With its simple harmony and elegant lines, much classic Asian art has been easy to digest but not to remember. This is its -- or rather, our -- struggle.

And so it is with the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens’ current exhibit, Kyoto: A Place in Art. As soon as we leave the exhibit, we’re in fear of forgetting what we’ve seen.

It doesn’t help that Kyoto: A Place in Art is not very exciting, at least not in the way that would require cool 3-D glasses. What is required of you is to empty your mind so it doesn’t interfere, for there is no way a show this quiet has a chance of being absorbed unless we forget for a minute -- more like an hour -- our busy modern lives.

The exhibit, which runs through Oct. 17, opens with a series of eight photographs by Haruzo Ohashi from the Morikami’s permanent collection. All of them feature sharp, beautiful images of temples, gardens and pavilions of relevant importance to a city that served as Japan's capital from 794 to 1868. Still, the images are far from unique.

Nature happens to be pretty extraordinary in these sites, so it is no surprise the photos take our breath away, particularly that of Kinkaku-Ji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion). This three-tiered Zen temple served as the retreat of retired shogun Yoshimitsu. Here it appears with its top floors completely covered in gold leaf and overlooking the famous pond, which functions more like a mirror. The building has had its share of tragedies having been burned down several times, the last time in 1950.

When not fusing with the outside world, the structures appear to have completely disappeared, as in Ohashi’s Shugaku-in (Imperial Villa: Winter), where a white and grayish veil of snow has taken over the print and left no chance for inner cheering. Thankfully, the autumn and the sunset photographs that accompany the winter piece lighten up our spirit with unbelievable intense colors. The sunset piece gets my attention with the curious line of trees that look as if strategically placed next to one another.

Notably missing from this trio is a spring season photograph, which one can only imagine would be impregnated with cherry blossoms. There are no humans depicted in any of the photos, leading us to wonder whether humanity and these glorious places can really coexist.

The presence of swords, spears and folding screens is not enough to get a mood going. I can’t help thinking that having Japanese melodies or Zen music playing in the background would have helped. Unlike tea ceremony and koi feeding, which set a particular mood, the show doesn’t seem to transmit much. This is perhaps intentional, as to leave room for inward reflection.

If that’s the case, the best place to cleanse the mind is by the woodblock paintings depicting rock gardens: Sekitei and Ryoan-ji. Each of the seven works, ranging in date from 1960 to 2001 and by seven different artists, gives us a personal interpretation of these famous dry landscapes, also known as Zen gardens.

Painters such as Toshi Yoshida, son of the great Hiroshi Yoshida, were considered sosaku hanga artists, meaning they engaged in every aspect of the woodblock painting creative process: designing, carving, printing and publishing. His Sekitei, dated 1963, is the warmest depiction of the garden in the show.

Following it is an unexpected geometric composition titled Ryoan-ji, Kyoto by Kiyoshi Saito. It’s rather Pollockian compared to the rest in the sense that the work is more concerned with free expression and experimentation than with retention of form. For instance, although Saito’s figures are still clearly defined, he has placed circles instead of realistic-looking rocks and given each a different texture. Next to the other pieces here, which are more tri-dimensional and play with angles and shadows, Saito’s primitive take on the rock garden seems very flat but yet fresh and unique.

A scroll right before the woodblock pieces titled Fishing in Autumn is the piece I like the most. Hine Taizan gives us the scholar turning to seclusion and isolation to reconnect with his inner self. Here he appears inside a boat but is not in a rush. The piece isn’t about anxiety or urgency, but rather a man making a quiet exit out of the social and political life.

When we reach the pair of six-panel folding screens we sort of sense the presence of something important, even when we cannot fully understand it. Think of them as visual narratives, starting from right to left. The screens, dating from the Edo period, 17th or 18th century, are meant to portray the life of the various social classes in Kyoto. Too bad that the glass wall protecting them prevents us from taking a closer look at the tiny figures. Don’t be shy about using the description to identify the important sites on the panels.

You will find the striking dance platform of the Kiyomizu-dara temple (top of the fifth panel on right screen) and, right below it, the Great Buddha Hall distinguished by a bright orange hue and a green roof. The overall view reveals black outlines dancing, meditating, fishing and carrying baskets. Bridges of different sizes connect the top section with the middle and the bottom sections of the panels while members of the imperial court make their way to Nijo Castle.

On your way out, before the countdown toward forgetfulness begins and while your mind is still fresh with images, find comfort in the fact that perhaps it isn’t meant for you to remember this show after all. You don’t need to retain all the details, nor are you expected to give your friends a lecture on what you learned during this visit.

After all, in Zen, learning and knowledge should be open and free from practical use as skills; knowledge for its own sake is sufficient. In other words, enjoy, and don’t worry about giving your visit a later purpose.

Kyoto: A Place in Art is showing at the Morikami Museum through Oct. 17 along with Kaiju! Monster Invasion!, an exhibit of toys based on Japanese monster movies. For more information, call 561-495-0233 or visit www.morikami.org.

WEST PALM BEACH -- Like many a local resident in this downbeat economy, Palm Beach Dramaworks has decided to rent instead of buy.

Long in the market for a new theater to replace its current 85-seat digs, the 10-year-old professional theater company in West Palm Beach announced today it will be signing a 20-year lease to move into the Cuillo Centre for the Arts at Clematis and Narcissus, with a grand opening expected in November 2011.

Dramaworks had been looking at a variety of theater sites over the years, as far away as Palm Beach Gardens, but West Palm Mayor Lois Frankel has been working to keep the organization in the city. She succeeded by persuading the local Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) to purchase the building from former car dealer and occasional Broadway producer Bob Cuillo and leasing it to move Dramaworks.

In recent years, Dramaworks had been in negotiations with Cuillo to buy the building themselves, but could never reach a satisfactory agreement. The lease offers a purchase option within the first six years.

The theater, a former movie house as well as home to Florida Repertory Theatre, was dark for many years before reopening in 1999 as the residence of the short-lived Burt Reynolds Institute of Theatre Training. At the time, it was renovated with a love-it-or-hate-it steeply raked auditorium that offered excellent sight lines but treacherous entry and exit, particularly for senior audience members.

Dramaworks intends to gut the theater and reconfigure the seating in a larger version of its current auditorium. At the moment, the Cuillo seats 377. Expected seating capacity after the reconfiguration will be about 250 seats.

The CRA board voted to “conditionally approve” the purchase for $2.85 million. Like Florida Stage, which moved to a larger facility within the Kravis Center this summer, Dramaworks will soon have the potential to produce a greater variety of plays, since the Cuillo space will eliminate its current limitations of set changes, wing and fly space, and stage entrances.

South Florida Symphony expands concert series into West Palm Beach

The South Florida Symphony, in its role as concert presenter, has announced a lineup of classical music programs for the season that for the first time will reach Palm Beach County.

The orchestra, which until earlier this year was the Key West Symphony, has presented similar series in Monroe County for more than a decade, but last year began hosting them further north. For the second season, the orchestra is welcoming two high-profile violinists, one each to the first two of its five concerts.

Chee-Yun, the celebrated South Korean violinist, will perform the Violin Concerto of Beethoven (in D, Op. 61) with the orchestra on Oct. 6 in Key West, on Oct. 7 at the Broward Center and Oct. 9 at the Lincoln Theatre on Miami Beach. Conductor Sebrina Maria Alfonso will also lead the group in the Academic Festival Overture of Brahms and the Enigma Variations of Sir Edward Elgar.

The fine Canadian violinist Lara St. John appears Dec. 1 at Key West’s Tennessee Williams Theatre, on Dec. 2 at the Broward Center and Dec. 5 at the Lincoln Theatre. She’ll perform Mozart’s Concerto No. 3 (in G, K. 216) and Sarasate’s Ziegunerweisen; Alfonso will lead the orchestra in the Beethoven Fourth Symphony (in B-flat, Op. 60).

Pianist Barry Douglas, a frequent South Florida concert guest during the season, handles the huge Brahms Second Concerto (in B-flat, Op. 83) in a concert at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach on Jan. 30. He’s in Key West on Jan. 28 and at the Broward Center Feb. 1, and the orchestra also will perform the Masquerade Suite of Aram Khachaturian and the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Miami native and part-time Pompano Beach resident Ellen Taaffe Zwilich sees two of her pieces on the fourth and fifth concerts in the series. The Sima Trio performs the Zwilich Septet for piano trio and string quartet, which had its Florida premiere earlier this year at the Kravis. Also on the program are the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 of Bach and the String Sextet No. 2 (in G, Op. 36) of Brahms. Concerts are set for March 2 in Key West, March 3 at the Broward Center, and March 7 on the new Frank Gehry-designed campus of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach.

Pianist Adam Golka joins the orchestra on April 29 in Key West, May 1 at the Broward Center, and May 2 at the Gehry campus for the perennially popular Tchaikovsky Concerto No. 1 (in B-flat minor, Op. 23). Zwilich’s Fifth Symphony also is on the program with the Festive Overture of Dmitri Shostakovich.

Alfonso said the concert series marks a move by the orchestra to raise its arts profile.

“We are committed to becoming leaders in the cultural landscape of South Florida by striving to present high-level classical programming, world-class guest artists, introducing new works and most importantly to become a leader in music education for the area,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “We are seeking grants, sponsorships and partnerships that will allow us this privilege.”

For more information about the series and ticket sales, call 800-775-4086 or visit www.southfloridasymphony.org.

A debate is raging in this country over what it means to be Muslim. The ethnic comedy The Infidel will hardly resolve things, but it least it tosses some leavening humor at the question.

Following its debut in the spring at the Tribeca Film Festival and its subsequent limited runs in New York and California, director Josh Appignanesi’s send-up of religious stereotypes opts for South Florida as the next market to attempt to gain a box office foothold. Not a bad strategy when you consider the left turn the film’s plot takes.

You see, the infidel of the title is British Muslim Mahmud Nasir (Omid Djalili), as indifferent to his religious faith as his children are to him. The biggest challenge he expects to face is his son Rashid’s looming wedding, but -- shades of La Cage aux Folles -- his fiancee’s stepfather is a fanatical and intolerant Muslim cleric who doubts the Nasirs are “proper Muslims” or that Rashid is worthy of his stepdaughter.

But that crisis pales next to Mahmud’s discovery, upon the death of his mother, of his birth certificate. It seems that middle-aged, pudgy, bald-headed Mahmud -- who looks like a Muslim Bob Hoskins -- was adopted at birth. Not only that, but he is actually Jewish, and his birth name is Solly Shimshillewitz.

Oy.

It is not that he hates Jews, just that he is hopelessly ignorant of them beyond their stereotypical characteristics. So he needs a crash course in what a Jew is and how they behave -- how they walk, dance, shrug and sigh – again, shades of La Cage. The only Jew he knows is the antagonistic transplanted New York cabbie, Lenny (Richard Schiff from TV’s The West Wing), who inexplicably takes on the role of Jew coach. Then, like Eliza Doolittle at the ball, Mahmud gets tested by attending a bar mitzvah with Lenny.

Much of this could easily come off as offensive, but is saved by the performance of Djalili, a comedian-actor with an ingratiating manner and a sky spin on the dialogue.

Not even he can save the film from its sentimental conclusion, which grinds the tale to a decided halt, but there are a few solid laughs before then, enough to wish the film luck trying to get out beyond Florida.

The Infidel is currently showing at Movies of Delray, Movies of Lake Worth, Sunrise Cinemas-Deerfield Mall and Sunrise Cinemas-Sunrise 11.

Art: One of the most revelatory, absorbing art shows I’ve ever seen was The Studio of the South, an exhibit exploring the relationship between Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and the work they created while briefly living together in the French town of Arles in late 1888. I caught it at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001, and it was remarkable to see the influence the two artists had on each other, particularly when it came to color. Tomorrow at the Norton Museum of Art, one of the last self-portraits van Gogh painted before his suicide in July 1890 will be on display until Feb. 8. The Norton is getting the painting in exchange for what is probably the finest painting it has, Gauguin’s Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889), in which the suffering Christ appears as Gauguin, but with the bright-red hair of van Gogh.

Garden of Olives is going out on loan in a couple weeks to a traveling Gauguin retrospective that will appear at London’s Tate Modern and Washington’s National Gallery, which in return is lending the van Gogh to the Norton. Few artists hold the iconic status of the tragic Dutch painter, and this beautiful portrait will no doubt draw ample crowds to the West Palm museum. For more information, call 832-5196 or visit www.norton.org. – G. Stepanich

Film: Want proof that the summer is coming to a close? Loud, violent action pictures such as The Expendables and Takers are giving way this weekend to The American, as close as we will ever come to an art house hit-man movie. True, it does star George Clooney as a loner professional assassin holed up in a small Italian village trying to avoid some Swedes who want to eradicate him, but any resemblance to a commercial entertainment is strictly coincidental. Directed by Anton Corbijn with a maddeningly methodical -- as in “slow” -- pace, the film will grow on you if you let it, as does Clooney’s internal performance, devoid of his usual easy charm. At area theaters. – H. Erstein

Theater: Coral Gables’ GableStage closes out its year-round theater season with one of its best productions in quite a while, an emotional roller-coaster look at the disintegration of a marriage: 50 Words, by Michael Weller, whose best-known plays -- Moonchildren and Loose Ends -- premiered decades ago. But he is at the top of his game putting a Brooklyn yuppie couple, Jan (Erin Joy Schmidt) and Adam (Gregg Weiner), under the microscope over a single night when they find themselves alone, having sent their overprotected son off to a friend’s sleepover. It should have been a night of romance, but long-festering wounds get picked at, secrets get revealed, claws get bared and even audience members in happy, stable relationships will find themselves identifying with the action on stage. Both Schmidt and Weiner are first-rate in these white-hot roles, under Joe Adler’s usual unflinching direction. Continuing through Sept. 12. Call (305) 445-1119 for tickets. – H. Erstein

Music: More big-name acts are in town at the Cruzan Amphitheatre in the next couple days, beginning with Toby Keith (Should’ve Been a Cowboy) tomorrow night. Keith’s flag-waving during the runup to the second Iraq War gained the country singer many new fans and plenty of media attention during his dispute with the Dixie Chicks. The former Oklahoma oil hand appears with Trace Adkins on a tour called American Ride.

Three days later, it’s tween heaven as the Jonas Brothers bring their brand of squeaky-clean corporate pop to the Cruzan, with Demi Lovato of Disney’s Camp Rock as their opening act. The Jonases have not yet managed to cross over from entertaining the younger set to adult artistic respectability, but they’re serious about what they’re doing, and it may be that one day one or all of the siblings will make that breakthrough. Tickets for Keith and the Jonases are available through Live Nation/Ticketmaster.

After first-rate productions of A Little Night Music and The Drowsy Chaperone, and now a very credible mounting of the problematic Mack and Mabel, we are going to have to stop being so surprised when the Broward Stage Door Theatre delivers satisfying entertainment.

The formerly erratic company has been coming through with the goods more and more, giving us hope for such demanding shows as On the Town and Light in the Piazza, which are on the schedule for later this season.

Mack and Mabel, the bittersweet tale of silent movie producer-director Mack Sennett and his “Bathing Beauties” muse and love interest Mabel Normand, is substantially darker in tone than composer-lyricist Jerry Herman’s megahits (Hello, Dolly!, Mame, La Cage aux Folles). Undoubtedly that is why -- like Mabel herself -- the show died before its time, running only 66 performances on Broadway in 1974.

The script by Michael Stewart is sketchy at best, but it serves what is generally acknowledged to be Herman’s best score. Herman has long expressed a special affection for the show, which explains why he has been preoccupied with revising and reviving Mack and Mabel for the past 35 years.

The Stage Door production incorporates a lot of those revisions, but the show’s chief asset remains its songs. The score ranges from the highs of the anti-love ballad I Won’t Send Roses and the bluesy Time Heals Everything to a signature Hermanesque rousing anthem, When Mabel Comes in the Room, which brazenly rips off the title numbers of Dolly! and Mame.

Although it is not the only reason Mack and Mabel failed to generate an audience originally, much of the blame is placed on the show’s downbeat ending. In all of its various revivals, efforts have been made to give the conclusion a more positive spin, even if only ironic. So it is at the Stage Door, which one could call less than honest, but then Stewart’s book takes plenty of liberties with the facts throughout the show.

Nevertheless, as long as you are not a film historian, there is a lot to like in this production. Shane R. Tanner, looking suspiciously like a young Orson Welles, carries the evening as crusty, staunchly unsentimental Mack Sennett, obsessed with making his two-reeler comedies and disdainful of anything resembling an art film. He sings with authority, delivers his dialogue persuasively enough and -- to his credit -- never bothers to try to soften Sennett’s character.

Less successful in an even less-dimensional assignment is Mara Gabrielle (Mabel), but she too knows her way around a song, belting out Wherever He Ain’t and Time Heals Everything with power to spare.

As part of the show’s revisions, the role of Fatty Arbuckle -- another of Sennett’s stable of stars -- was added, though he serves little dramatic purpose beyond comic relief. He is played here by the always welcome Ken Clement, who feels underemployed. The only other featured player is Kelly Cusimano as second banana Lottie Ames. She barrels through her second act number, Tap Your Troubles Away, well enough, but needs to pull back on her facial tics.

Director Michael Leeds builds scenes from the script outline, managing a more cohesive narrative than exists on the page. And whenever the story starts evaporating, he relies on choreographer Chrissi Ardito to cover up the plot holes with dance flash. Unfortunately, the show includes several extended sequences on the set of The Keystone Kops, Sennett’s most lasting legacy, but they are nowhere near as funny as the actual movie shorts that play before the show and at intermission.

Mack and Mabel is hardly a perfect show and probably never will be, but it has a great score and enough entertainment value to make it worth seeing.

MACK AND MABEL, Broward Stage Door Theatre, 8036 W. Sample Road, Coral Springs. Through Sept. 26. Tickets: $34-$42. Call: (954) 344-7765.