have one image which people are looking at. That single image is in fact radiating out from itself thousands or an infinite number of possible images for reception, because when your eyes look at an image, that's one particular viewpoint picking up that image. So it is an individual solo viewing, but as you said, it can be viewed by thousands of people.

And in the same way, the binocular is a very particular viewing instrument that one person looks through. But it's used as an object when it's drawn as a metaphor for that gap between the individuality of looking — that is your particular retinas that are picking up the image that is only there for that very specific angle. But everyone around, in other words, has their own unique view which is waiting to be received. Now, for example, it's a little bit like you've got the cloud of the Internet above, and you've got your particular screen on which you are looking at it.

I did a project once which involved a projection on a ceiling in Holland, and all the viewers sitting on the floor 20 meters below the ceiling had small mirrors. Now you could either look up to the ceiling, lean your head back, and you'd all be seeing exactly the same image on the ceiling, and it seems like everybody looking at the same thing. Or, everybody could turn inwards to their own particular viewing device, which was the small postcard-sized mirror on which they could see the whole ceiling as well, reduced to the scale of that postcard mirror. So you had both this mixture of a communal looking up into the ceiling and the individualized looking down below.

So, I think the different viewing devices which are present in the work do refer to that, the activity of looking, the kind of the energy you put into looking individually, as well as it obviously being all this democratic emanation of film or an image of the world outwards to everyone.

Broderick: And the way you present your imagery — not just in the mirrored piece that you mentioned, but also in the anamorphic drawings, where you draw a distortion that is made right in reflection — you seem to be asking the viewer to straighten things out for themselves. You seem to trust the viewer.

Kentridge: Well, it's not just a question about trusting it, because you can't resist it. That's a secondary question to what I've just been describing, and that has to do with understanding the agency we have with looking. Looking becomes natural. Let's assume it's a natural activity — the world is there, it gets received by our eyes, and that's it. What the anamorphic drawings and the stereoscopic drawings similarly do, is give you a direct anomaly. The stereoscopic drawings are in one way clearer. You know you're looking at two flat images, which are either drawings or photographs, in my case drawings, and you understand your left retina is seeing one, and your right retina is seeing the other. You know you're looking at flat drawings. Your brain constructs these two drawings into a three-dimensional image.

Now, when you normally look at the three-dimensional world, it doesn't seem like your brain is doing anything because it is a three-dimensional world, and you're seeing it as three-dimensional. But in fact, what your brain is always doing is taking a flat image from your left eye and a flat image from your right eye and constructing this illusion of depth, which does seem to correspond to the way the world is made. So when you do that in a drawing, what you're bringing attention to is that activity that we do as viewers. In this case it's in a kind of heightened activity, because we're aware of the difference between the two- and three-dimensionality between what we are looking at and what our brain is seeing, but it's decidedly a heightened example of what we do when we look anywhere.

And it's about making sense of clues that we get visually from our retina. We get a number of different images and clues, but the sense of the world that we get from it, we are constructing continuously. That's what the anamorphic drawing is about. I mean on the one hand, it's a trick, it's a game. You look at the image on the flat table as it's projected, and it's completely distorted. In the mirror it looks corrected, and we believe the mirror more than we can believe the table.

Broderick: All this seems to suggest that the world does not necessarily provide us with the true facts, but that we have to create truth in our own mind as we live.

Kentridge: Well, that's definitely what we do when we're looking at anything, taking different fragments and constructing possible coherences from them. [We go] backwards in history to understand our story, and in the very moment where we take clues that we've got and try to understand what people are saying or what we are looking at, [we anticipate] the future. So I think that is a central thing that I'm interested in.

Broderick: Given the fact that these fragments and memory and loss and our relationship to history, that these are prominent themes in your work, it also seems that the way you make your work with individual marks or fragments of paper becomes a powerful metaphor for that. Even the way ghost images are left on the page when you erase.

Kentridge: The ghost images and those things are sort of a fortunate, I mean, they're central, but they were in a sense fortunate byproducts. They weren't things I decided or chose; they were what was left when the work was done. But I certainly think they obviously do carry with them various associations, thematic associations, and then these do become part of the work as well. So at the moment, I'm working a lot with fragmented images constructed out of different pieces put together of ink wash drawings.

I'm not sure yet what the difference is between drawing these on all these different sheets of paper, which I'm doing, or if I simply drew them as one large sheet of paper, but they do feel different. But at the end of the process, maybe it will become clear what the difference is. I am not trying to first work out what the meaning is before the work is done.

Broderick: That's an interesting approach that you take. I often try to convince my students to enter the process of art making without knowing what’s going to happen. Is that ever a difficult point of view for you to maintain, this idea of entering the work without a plan?

Kentridge: It can be, because sometimes you arrive with rubbish at the end; it doesn't always turn into sense. Sometimes it does, but sometimes you realize you're not going anywhere, or the idea of the strategy is stronger than what actually comes out of it. But it certainly for me is an essential strategy to have, to find ways of working in which you cannot anticipate all the elements.

Broderick: Is that part of what prompted you to be an artist, that it is a line of work where that uncertainty is permissible?

Kentridge: Yes. I think it's a line of work in which uncertainty is permissible, where making up the world or constructing the world is a virtue rather than a vice. If you were, say, a historical scholar, or a lawyer, in both cases one would be thrown out of the profession if one worked as an artist does, which is to allow us all to invent things, to fill in gaps and have a healthy disregard for the authenticity of impulses and sources.

Broderick: And yet do you see any connections between your sense of purpose as an artist and say, your parents' sense of purpose as lawyers and advocates?

Kentridge: There may be. At the end of the day, it may come down to the somewhat different ways of approaching ideas of truth or knowledge, the one that's kind of subject to rational dispute at the end, and another way that kind of goes around questions of rational dispute. It’s a question also of saying that without that program of rational reflection and checking, can one still arrive at knowledge? That's kind of the big open-ended question of all these years of work.

Broderick: In conjunction with that big question, what do you think are the primary ethical or social or even creative responsibilities of visual artists?

Kentridge: The essential responsibility is to work well, and hard, and a lot, and look at the work once it's made. In the end, the work shows who you are, and you can fool it for a certain time, but if you are a shallow or a pretentious or a vain person, that comes through in the work. If there are other elements to you, then those also come through in the work.

But to try to set the program in advance — to say, this will be my moral program, and this will be the ethical program, this will be the political program — in the end, the bad faith comes through.

Amy Broderick is an artist and writer who currently is associate professor of drawing and painting at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. She regularly exhibits and delivers lectures about her work locally and nationally. Visit her at www.amybroderick.com.

Written by Hap Erstein | 14 June 2010

When you consider what a mediocre season it was on Broadway, did anyone really think the Tony Awards show would be any good? Sunday night’s ceremony was, as expected, just like the season for musicals – loud, punk and uninspired.

As I previously reported, however, it was a terrific year for plays, but CBS and the people who assemble the Tonys show have no patience for showcasing plays. They would rather stuff the program with filler from the rock band Green Day (creators of the score that became the musical American Idiot) and pointless solos by Matthew Morrison and Lea Michele (former Broadway performers who are now deemed worthy of Tony time because they star on the TV show Glee).

In the same way that the misguided revival of Promises, Promises could not attract a bigger star than Sean Hayes, nor could the Tonys attract a more interesting emcee. Hayes started well with a display of his piano virtuosity (who knew?) that segued into a disheartening jam session from the show Million Dollar Quartet, including a piano duet with Levi Kreis, who plays Jerry Lee Lewis in the musical (and won a supporting actor Tony later in the show.)

Hayes gamely went along with the comic bits written for him, including dressing up as a well-endowed dancer from Billy Elliot, as Little Orphan Annie and as the biggest no-show of the season, Spider-Man. The elephant in the room, though, was an inane Newsweek article that slammed Hayes’s performance in Promises, Promises as hard to swallow because he is an out gay man. Hayes never referred to the article directly, but he locked lips and exchanged tongues with his painfully thin co-star Kristin Chenoweth in a winking attempt at heterosexuality, a kiss that would make even Al and Tipper Gore envious.

But the good sports award for the evening surely goes to Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, the (justifiably) snubbed stars of the dreadful The Addams Family, who were asked to present the awards for (gulp!) best actor and actress in a musical. Still, it was good to see them at the Tonys or, as Lane says it is referred to at his house, “Passover.”

The Tonys have notoriously low ratings and Sunday night’s numbers should be no better than usual. There is a perennial tug-of-war between those who think the Tonys should be populated by and about theater people and those who think that widening the profile of presenters will increase viewership. I am staunchly in the former camp and get actively annoyed by TV executives who think pulling in New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez or former American Idol judge Paula Abdul to lend their name value will get anyone beyond the small, core audience to tune in.

It will be interesting to see if American Idiot or Million Dollar Quartet -- which won a few minor awards -- get a boost at the box office from their exposure at the Tonys. They only confirmed my decision not to see them while I was in New York last month. The big winner among musicals was Memphis, which collected statuettes for best musical, book, score and orchestrations. The pre-show guessing was that its win for the top award over Fela! would be engineered by the road presenters, who need a sellable hit for their performing arts centers. Too bad, because Fela! was the only innovative new musical in the field.

I couldn’t be more pleased that Red, John Logan’s script about abstract artist Mark Rothko and the art of making art won for best play, director, supporting actor (Eddie Redmayne), scenic design and sound design. A fine play, superbly performed.

I haven’t heard how many visitors to Palm Beach ArtsPaper beat me in my Tony prognostication, but it is a shame that we did not just ask you to guess best play, musical and the eight performance categories. In those I went 10 for 10. (Hint: When in doubt, go with the movie stars who will be thanked with a Tony for the sacrifice of doing a play.) In all, I got 19 out of 26, well enough to not be embarrassed.

And as they say in baseball, “Better luck next season.” Maybe a year from now, we’ll be talking about the brilliance of Spider-Man. But I kind of doubt it.

Written by Hap Erstein | 12 June 2010

You know the drill by now. Sunday night’s Tony Awards ceremony will do its best to put a happy face on the Broadway season, but in fact, this was the worst year for musicals in a long time.

Note the Best Score category, which could only find two musicals to nominate and had to settle for singling out two plays for their incidental music. Of the four shows nominated for Best Musical, only one of them has an eligible score written specifically for the theater. Sigh.

Curiously, it was a solid season for new plays, which were supposed to be comatose on Broadway. There, at least, the nominating committee had the luxury of snubbing such worthy works as David Mamet’s Race and Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane in favor of such long-shuttered limited-run productions as Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room and Donald Margulies’ Time Stands Still. What fun is throwing a party if you can’t prevent a few people from attending?

According to Variety, only four productions have recouped their investments by now this season. All four are non-musical plays and all four are headlined by movie or television stars. Broadway audiences are saying that if they are going to pay as much as $135 a ticket -- the going rate this season for the most in-demand musicals -- they had better see stellar names in them. The four shows that made it into the black so far are: Hamlet with Jude Law; Race with James Spader and Richard Thomas; A Steady Rain with Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman; and A View From the Bridge with Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson.

Maybe theatergoers are clamoring to see August Wilson’s first-rate play, Fences, or maybe they just want to be in the same room with Denzel Washington. The same goes for Catherine Zeta-Jones in A Little Night Music. Star power is good for Broadway, and it usually repays the favor. Look for these two performers to be given Tonys on Sunday for their visits to the theater this season. In contrast, a critically acclaimed but starless revival of Ragtime closed quickly, though it later earned seven Tony Award nominations.

In any event, here are some thumbnail reviews of prominent shows from this Broadway season:

* Sondheim on Sondheim (Studio 54) – A revue of the theater songs of reigning genius Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd, Company, Follies), featuring Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat, with state-of-the-art video commentary by the 80-year-old composer-lyricist. It has been more than 15 years since Broadway has seen a new show from Sondheim, so we might as well content ourselves with the parade of revivals, like the current A Little Night Music, and retrospective songfests like this one, conceived and directed by his occasional collaborator, James Lapine.

It was almost a given that this revue would feature the best music currently on Broadway, even if the song choices prove a bit esoteric for Sondheim beginners. The show virtually assumes an awareness of the shows from which these songs are extracted and a deep-seated interest in the creative process of their development, as we are treated to a couple of examples of how a number evolved into its final form. I found a lot of this fascinating, but could well understand the audience’s growing impatience.

This show marks the return to Broadway of Cook, a former ’50s stage ingenue and star of the legendary Follies concert from 1985. She has earned her own legendary status, but was not in great voice when I caught this show and was unsteady on her feet. Still, if the Sondheim video interviews become available, this is a revue that could have a subsequent life across the country.

* Come Fly Away (Marquis Theatre) – What exactly is the definition of a musical? This latest stage piece from director-choreographer Twyla Tharp (Movin’ Out) is really a dance concert masquerading as a musical, for it does not even pretend to have plot or characters like that earlier salute to the song library of Billy Joel did.

This show celebrates the song hits of Frank Sinatra, with the recorded voice of Ol’ Blue Eyes synched to a live orchestra, which accompanies the athletic, quirky dance steps by Tharp set at a period nightclub. The dancers are terrific, particularly the macho John Selya and the ethereal Holley Farmer, but without a story to hang this evening of Tharp’s idiosyncratic moves on, they soon reach diminishing returns.

* Fela! (Eugene O’Neill Theatre) – The drum-heavy, infectious tribal beat of Nigerian poet-performer-political activist Fela Anikulapo-Kuti is the basis for this immersion into African culture, quite unlike anything else on Broadway. With all the retro jukebox musicals around, this feels like the only new show that is truly trying to take the genre into uncharted territory.

As Fela, Sahr Ngaujah (who alternates in the role with Kevin Mambo) turns the theater into his Lagos club with his sheer energy and perspiration, aided by the non-stop, high-stepping dances of director-choreographer Bill T. Jones. The audience gets a workout as well, as Fela gets us up on our feet, moving and swaying to his Afrobeat. It is a unique experience, one which has fortunately caught on with the usually staid Broadway crowd. It is hard to gauge what lasting effect a show like this will have on the musical theater, but if it gives Jones and Ngaujah more visibility, that might be enough.

* Promises, Promises (Broadway Theatre) – I know I sound like an old geezer when I say that to understand why this show’s fans feel so strongly about it, you had to have seen the original 1968 production. But even without that experience, the miscasting of its female lead, misguided attempt to stuff the show with irrelevant Burt Bacharach-Hal David pop hits and the clumsy direction and choreography of Rob Ashford are enough to sink this revival on its own.

The relatively inexperienced Sean Hayes (TV’s Will & Grace) is fine as spineless C.C. Baxter, who lends his apartment to libidinous executives at his insurance company, hoping to parlay his generosity into a promotion. He has a fairly musical singing voice, terrific sense of physical comedy and knows how to deliver a Neil Simon laugh line. The problem is his Broadway veteran co-star Kristin Chenoweth, far too self-assured to play his doormat romantic interest, and her added songs -- I Say a Little Prayer and A House Is Not a Home -- are mere padding.

Simon wrote a terrific supporting role of an easy virtue barfly that Katie Finneran all but steals the show with, even if that is petty larceny. Perhaps the saddest and most telling scene is the office party dance number, Turkey Lurkey Time, once an absolute show-stopper that now musters no heat at all.

* The Addams Family (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre) – Even if you avoided reading the reviews, it would be hard to miss hearing of the frantic out-of-town work to salvage this adaptation of Charles Addams beloved, macabre characters turned into a toothless, amiable musical comedy clan. Maybe relief director Jerry Zaks helped the patient, but the results are still distressingly anemic in the laughs department.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but much should go to writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elise (Jersey Boys), who came up with a plot right out of La Cage aux Folles or Mame about Wednesday Addams and her strait-laced prospective in-laws. The problem is compounded by Andrew Lippa’s humor-challenged score.

Still, the show is very well-cast, with Nathan Lane pressing hard for laughs as pin-striped patriarch Gomez, but coming up short. As his sexy squeeze Morticia, Bebe Neuwirth does not have much to do until a creaky dance solo in the second act. Only Kevin Chamberlin (Uncle Fester) comes off well with a surreal production number where he floats in space and serenades the moon, a glimmer of the show this might have been.

* Red (Golden Theatre) – The art and commerce of modern art are the topic at hand as abstract painter Mark Rothko (a hot-tempered Alfred Molina) toils in his studio on a commission for New York’s then-new Four Season Restaurant, while training a new assistant in his work methods and attitudes. The result is talky, but it is thought-provoking talk about the nature of art and its intersection with commerce, in a compact, but high-impact import from London by American John Logan (screenwriter of Gladiator and The Aviator).

Molina is an angry force of nature as the underappreciated Rothko and Eddie Redmayne holds his own on stage with him as Ken, the aide, who absorbs his boss’s philosophy and eventually challenges it. As they discuss and debate, they work on the massive works of the commission, at one point furiously priming a canvass with red paint, a true coup de theatre.

* A Behanding in Spokane (Schoenfeld Theatre) – Holed up in a seedy Washington State hotel, a hard-luck schlemiel named Carmichael (Christopher Walken) bemoans the loss of his left hand decades earlier, and grows quickly impatient with two con artists who arrive, claiming to have retrieved it. It seems that mob thugs severed the hand on railroad tracks and Carmichael has been on a mission of reconnection ever since.

It is a typically dark, violent comedy by Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman), elevated by Walken’s offbeat performance. McDonagh is devoid of any themes worth pondering here, but that does not prevent this minor work from brimming with theatricality. Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan are amusing as the bickering grifters and Sam Rockwell has some loopy but satisfying monologues as the philosophical desk clerk.

* Race (Ethel Barrymore Theatre) – As a nation, we have come a long way in matters of race, right? Don’t believe it, says writer-director David Mamet, who is back to form with his crackling, heated polemic tricks, not unlike his incendiary Oleanna and triangular Speed-the-Plow, after churning out such unsatisfying trifles as Romance and November.

Race and our attitudes about each other are on trial here, even if the play never leaves the law library of a boutique firm headed by two partners, one white (James Spader) and one black (David Alan Grier). Into their offices enters a well-heeled power broker (Richard Thomas), gauging whether to have them defend him in a case where he is accused of raping a black woman. Oh, and there is a girl – isn’t there always with Mamet? – an outspoken black associate (Kerry Washington) who at various times seems naïve, then crafty beyond her years.

Some of the play feels contrived, but Race is worth going along with, for we are in the hands of a master storyteller who has a few unpleasant truths to impart.

Written by Palm Beach ArtsPaper Staff | 11 June 2010

Stage: There’s a new theater company in the area, Entr’Acte Theatrix, a professional offshoot of the 10-year-old Palm Beach Principal Players, which hangs out its shingle for the first time with a worthy production of Hair, the “tribal love-rock musical” from 1968, the previous time we were mired in a protracted, unsinkable war. The youthful cast fills out the hippie garb well, except for the finale of the first act, when they doff their duds with an infectious innocence. The score’s nostalgic string of counterculture anthems is still welcome, while the storyline was never the show’s strong suit. But director-choreographer K.D. Smith does wonders with building the sketchy story into an appealing series of visual stage images. At the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton (561-241-7432) this weekend, before moving to Palm Beach Gardens High School through June 20. – H. Erstein

Film: That noise you hear this weekend is coming from The A-Team, a loud, clumsy feature version of the ‘80s television series. The quiet sleeper release you should see instead is Solitary Man, a remarkable dark comedy about a divorced, disgraced car dealer and full-time philanderer caught in a personal and professional downward spiral. Douglas gives a terrific, vanity-free performance, and he is surrounded by a first-rate cast, including Susan Sarandon as his ex-wife, Danny DeVito as a generous buddy from his past and Mary-Louise Parker as his current girlfriend, whose college-age daughter he escorts to a college interview and then sleeps with. Opening locally this weekend. – H. Erstein

Music: Jazz trumpeter Nicholas Payton has been playing professionally since age 11, and 25 years later he has a Grammy Award and nine albums to his credit, as well as a long list of collaborations with jazz’s leading luminaries. He’s been touring Europe and Israel in the past couple months, and on Saturday he returns to the States for a night with his quintet at the Miniaci Performing Arts Center on the campus of Nova Southeastern University in Davie. The concert starts at 8 p.m., and tickets are $35. For more information, call 954-462-0222 (Broward Center) or visit www.browardcenter.org.

The Cruzan Amphitheatre is moving into high gear this coming summer, with visits from Sting on July 2, the newly reconstituted Lilith Fair on Aug. 10, and appearances by Dave Matthews, Jack Johnson, Carlos Santana, Steve Winwood, Creed, John Mayer and Brad Paisley, among others. This Saturday night, it’s a night with the veteran country songwriting duo of Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn, retiring as a team in August after 20 years on the road and in the studio, but playing songs such as Cowgirls Don’t Cry on what is billed as their Last Rodeo tour. 7:30 p.m. Saturday; tickets are $29.25-$69.25 and are available through www.livenation.com.

Seraphic Fire, the Miami-based concert choir, has enjoyed sellout crowds over the years with its annual concerts of music from the gospel tradition, and this year, the choir is doing its latest version – called It Is Well With My Soul – five times. The concerts began Wednesday, and continue tonight through Sunday, with performances Friday in Coral Gables, Saturday night in Fort Lauderdale, and Sunday in Miami Beach. There’s nothing quite like hearing this group of professional singers who tackle composers such as Monteverdi, Lassus and Palestrina as a matter of course turn their attention to 19^th-century devotional pieces such as In the Sweet By and By – and make them sound just as lovely. 7:30 tonight at First United Methodist in Coral Gables, 8 p.m. Saturday at All Saints Episcopal in Fort Lauderdale, and 4 p.m. Sunday at Miami Beach Community Church. Tickets: $35. Call (888) 544-FIRE (3473) for more information. – G. Stepanich

Written by Palm Beach ArtsPaper Staff | 10 June 2010

You read Palm Beach ArtsPaper, so chances are you are a theatergoer and you actually care who wins the Tony Awards this Sunday evening. You realize this puts you in a very small minority of the population, don’t you?

Well, theater writer Hap Erstein considers himself in that group, too, and he hereby challenges you to a Tony Awards predictions duel. All you have to do is guess more winners right than Hap and -- get this -- you will know his picks before you have to declare yours. What could be easier?

Below is a list of the nominees, with Hap’s picks in boldface. Just make your choices and return your ballot to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by 6 p.m. EST on Sunday, June 13. And if here’s the tie-breaker: Many Tony nominees have a distinct Florida connection. Identify as many as you can and explain the connection.

The winner gets a $25 gift certificate to Amazon.com. Just give us a valid e-mail address so we can get in touch with you. OK? Go!

Best Play

In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)

Next Fall

Red

Time Stands Still

Best Musical

American Idiot

Fela!

Memphis

Million Dollar Quartet

Best Book of a Musical

Everyday Rapture

Dick Scanlan and Sherie Rene Scott

Fela!

Jim Lewis & Bill T. Jones

Memphis

Joe DiPietro

Million Dollar Quartet

Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux

Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre

The Addams Family

Music and Lyrics: Andrew Lippa

Enron

Music: Adam Cork
Lyrics: Lucy Prebble

Fences

Music: Branford Marsalis

Memphis

Music: David Bryan
Lyrics: Joe DiPietro, David Bryan

Best Revival of a Play

Fences

Lend Me a Tenor

The Royal Family

A View from the Bridge

Best Revival of a Musical

Finian's Rainbow

La Cage aux Folles

A Little Night Music

Ragtime

Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play

Jude Law, Hamlet
Alfred Molina, Red
Liev Schreiber, A View from the Bridge
Christopher Walken, A Behanding in Spokane
Denzel Washington, Fences

Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play

Viola Davis, Fences
Valerie Harper, Looped
Linda Lavin, Collected Stories
Laura Linney, Time Stands Still
Jan Maxwell, The Royal Family

Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical

Kelsey Grammer, La Cage aux Folles
Sean Hayes, Promises, Promises
Douglas Hodge, La Cage aux Folles
Chad Kimball, Memphis
Sahr Ngaujah, Fela!

Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical

Kate Baldwin, Finian's Rainbow
Montego Glover, Memphis
Christiane Noll, Ragtime
Sherie Rene Scott, Everyday Rapture
Catherine Zeta-Jones, A Little Night Music

Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play

David Alan Grier, Race
Stephen McKinley Henderson, Fences
Jon Michael Hill, Superior Donuts
Stephen Kunken, Enron
Eddie Redmayne, Red

Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play

Maria Dizzia, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)
Rosemary Harris, The Royal Family
Jessica Hecht, A View from the Bridge
Scarlett Johansson, A View from the Bridge
Jan Maxwell, Lend Me a Tenor

Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical

Kevin Chamberlin, The Addams Family
Robin De Jesús, La Cage aux Folles
Christopher Fitzgerald, Finian's Rainbow
Levi Kreis, Million Dollar Quartet
Bobby Steggert, Ragtime

Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical

Barbara Cook, Sondheim on Sondheim
Katie Finneran, Promises, Promises
Angela Lansbury, A Little Night Music
Karine Plantadit, Come Fly Away
Lillias White, Fela!

Best Scenic Design of a Play

John Lee Beatty, The Royal Family
Alexander Dodge, Present Laughter
Santo Loquasto, Fences
Christopher Oram, Red

Best Scenic Design of a Musical

Marina Draghici, Fela!
Christine Jones, American Idiot
Derek McLane, Ragtime
Tim Shortall, La Cage aux Folles

Best Costume Design of a Play

Martin Pakledinaz, Lend Me a Tenor
Constanza Romero, Fences
David Zinn, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)
Catherine Zuber, The Royal Family

Best Costume Design of a Musical

Marina Draghici, Fela!
Paul Tazewell, Memphis
Matthew Wright, La Cage aux Folles

Best Lighting Design of a Play

Neil Austin, Hamlet
Neil Austin, Red
Mark Henderson, Enron
Brian MacDevitt, Fences

Best Lighting Design of a Musical

Kevin Adams, American Idiot
Donald Holder, Ragtime
Nick Richings, La Cage aux Folles
Robert Wierzel, Fela!

Best Sound Design of a Play

Acme Sound Partners, Fences
Adam Cork, Enron
Adam Cork, Red
Scott Lehrer, A View from the Bridge

Best Sound Design of a Musical

Jonathan Deans, La Cage aux Folles
Robert Kaplowitz, Fela!
Dan Moses Schreier and Gareth Owen, A Little Night Music
Dan Moses Schreier, Sondheim on Sondheim

Best Direction of a Play

Michael Grandage, Red
Sheryl Kaller, Next Fall
Kenny Leon, Fences
Gregory Mosher, A View from the Bridge

Best Direction of a Musical

Christopher Ashley, Memphis
Marcia Milgrom Dodge, Ragtime
Terry Johnson, La Cage aux Folles
Bill T. Jones, Fela!

Best Choreography

Rob Ashford, Promises, Promises
Bill T. Jones, Fela!
Lynne Page, La Cage aux Folles
Twyla Tharp, Come Fly Away

Best Orchestrations

Jason Carr, La Cage aux Folles
Aaron Johnson, Fela!
Jonathan Tunick, Promises, Promises

Daryl Waters & David Bryan, Memphis