Theater: It is not easy getting attention for a play when the mainstream media will not even print the title, but Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherf**ker with the Hat (C’mon, Wheel of Fortune fans, you can figure it out) managed to eke out a respectable run on Broadway last season and be nominated for Best Play.

It is described as a high-octane verbal cage match about love, fidelity and misplaced haberdashery, the story of a former drug dealer who gets released from prison, returns to his girlfriend’s apartment, discovers a hat there and flies into a rage accusing her of being unfaithful to him. Yes, it sounds right up director Joseph Adler’s alley. It opens this weekend at GableStage in Coral Gables, running through Feb. 5. Call (305) 445-1119 for tickets. – H. Erstein

Film: Ian Fleming’s James Bond led the pack among gadget-toting, sexually active secret agents since the early 1960s, but if you wanted a more authentic look at the British spy game, you gravitated to the novels of John Le Carré and his understated MI-6 agent, George Smiley.

In 1979, the BBC brought Smiley to the small screen with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a six-hour miniseries starring Alec Guinness, about rooting out a mole -- a double agent -- at spy headquarters. Now comes the same story, compressed into a two-hour feature film, starring the equally remarkable Gary Oldman (The Contender, Hannibal), a chameleon-like actor usually relegated to supporting roles.

Like the book, the film is slow, methodical and cerebral, so lean in and concentrate, but how refreshing to encounter a movie that dares to be smart instead of purposely dumbed down. Opening in area theaters today. – H. Erstein

Music: This is a big weekend, and coming week, for classical music, and it begins tonight with the first of Palm Beach Opera’s One Opera in One Hour workshop productions populated by the company’s Young Artist crew. The abridged opera tonight is Semele, George Frideric Handel’s oratorio-turned-opera about Semele, daughter of King Cadmus, who’s having a passionate affair with a married god, Jupiter, who happens to be the boss of all of them. The score is full of invention, with great tunes like Myself I Shall Adore, Endless Pleasure, Endless Love, and Where’er You Walk. Canadian soprano Emily Duncan-Brown sings Semele, and the Mexican tenor Evanivaldo Correa is Jupiter. Canadian mezzo Shirin Eskandani, who sang Kate Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly last month, sings Juno, Jupiter’s wife. Admission to the 8 p.m. show at CityPlace’s Harriet Himmel Theater is free, with $15 reserved seats also available. Call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org for more information.

Lindsay Garritson is most drawn to the composers and performers of the Russian school, but she still has room on her dance card for a concerto by a Frenchman. “The second movement of the concerto is really light and happy, and it’s a lot of fun to play and to listen to,” said Garritson, who’s playing the solo part of the Piano Concerto No. 2 (in G minor, Op. 22) of Camille Saint-Saens with the Atlantic Classical Orchestra at Stuart’s Lyric Theatre this afternoon and evening.

“The first movement sounds almost as if it were inspired the organ. It’s got a grandiose feeling to it,” she added. The Saint-Saens concerto is on a program with the Mendelssohn Italian Symphony (No. 4 in A, Op. 90), and a rarely heard symphony by a teenage Mozart (No. 28 in C, K. 200). Stewart Robertson, music director of the ACO, will conduct.

Garritson, 24, who’s just completed her master’s degree at the Yale School of Music, is sticking around in New Haven as a staff accompanist for the music school. Raised in St. Louis, she attended Principia College in Illinois before heading east to Yale, where she studied with Boris Berman. She now considers Stuart home, her mother having moved to Martin County in 2003.

Also a violinist, Garritson has won numerous prizes and competitions, including a first-place win in 2010 at the summer Chopin Competition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and this past June, a second-place win at the Montreal International Music Competition, where she tackled another big Concerto No. 2 (also in G minor), this one by Sergei Prokofiev. “It’s really great to be around other pianists your age who are so accomplished and at such a high level,” Garritson said. “It was an intense experience.”

The ACO concerts are set for 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. today at the Lyric. Tickets are $55 (4 p.m.) and $60 (8 p.m.); call 772-286-7827. – G. Stepanich

Also, two chamber music series get under way in the next few days. At the Four Arts on Sunday, the Brentano String Quartet, now celebrating its 20^th year, will play the String Quartet of Debussy, Schubert’s Quartettsatz (in C minor, D. 703), and the Quartet No. 13 (in B-flat, Op. 130) of Beethoven. 3 p.m. at the Society’s Gubelmann Auditorium. Tickets: $15. Call 655-7226 or visit www.fourarts.org.

And the Flagler Museum opens its five-concert chamber music series this coming Tuesday night with the Adaskin String Trio. The Canadian threesome will play string trios by Miklos Rosza (the future film composer; this is his Op. 1), Erno von Dohnanyi (Serenade, Op. 10), Haydn (one of the many trios for the obsolete baryton he was obliged to write; this one is No. 65 in G), and a young Beethoven (No. 4 in C minor, Op. 9, No. 3). The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Tickets are $60. Call 655-2833 or visit www.flaglermuseum.us.

Meanwhile, Sunday also brings the American Brass Quintet to Lynn University, where it plays music by Josquin des Prez, Erasmus Widmann, Ludwig Maurer, Osvaldo Lacerda and Joan Tower. They’ll also play American composer Trevor Gureckis’s Fixated Nights, which was written for the group. 4 p.m., Wold Performing Arts Center. Tickets: $20-$35. Call 237-9000 or visit www.lynn.edu/tickets.

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Delray Beach, in tandem with the Miami Bach Society brings Trefoil, countertenor Drew Minter’s medieval-music trio, to the church on Sunday for a special last look at the Christmas season. The group will perform Christo e Nato (Christ Is Born), a collection of mostly anonymous music gathered in Florence from the 13^th through the 15^th centuries. The recent cold snap has reminded us that this is still the season, and here’s a good way to finally let go of a time of year we all cherish. 3 p.m., St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Tickets: $15-$20, call 278-6003.

The last time Clint Holmes appeared with the Palm Beach Pops, he sang Broadway show tunes and songs associated with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

“The audience went crazy. We got a high volume of letters requesting him back,” says David Quilleon, executive director of the Pops.

This season, the Pops celebrates its 20^th anniversary, having given its first concert in 1992 at the old Palm Beach Auditorium under its founder and current director, Bob Lappin. And Friday, they’re bringing back Holmes, who’s debuting a new show that will play daily through Thursday.

“This is our third collaboration with Clint. Our maestro, Bob Lappin, saw him perform in Las Vegas and was smitten. He is an audience favorite, very versatile, passionate and eclectic,” Quilleon said.

Later this year, the Pops will offer tributes to Louis Armstrong and George and Ira Gershwin. In March, Lea Salonga, best-known for her work in Miss Saigon, and David Burnham, best-known for Wicked, will appear with the orchestra in The Magic of Broadway.

The orchestra is looking forward to “the next 100 years,” Quilleon said.

“We are proud of our legacy in the Palm Beach community, and proud of our commitment to the American Songbook. We coaxed Lena Horne out of retirement; we’ve had Kenny Rogers, Frank Sinatra, Jr., and Vic Damone all perform with us,” he said.

Holmes’ new show, called Inspired, is a musical journey through the American Songbook and pays homage to artists such as Nat King Cole, Bobby Darin, Marvin Gaye, Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Michael Jackson and Horne, all of whom have inspired Holmes.

Holmes comes from a musical family; his father was an African-American jazz musician and his mother was a classically trained opera singer from Great Britain. “My mom taught me how to sing correctly, and my dad taught me how to enjoy it,” quips Holmes.

Holmes lives in Las Vegas with his wife of five years, Kelly Clinton-Holmes, also a Vegas entertainer, and three grown children: Brent, 30, and twins Brittany and Cooper, both 28. Palm Beach ArtsPaper talked to him this week by phone after he had just finished a rousing game of singles tennis.

PBAP: How did the idea for Inspired come about?

Clint Holmes: The show is about everyone who inspired me. Well, first of all my mom and dad. They were both singers so they supported my sister (the singer and actress Gail Steele) and I. I’ve been inspired by music and performance since I was 9 years old. I loved Sammy Davis, Marvin Gaye, Bobby Darrin, Harry Belafonte, Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby and Joni Mitchell – they were my heroes.

Probably more than anyone else, Bill Cosby was my mentor, teacher and supporter, along with Sammy, Harry and Joan Rivers. These were the people I emulated and who were influential in my career. Bill Cosby and I worked together for years. I was his opening act. Then in 1986 when Joan Rivers had her TV show, I was her Ed McMahon.

Currently, I work with Larry Moss, one of the foremost acting coaches. He coaches Hilary Swank, Helen Hunt and Leonardo DiCaprio. I’ve learned more from Larry in the past five years than I’ve learned from anybody. Being on stage, being an actor and artist, bringing yourself to every performance, analyzing the songs and the lyrics – are all crucial. I consider myself an actor. If you want to live the music – as Frank Sinatra said, it was never him singing, it was always the character.

PBAP: What are your expectations for the show?

CH: Eventually I hope to add a multimedia video element to the show, à la Sondheim on Sondheim and bring the show to Broadway, off-Broadway or to London’s West End. It’s the hardest thing in the world to get a musical from ‘page to stage.” West Side Story took seven years and those guys were geniuses. It takes a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of investment in energy. So, we’re working on it.

PBAP: How would you characterize your style?

CH: My roots are jazz and theater. I’m pretty eclectic. My two musical loves are jazz and theater.

PBAP: What would you say is your biggest achievement to date?

CH: My success in Las Vegas. From 2000 to 2006, I had a 6.5 year-run at Harrah’s. I was the first African-American to have a theatre named after him in Las Vegas (the Clint Holmes Theatre in Harrah’s Casino) and I won a number of awards.

PBAP: If you were not performing, what do you think you would you be doing?

CH: If I wasn’t on stage, I’d be writing music - my second love. I do it for my plays and my shows. Or, I’d be a chef because I love to cook.

PBAP: What quality do you value most in yourself?

CH: Loyalty and being positive. My children tell me that I’ve always been an optimist and I’ve always been a positive person. In terms of sustaining my career and my life, being positive is my strongest asset.

PBAP: What makes you happiest?

CH: Being on stage. Singing. Fortunately, I’m in a wonderful relationship with Kelly, so that makes me very happy on a daily basis. I get great joy from that. I find joy in a lot of things: tennis, my kids, but if you have to say one thing, it’s being on stage, performing.

PBAP: Are you driven, and if so, what drives you?

CH: Yes. Totally driven. I’m driven by the need to grow and the need to learn and grow as an artist. And one of the wonderful things about being an onstage artist is that you get immediate gratification. If I’m working on something, I get to go out and do it, and get immediate feedback from the audience.

PBAP: How do you relax?

CH: Tennis is my chief avocation. Kelly and I went to the Bahamas for a week to relax. But, even if I go on vacation, I prefer to go to Paris, London or New Orleans. Also, Kelly and I love to go to the movies and we have our guilty pleasure TV shows that we TiVo. We never miss David Letterman and we love Louis C.K. – he’s very dark and funny. We enjoy Modern Family. And Saturday Night Live is good again … they have a great new cast.

PBAP: What would I be surprised to learn about you?

CH: That I’m silly. Or, that I’m an avid reader. I read at least two newspapers a day and the Sunday New York Times on the weekend, and I’m a magazine fanatic. I have magazines stacked up in every corner of the house. My favorite magazines are Esquire and GQ, but again on the guilty pleasure, I love Entertainment Weekly and Cosmopolitan.

PBAP: How do you stay so young and vibrant?

CH: Good genes. My mom died at 96, still singing. My dad died in 1998 at the age of 78. He still had a 32-inch waistline and did aerobics 3 times /week.

I work hard to stay in shape. One of the things that Cosby and Belafonte taught me is a work ethic. You have to work at everything. At tennis – you have to work to stay on top of your game. You have to work to maintain your health. My instrument is my voice and I work hard to take care of it.

PBAP: You seem to be extremely disciplined.

CH: In certain things I am (laughs). I am disciplined creatively and in terms of my health. I had colon cancer five years ago. I understand that things are finite. Makes you appreciate life. You can’t assume anything.

PBAP: Has luck played any part in your success?

CH: Oh, absolutely. Good fortune plays a role in anybody’s career. There’s a certain amount of right time/right place. Even if you have good fortune, you have to be prepared. When I came to Las Vegas in 2000, I was fortunate to be seen by the right people, but even if I had been seen but not been ready to move into a main room in Vegas, timing and good fortune wouldn’t matter. You have to be able to take advantage of that good fortune when it comes.

Clint Holmes will appear at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Kravis Center (call 832-7469); 8 p.m. Sunday, Eissey Campus Theatre, Palm Beach Gardens (call 561-278-7677); 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, Kaye Auditorium, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton (call 800-564-9539). Tickets: $29-$89. Call 832-7677 or visit www.palmbeachpops.org.

As Brian De Palma and Stanley Donen understand all too well, there can come a time in every reverential filmmaker’s oeuvre when loving homage devolves into shameless mimicry.

For these aforementioned filmmakers, features such as Dressed to Kill and Charade followed various Hitchcock blueprints so faithfully that the directors’ own voices risked being swallowed in a quicksand of referentiality.

Likewise, Hong Sang-soo’s strangely sprawling Night and Day (Zeitgeist, $26.99, release date Jan. 10), the eighth feature from the respected South Korean filmmaker, feels cribbed wholesale from the universe of Eric Rohmer, where the shifting tides of romance are investigated with exquisite delicacy and patience. Like Rohmer’s films (A Summer’s Tale comes to mind most overtly), it follows a man’s blossoming relationship with several young women over a contained period of time.

It’s dialogue-heavy in an intellectually Rohmerian way; as the man grapples with the moral considerations of sleeping with another woman while his wife waits for him in another continent, few words are left unsaid and few thoughts left unexpressed through voiceover narration. The movie is even set in Paris, with Hong’s characters walking and talking along the boulevards, galleries and cafes where Rohmer’s young hipsters might have treaded.

The film follows the point of view of Sung-nam Kim, a married, fortysomething Korean painter exiled to France to avoid a prison sentence for smoking marijuana. He doesn’t speak a word of French, but he finds lodging in a hostel of like-minded expats and eventually falls in with Paris’ apparently vibrant South Korean subculture. He bumps into an ex-girlfriend by chance, and is eventually introduced to a lovely painter and her lovelier roommate, slowly falling for at least one of them and sharing none of this in his nightly phone calls to his wife, who is constantly thinking of ways to bring him home.

At one point, Night and Day becomes something of a love quadrangle, with Kim choosing from a buffet of potential sexual partners. It’s a pleasant problem, to be sure, but Hong paints his protagonist as an unenviable, growth-stunted horndog displaced in a foreign country, his moral confusion exacerbating a definitively male helplessness that transcends borders. He’s best viewed as a pathetic slave to his lust, with Hong expressing a deeper fondness for the women in Kim’s life. The only Hong film I’d seen prior to this, 2004’s sublime Woman Is the Future of Man, reinforces the director’s worldview in its title.

The characters say and think some strange things – Kim’s “I had been thinking about oysters for several days” being one of them – and there are cultural roadblocks in the film’s translation that will leave English speakers scratching their heads at some of the movie’s bizarre interactions. But part of Night and Day’s peculiarity lies with director’s frequent meanderings into esoteric symbolism, his camera lingering on a dying bird, a tai chi class, sludgy river or an abandoned hair scrunchie. The strangeness of Hong’s visual signature extends to his use of amateurish zooms, often for no apparent reason (I’ve always considered zooms to be an offensively unsubtle device, lacking the poetry of the slow dolly).

Ultimately, there’s no justification for the 145-minute running time of Night and Day, given that Rohmer’s movies are just as rich at 90 to 110 minutes. When a movie’s tone is this breezy, the result should never feel like a slog; like Kim’s Parisian sojourn, the movie itself overstays its welcome.

DVD Watch

Jan. 10: Jean-Luc Godard is back with what we can probably assume is a vengeance in Film Socialisme (Kino, $31.49 Blu-ray, $26.99 DVD), a film so alienating that only one theater in South Florida (Miami Beach Cinematheque) proved bold enough to screen it last year. Like most of Godard’s post-millennial output, this inscrutable treatise is stubbornly anti-entertainment and more difficult than Chinese algebra – especially because Godard translated the French language into what he calls “Navajo English” – a few choice words from each portion of dialogue, as if transcribed by laconic Native Americans from old, offensive Westerns (the home video version also provides the full English translation, which I recommend).

Part of the movie takes place on a European cruise ship, which for Godard symbolizes capitalism’s fatuous excesses; a second part follows a news crew attempting to interview a local political figure in trouble; and the final stanza is an essay film a la the director’s Histoire(s) du Cinema, reviewed on this site a couple of weeks ago. The images rotate between stock footage, shimmering HD photography and pixilated cellphone shots that capture the diminished expectations of modern shutterbuggery. All in all, Godard touches on World War II, communism, economic inequality, Hollywood, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the news media, AIDS and the history of time itself. What it all means is beyond my grasp. It’s either one of the best or worst films of 2011 – I’ve yet to decide which.

Among other unheralded works by challenging auteurs, Zeitgeist unveils Bela Tarr’s The Man From the London ($26.99), a slow and mesmerizing black-and-white tranquilizer about a lonely railway worker who witnesses a crime and finds himself the owner of a suitcase full of money. Art-house noir at its precise, truthful finest, with the multilingual Tilda Swinton again proving her world-cinema bona fides.

Other curiosities this week include 1971’s The Hellstrom Chronicle (Olive Films, $26.99 Blu-ray, $22.49 DVD), a Swedish documentary, grounded in science, about insects taking over the world. Its histrionic tagline reads like a collection of Peter Travers blurbs: “Shocking. Beautiful. Brilliant. Sensual. Deadly ... and only they will survive.” It must be seen to be believed. This week also marks the DVD debut of one of 2010’s most critically acclaimed films, Aurora (Cinema Guild, $26.99), a three-hour revisionist murder mystery from the Romanian director Cristi Puiu. On a far more commercial front, When Harry Met Sally premieres on Blu-ray (MGM, $17.99), though I have to say this is a movie that can be appreciated at the same level on a VHS transfer on TNT.

Jan. 17: If you have a good five-plus hours to spare this month (and who doesn’t?), I can’t think of a better way to spend it than with Raoul Ruiz’s 266-minute Mysteries of Lisbon (Music Box Films, $39.49 Blu-ray, $31.49 DVD). The final film of more than 100 titles Ruiz completed before his death last year, the film (which also aired as a six-episode miniseries) is an adaptation of a book by Camilo Castelo Branco, one of Portugal’s most celebrated writers. Following three people across three decades and four countries, it alludes to Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens and is one of 2011’s most acclaimed films. The box set is loaded with extras, including a half-hour interview with Ruiz and a roundtable discussion recorded for French television.

Equally exciting is Criterion’s reissue of Belle du Jour ($27.99 Blu-ray, $19.99 DVD), the jewel in Luis Buñuel’s crown and a title most deserving of a Hi-Def treatment. This edition is tricked out to the nines, including new interviews with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, a video piece narrated by a film scholar and a sexual-politics activist, an audio commentary by British film scholar Michael Wood and an excerpt from a French television program about the movie. Also making Blu-ray debuts this week are Steven Soderbergh’s ensemble classic Traffic (Criterion, $27.99), Kim Ki-Duk’s downbeat antiwar character study The Coast Guard (Palisades Tartan, $11.99, also includes DVD) and, to meet some inexplicable demand, the Ed O’Neill comedy clunker Dutch (Anchor Bay, $12.99), whose out-of-print DVD has exceeded obscene amounts on eBay.

Jan. 24: Criterion steps out of its Janus Films art-house comfort zone for a more populist classic in 1954’s Godzilla ($27.99 Blu-ray, $21.99) – which may rank among the most exciting home-video packages of the year. Godzilla has been a mass-market science-fiction touchstone for so long that it’s about time the film received an intellectual critical evaluation. Included in this two-disc bundle is the 1956 American reworking of Godzilla, starring Raymond Burr, along with featurettes, interviews, an illustrated audio essay, a new print essay by J. Hoberman and audio commentaries for both films. I must say, this one is worth owning for the kick-ass cover art alone.

Elsewhere, MGM has gone all out this week, reissuing Blu-ray titles by two of the greatest American filmmakers of the past century: Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen. From the latter, we get his twin ‘70s masterpieces Annie Hall and Manhattan ($16.99 each), and from the former, three of his ‘40s classics, Rebecca, Notorious and Spellbound ($16.99 each). Both of these directors are under-represented in Hi-Def; hopefully there’s a lot more where these are coming from. This week also marks the Blu-ray debut of William A. Wellman’s silent war drama Wings (Paramount, $19.99), notable to trivia buffs as the first movie to ever win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Jan. 31: This week features nothing particularly rare and unusual, but its bounty of Blu-ray debuts will allow fans of many vintage and modern prestige films to view them anew. Titles include The Piano (Lionsgate, $14.99), To Kill a Mockingbird (Universal, $27.99, includes book, DVD and digital copy), Malcolm X (Warner, $29.99) and Grand Canyon (Anchor Bay, $15.99).

Palm Beach Opera said last week it is expanding its Young Artist program to add more singers, three days of auditions in New York, and a staged production next season featuring the young musicians.

In order to put the expansion into effect, the West Palm Beach-based opera company has canceled this year’s vocal competition, which had been scheduled for April.

“We realized that four of the most prominent schools in the Northeast were either holding their spring opera productions or were in final rehearsals … which would have kept many of the most talented young artists from entering the competition,” general director Daniel Biaggi said in a prepared statement.

Under the plan announced Dec. 30, there will be eight to 10 Young Artists each season (there are currently seven), and the program will have its own pianist. In addition to the staged production – Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, done in tandem with Lynn University’s Conservatory of Music -- there will be a series of master classes open to the public.

Auditions for the 2012-13 season have been set for Jan. 26-28 in New York. (Singers looking to participate can visit this link on the Palm Beach Opera website.)

This year’s Young Artists are presenting three abridged workshop operatic performances as part of the company’s Opera in One Hour series. The first opera is Handel’s Semele, which takes the stage at the Harriet Himmel Theater at CityPlace on Friday at 8 p.m., with an encore performance at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Arts Garage in Delray Beach.

Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land will be presented Friday, Feb. 3, at the Harriet Himmel Theater, and on Friday, March 2, the group will present Florencia en el Amazonas, written in 1996 for Houston Grand Opera by Mexican composer Daniel Catán, who died suddenly last April.

The company’s next production consists of two gala concerts for its 50^th anniversary celebration, set for Jan. 20 and 22 at the Kravis Center. The concerts will be hosted by baritone Sherill Milnes, with guest singers including Ruth Ann Swenson, Denyce Graves and Brandon Jovanovich. For more information, call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org.

Maltzes, Robinson to receive 2012 Muse Awards

A philanthropic couple and the former artistic director of the Palm Beach Symphony are among the recipients of the 2o12 Muse Awards, which are given annually by the Palm Beach County Cultural Council to recognize individuals and groups that contribute to arts and culture in the county.

Individual recipients this year are Milton and Tamar Maltz, patrons of the Maltz Jupiter Theatre (Outstanding Civic Leader); Ray Robinson, retired chief of the Palm Beach Symphony (Outstanding Cultural Leader); Stephen Backhus, outreach manager for the Milagro Center in Delray Beach (Outstanding Arts Educator); artist Carol Prusa (Herbert Ubertalli Award for Visual Arts); and Andrew Kato, artistic director of the Maltz Jupiter Theatre (Council’s Choice Award).

Organizational recipients are the Bon Festival at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens (Outstanding Art or Cultural Program of the Year); the Boca Raton Museum of Art (Outstanding Art or Cultural Program of the Year, budget over $50o,ooo); andthe Palm Beach Poetry Festival (Outstanding Art or Cultural Program of the Year, budget under $50o,ooo).

The awards, which were announced Dec. 13, will be presented in a ceremony Feb. 9 in the Cohen Pavilion at the Kravis Center. Tickets for the gala dinner and show are $300; proceeds go to benefit the council’s arts education programs.

For more information, call 472-3340 or visit www.palmbeachculture.com/museawards2012.

Seraphic Fire gets two Grammy nominations

Seraphic Fire has been nominated for two Grammy Awards, a first-time achievement for the Miami-based choir that this season is celebrating its 10^th anniversary.

Released in August, the group’s recording of the London version of Brahms' German Requiem is in the running for Best Choral Performance, and A Seraphic Fire Christmas, an album of holiday music, is nominated for Best Small Ensemble Performance.

Peter Rutenberg, producer for Seraphic Fire, is also vying for Classical Producer of the Year award, in part for his work on the German Requiem album.

Seraphic Fire was founded at the Church of the Epiphany in South Miami in 2002. The group performs at a number of venues throughout South Florida, including Coral Gables, Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami and Boca Raton.

Seraphic Fire was honored with a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation grant to aid in the formation of their Firebird Chamber Orchestra, which debuted in 2008. This month, it will present a 10^th-anniversary concert of music from its history, and in February, three performances of the Mass in B minor of J.S. Bach.

Subscriber benefits and discounts are available for fans looking to attend three or more programs. For a full lineup, tickets or to learn more about Seraphic Fire, visit www.SeraphicFire.org or call 888-544-FIRE.

-- compiled by Katherine Concepcion and Greg Stepanich

On a recent Saturday evening, crowds at the Delray Beach parking structure that doubles as the Arts Garage were jumping and jiving to the New Age/neoclassical piano sounds of composer and artist Jace Vek.

Vek, a two-time Emmy award winner and Pittsburgh native, was accompanied by soprano Kat Yarbrough and tenor Matthew Farmer, who does double duty himself as the programming manager of the Arts Garage.

Vek’s joy and passion were in evidence as he conveyed his piano compositions to a full house and an enthusiastic audience.

Kenneth Stern, a former Palm Beach County family court judge, and his wife Pamela Farthing Stern, an interior designer, were beaming after the show.

“Jace Vek is amazing and the evening was thrilling – really wonderful to hear,” Kenneth said. “Although the Garage is in its infancy, I take a lot of civic pride in the fact that Delray is able to command this caliber of talent and I will be back. Now that we’ve found this wonderful venue, we can’t stay away.”

Pamela said the show reminded her of “the salons in Vienna or Salzburg,” where people came to hear Mozart.

“Because of the intimate environment, we were able to see Vek close up and see his fingers and hands move over the keys as well as see his emotions,” she said.

From a relatively modest opening in April, the Arts Garage, at 180 N.E. 1^st St., has become an important player on the South Florida cultural scene, with a busy slate of activities each weekend that range from puppet theater to hip-hop. It also has become a key venue for jazz, always an art form with too-few outlets, and brought musicians familiar in the Miami-Lauderdale orbit further north.

“It’s amazing what the Arts Garage has accomplished in a short period of time,” said Gwen Verbeeck, a retired marketing research executive from New York and culture maven who has attended a number of events since its inception.

The inspiration for the Arts Garage -- a multidisciplinary venue for visual artists, musicians, performers, film and playwrights -- was developed under former two-term Mayor Jeff Perlman, who led the charge to create a long-term cultural plan for downtown Delray.

He hired a New York arts consultancy and Carol Coletta, host of National Public Radio’s Smart City and an expert on urban planning, to help with the long-term vision for the city.

It was then that the idea of Delray Beach as an arts incubator took hold.

“We did a plan that called for Delray to be positioned as an intimate, authentic venue for the arts. At that time, we had plans for everything else, neighborhoods, parks, the downtown,” Perlman said. “But we had no blueprint for what we wanted from a cultural standpoint.”

In February 2010, the Delray Beach Community Redevelopment Agency bought a 15,007-square-foot warehouse in Pineapple Grove and decided to utilize the parking garage nearby on First Street to host cultural and arts activities. Their intention is to move into the warehouse as a permanent space within two to three years, Perlman said.

City leaders launched a national search for a director of its arts activity and found her in Russian-born Alyona Ushe, then executive director of the New Orleans Opera.

Ushe, who has been described as someone who can do 99 things at once and be good at all of them, brings 15 years experience in nonprofit management, administration and development to her new position as executive director of the Creative City Collaborative and Arts Garage.

Ushe said she was sold on the idea of the upcoming Arts Warehouse when she first saw the building.

“When I saw the warehouse, it was overwhelming. It’s raw space with nothing but potential,” she said. “You walk into the venue and it begins to unfold in front of you, and with each step that you take, the more possibilities and the more ideas evolve naturally and organically. And when you see the humongous ceilings and open space, you can only say ‘Wow.’”

The buying of the warehouse didn’t immediately come with a plan for the parking garage, which “was not even a concept at the time,” Ushe said. “But they saw the opportunity to create an unusual arts center from this raw, powerful space and they came back to CCC and said ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing building, do you guys want to figure out what to do with it?’”

To get that off the ground, the garage became critical.

“Our challenge was to build out this amazing venue without having any audience development or any financial backing, or fundraising base. When the parking garage miraculously became available, everything came together,” she said. “Now we have this as our testing ground with a much bigger picture in mind. We have the flexibility to try different things and see what works and what doesn’t.”

Perlman and others have high praise for Ushe, who is high-energy and disarmingly direct, the sort of person who immediately starts writing down ideas she likes while conversing.

“Alyona is a force of nature. She resurrected the cultural plan that we had worked on. With the CRA's support and her energy, the vision of the Arts Garage has come to life,” Perlman said. “They have done a tremendous amount in a short period of time to enhance Delray's reputation in the arts world.

“Alyona is bringing world-class musicians to Delray and has also given local talent like Chloe Dolandis, Jace Vek and Drew Tucker a venue in which to build their careers.”

The ambitious line-up of musical programming includes a jazz series with Israeli-born Brooklyn-based Uri Gurvich and four-time Grammy award winner and violinist Federico Britos, trumpeter Melton Mustafa and saxophonist Jesse Jones Jr.; classical performances with cellist Jonah Kim and members of the South Florida Symphony; and “straight from the streets of Brooklyn,” the Urban Underground, bringing R&B, reggae, and hip-hop.

Farmer also initiated cabaret-style female-impersonator performances, Divas in Art, on the last Sundays of the month.

That’s helped make the Arts Garage popular in a short time, and it may have a future once the operation moves to the Arts Warehouse.

“If people love to come here, we may keep it as an annex or as its own destination. Once the boutique hotel is finished across the street, we will be perfectly positioned,” Ushe said.

CRA Executive Director Diane Colonna said the Garage “has exceeded our expectations.”

“Delray Beach has been a work in progress for the past two decades. In the 1980s we wanted to be Boca. Our downtown was dead,” Colonna said. “The CRA made housing and neighborhood improvements and focused our energies and monies into arts initiatives.

“Although we wanted to invest in economic development for the city, we had no set agenda or idea, but wanted to put Delray Beach on the map as an arts destination. Alyona, as a true change agent, has raised the bar and attracted high-profile talent to our area,” Colonna said.

Ushe’s future plans include a film series, but one of her most notable recent accomplishments is to bring Louis Tyrrell, founder of Florida Stage, into the fold.

“When I met Lou, I knew we were on the same artistic page,” Ushe said.

After the final curtain fell last June at Florida Stage, Tyrrell found a second act in December in Delray Beach. He’s now artistic director of The Theatre at Arts Garage, and has already programmed a Master Playwright Series with playwrights John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation), Pulitzer-prize winner Marsha Norman (‘Night Mother) and Israel Horovitz (The Indian Wants the Bronx). He also hopes to bring renowned Tony Award-winner Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues) to the venue.

The Master Playwright Series is set for four subsequent Tuesdays in February (7, 14, 21 and 28), and on March 1-4, he’ll present a new play-reading festival with six new works, plus workshops led by playwright William Mastrosimone (Extremities). The first formal production will be Woody Sez: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie, a revue by David Lutken and Nick Corley celebrating the 100^th birthday of the folk hero and musician. It opens March 16 and runs through April 8.

Tyrrell said he sees the return of the kind of work he was doing at Florida Stage as an economic boon for the city.

"We hope to drive the economy in the area in terms of restaurants and shops, plus there will be a brand-new boutique hotel across the street. And if all of the rest of the square footage in the Garage gets rented, then the city would say, ‘Why would we mess with it?'” Tyrrell said.

“At Florida Stage, we had that experience when we were in the Plaza Del Mar in Manalapan. The clothing store Chico’s moved in, and all the restaurants and shops were very generous with us because we drove a lot of the business. Our plan is to do the same thing here."

In the meantime, patrons are just plain enjoying the vibe at the Arts Garage, even when cars rumble overhead during a performance.

“The atmosphere is alive and you can bring your own bottle of wine, come with friends or come alone, sit at a table and meet new people,” said Verbeeck, the retired marketing executive. “It’s these types of organizations that make Delray Beach so vibrant.”

The Arts Garage is located at 180 N.E. 1st Street, Delray Beach. For scheduling or ticket information, please visit www.delraybeacharts.org or call 561-450-6357.