Both were boy wonders. Both were performing in public before they reached puberty. Both have kept the fires burning, enthralling, inspiring and enlightening audiences for more than five decades.

But perhaps Sunday’s show at Cruzan Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach explains why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has inducted Carlos Santana as an individual artist, but Steve Winwood only as a member of Traffic.

For Winwood, it was a night of “perhapses.”

Perhaps the sound mix was uneven. No. The sound was uniform throughout the shed.

Perhaps it was an unfamiliar song here or there. No. “They’ve been playing the same set all tour,” a sound tech said.

Perhaps he was road-weary. Possible. His 2010 touring schedule began Feb. 9 in Durham, N.C., with four stateside dates, broke for three months, then jumped to Europe for 16 May through mid-June well-received shows with Eric Clapton. After one solo show in Chicago on June 26, he hit the heartland as opener for Santana.

Twenty-three shows in 33 days.

Was he tired? He didn’t appear to be. At age 62, he seems fit, the ideal image of a boy wonder half a century later.

Perhaps it was his band. Five players including Winwood. Competent, but hardly inspiring. Perhaps Steve was deferring to the lead act. Didn’t want to show up his elder.

After all, so many times in his career he was not the dominant force. His first gig, at age 15, was in the Spencer Davis Group. Traffic was a joint effort, and with the likes of Dave Mason and Jim Capaldi, egos were bound to clash. Longevity wasn’t in the cards. Then came Blind Faith, a one-album wonder with Clapton and Ginger Baker, back to Traffic with Capaldi for its dominant years.

Nothing Sunday night was dominant. With its flute interludes, the opener, Secrets, conjured up some of early Traffic’s jazzy twists, and Dirty City, with Winwood on guitar, suggested more edge which built as the band ripped into Can’t Find My Way Home. But then the Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys needed a highlight. Too reserved.

Going trio, Winwood swapped his beloved Hammond B-3 for a Stratocaster and showed some fire in his solo on Dear Mr. Fantasy, but the song still seemed to drag. Then came a rousing , pumping, this-is-what-we expect-from-Steve-Winwood Gimme Some Lovin’. Alas, the set was over.

As fan “sponge bob” wrote on Winwood’s website Monday morning: “Steve, Steve, Steve, you have fallen asleep at the wheel. I was so dissapointed (sic) in your show; it was like a jam session! Just terrible.”

It didn’t help that, unlike Tampa the night before, when Winwood and band joined Santana and band for Marvin Gaye's Right On, the fans were treated to no what-if fireworks Sunday.

No sweet taste. No foul taste either. Just: Huh? The music offered no depth, no power, no subtlety – a monaural memory in a high-def world. If this was earth music, then Winwood and Co., are in the middle of a drought.

Back in the VIP area during intermission, UpShot, a local band that struggles for every gig it can get in a lean market, sounded better on its covers of the likes of Brown-Eyed Girl.

We have to wonder about Carlos Santana, too. Not about his talent or his music, but about what might have happened to him had the nation been embroiled so deeply in the immigration debate half a century ago when his family moved from Tijuana to San Francisco. Fortunately, he didn’t have to scale barbed wire or swim a river, and in 1965, the same year he graduated high school, he became a U.S. citizen.

Actually, Santana is more a citizen of the world, as he expressed after opening with a powerful, energetic Yaleo: “We are very grateful, appreciative. This is what Martin Luther King was talking about: unity, harmony, respect for one another.”

Then BOOM! They were off, with the political Maria Maria, vocalists Andy Vargas and Tony Lindsay going back and forth:

See mi y Maria on the corner
Thinking of ways to make it better
In my mailbox there's an eviction letter
Somebody just said see you later

Then came the horns (Bill Ortiz and Jeff Cressman) on Foo Foo, the salsa of Corazon Espinada, and Dennis Chambers’ exhausting drum solo, all enhanced by a dramatic light show and three video screens that served to amplify Santana’s world view. No where was it more evident than with the African tribal dancers on Santana’s first hit, Jingo, with musical emphasis to the percussion of Karl Perazzo and Raul Rekow and Freddie Ravel’s organ. Add Miami-raised Tommy Anthony on guitar and backing vocals and Benny Rietveld on bass and you have the complete package.

They go bluesy on Singing Winds, Crying Beasts, then have the crowd dancing in the aisles with Evil Ways and A Love Supreme. Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love offered a taste from the new album, Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time (due Sept. 21) while Smooth/Dame tu amor recalled Ultimate Santana, the first such guest-star venture in 2007.

The band is blessed with energy; every member wants to cook; every member, however, knows he’s in a band and thus part of the team.

With only one album, Santana first played South Florida at the Miami Rock Festival at Miami-Hollywood Speedway Park in what is now Pembroke Pines in late December 1969. Not much survives, no reviews, no set lists. By contrast, Woodstock is seared into the rock fan’s memory and was rekindled at Cruzan with a triptych video that began with the “Woodstock chant” and continued in perfect synch on stage with Soul Sacrifice. Hits from album No. 2, Abraxas, followed: Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen, Oye Como Va.

Into the Night, another Ultimate cut was followed by the Chambers Brothers’ Love Peace and Happiness that segued into Freedom.

Thus a tale of two concerts: Winwood, full of promise but failing to fulfill, and Santana, leaving the audience screaming for more but satisfied. Such is rock ‘n’ roll.

In the years just before and after World War II, Southern California became an oasis of sun, refuge and economic opportunity for several of the era’s most important European composers, Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schonberg chief among them.

Ingolf Dahl was another one of those composers, and in the fourth and final program of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, his lively and clever Concerto a Tre was the intellectual and musical high point. Written in 1946, this piece for clarinet, violin and cello has a lot of the flavor of Stravinsky, with whom Dahl closely worked, but it comes across as less calculated, more naturally musical.

Friday night at Palm Beach Atlantic’s Persson Hall, violinist Dina Kostic, clarinetist Michael Forte and cellist Susan Bergeron gave a deft and engaging performance of this work, which has neoclassicism in its veins but also takes in some of the popular musical language of its time. Although each of the players has very difficult, challenging music to play, it’s the sound of the clarinet that drives the piece more than any other, and Forte gave the enterprise fluid fingers and a large, pleasing tone.

He ran into trouble in the highest reaches of the florid cadenza that ends the second movement, a piece with a slow-stepping kind of archaic grace (it’s marked esitando) in which the violin carefully sets out steadily rising single notes as it climbs, too, into the instrumental stratosphere. But most of the piece has a slangy, vivid swing in which odd rhythms and bright colors dominate, and in the conclusion, where the rhythmic complexity reaches its apex, the three musicians dispatched it handily.

Another trio on Friday’s program had its world premiere: Odyssey, for flute, clarinet and bassoon by composer Clark McAlister, who has been the festival’s producer for each of its six recordings. McAlister, whose Lou’s Mountain Bread remains my personal favorite of the works he’s written for this company of musicians, has crafted here a modest, sober 6-minute work for the three musicians – Forte, flutist Karen Dixon and bassoonist Michael Ellert – who founded the festival in 1992.

Beginning with a moody solo motif down around the chalumeau register of the clarinet, Odyssey opens up into a tapestry of long-lined, slowly moving themes, with a recurring waltz-like motif and an overall aspect of almost Bachian gravity. McAlister knows his way around the tonal possibilities of the three instruments, which gave this interesting, worthwhile piece added breadth despite the inherent limits of flute, clarinet and bassoon.

Modesty also was the watchword for two other works on the program, beginning with a curious Duo for bassoon and double bass by the French composer Albert Roussel. This 1925 duet already is on one of the festival’s discs, and was one of the works chosen for revisitation in the event’s 19^th season. This is not the Roussel of the Third Symphony or the ballet score Bacchus et Ariane; rather, this work is more of a sport, an exploration of how to write for two low-voiced instruments.

Roussel leaves the bassoon to do most of the work, and much of that is a march-like chattering for the wind instrument over spooky harmonics in the bass. Ellert and bassist Jason Lindsay played it well, and with the right whimsical touch.

The concert opened with a rarity by Donizetti, a Trio for flute, bassoon and piano featuring Dixon, Ellert and pianist Michael Yannette. Best-known for his operas, Donizetti also wrote a great deal of other music, including 19 string quartets, and this work probably dates from the early part of his career around 1820, when he was concentrating on instrumental music.

Again, the three players here did a good job with this light-as-a-feather piece, which was distinguished by attractive melodies and a thoroughly conventional harmonic format. Dixon and Ellert had plenty of straightforward tune to play, and they made a good case for this composer’s fondness for both of these instruments.

The final work on the program was the little-known String Quintet in G, Op. 77, of Dvořák, which despite the late opus number is a relatively early composition, written about the time of his Fifth Symphony. Composed for string quartet and double bass, it has a ravishing slow movement, a folk-flavored scherzo and finale, and a somewhat fussy, academic opening movement.

Kostic and Lindsay were joined by violinist Mei-Mei Luo, violist Rene Reder and cellist Christopher Glansdorp for the quintet. There were moments of fine playing here, especially in the slow third movement, in which all five musicians maintained a beautiful intensity that served the music well, and in the trio of the Scherzo, which was somewhat more successful than the main section.

But there were frequent intonation problems throughout the piece, and in general, the musicians didn’t sound quite in control of the material, to the point that little of the lilt and joy of Dvořák’s writing came through. As sometimes happens in this festival, this could be an example of opening-night unease, and I would wager that matters will improve by the final performance Monday night.

The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival repeats this program at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre, Delray Beach, and at 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Tickets are $22. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org.

Dance: Julie Kent, long a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre, takes the title role tonight and through the weekend in Giselle, with the Boca Ballet Theatre at Florida Atlantic University’s University Theatre. Kent, one of the best-known ballerinas of her generation, partners with another ABT standout, Marcelo Gomes, for these three performances of the beloved 1841 ballet scored by French composer Adolphe Adam. It’s a story of selfless love, as a poor village girl who falls in love with an unattainable man, then dies, comes from beyond the grave to save him from a certain death by dancing at the hands of the Willis, spirits of girls who have died before their wedding day. This is one of the staples of the repertoire, with charming, elegant music, a dramatic story, and the kind of dance that epitomizes what classical ballet is all about. The shows (with recorded music) begin at 7 p.m. today, 8 p.m. Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday. Call 995-0709 or visit www.bocaballet.org. – G. Stepanich

Music: The South African-born singer-songwriter Dave Matthews and his band return to the Cruzan Amphitheatre for two shows, tonight and tomorrow (Saturday night’s show is sold out, according to the band). Matthews’ politically conscious jam-band style has won him a devoted core of followers, and he’ll be joined at the Cruzan by the festival favorites Gov’t Mule, the Allman Brothers Band offspring featuring Warren Haynes. The concerts, if you can get in, start at 7 p.m. Tickets are $40-$75, and are available through Live Nation.

Then on Sunday at the Cruzan, it’s a visit from two of the rock titans of the 1970s: guitarist Carlos Santana and keyboardist Steve Winwood. This is a classic Boomer show, and while there will no doubt be much new music from these busy artists, lots of the crowd will have come to hear Black Magic Woman and Gimme Some Lovin’, among other favorites from these performers’ large catalogs. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Sunday; tickets are $25.50-$125.50 and are available through Live Nation.

It’s the final weekend of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, and the musicians will end their 19^th season with a world premiere and several of the rarities for which this concert series has become known. Composer Clark McAlister, who has produced each of the festival’s six CDs, offers Odyssey, a work for flute, clarinet and bassoon written in honor of the series’ three founders: Karen Dixon, Michael Forte and Michael Ellert. Also on the program are pieces by Donizetti, known primarily for his operas but also a prolific chamber composer earlier in his career (a Trio for flute, bassoon and piano), France’s Albert Roussel (a Duo for bassoon and double bass), German-born American composer Ingolf Dahl (Concerto a tre for clarinet, violin and cello), and the beautiful String Quintet in G, Op. 77, of Antonin Dvořák. The concerts are set for 8 p.m. tonight at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall; 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach, and 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org. – G. Stepanich

Film: For those who appreciate the excitement of a breakout performance, see the new independent film Winter’s Bone and be stunned by the emergence of young Jennifer Lawrence. This impressive young actress plays a teenager trying to hold onto her homestead in backwoods Missouri, threatened with foreclosure by the disappearance of her deadbeat, drug dealer dad. So she heads off on an odyssey in the Ozarks to find him and, of course, encounters more than she bargained for. The film, a sensation at Sundance, is directed and co-written by Debra Granik, who made a similarly bleak feature called Down to the Bone a few years ago. The release of Winter’s Bone in the summer is more than a little puzzling, but do not let that stop you from seeking out this small, low-budget gem. At area theaters beginning this weekend. – H. Erstein

Theater: Sometimes a show’s cast is powerful enough to overcome the material’s shortcomings. The new musical revue Low Down Dirty Blues at Florida Stage’s new digs at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach is a dramatically lazy songfest, but its four-member company of performers is so entertaining, you will be willing to overlook the evening’s shapelessness. Instead, go and enjoy Sandra Reaves-Phillips, Mississippi Charles Bevel, Felicia P. Fields and Gregory Porter, four Chicago area fixtures who know their way around the blues and each get time in the spotlight to prove it. The show is not ideally suited for the Rinker Playhouse’s new thrust stage configuration, but with the expert sound design by Victoria DeIorio, the vocalists and band are a fine aural blend. Continuing through Sept. 5. Call (561) 585-3433 for tickets. – H. Erstein

Art: Next week, the Norton Museum of Art offers an exhibit of works by American artists such as Winslow Homer and Rockwell Kent from the West Palm Beach museum’s collections. The show, called American Masters: Prints and Drawings From the Norton Museum of Art collection, runs from Thursday, Aug. 5, to Oct. 1o, and was curated by the museum’s five summer interns. Those of us who’ve worked in companies that employ interns on a regular basis always look forward to the summer and collaborating with enthusiastic young people who so willingly and eagerly shoulder some of the burdens of the permanent staff. No doubt the Norton feels the same way about its quintet of helping hands, all of them young women from Palm Beach County, two of whom are still in high school and the others students at Florida State, the University of Florida and Dartmouth. Go see the show, which features 13 works on paper from the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as a way of honoring the interns in your own office, or as a tribute to the days when you yourself were a member of this honorable company of summer laborers. – G. Stepanich

Without the safety net of their subscriber bases, South Florida theaters often ease up on their missions in the summer with lighter fare. A case in point is Palm Beach Dramaworks, which just came off its most challenging season in its 10 years of existence, lowering its sights with the playing card-thin serio-comedy, The Gin Game.

The play brought instant recognition to its playwright, D.L. Coburn, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1978 for this tale of two elderly residents of the Bentley Home for seniors who meet and do battle over a series of gin rummy games. Some find this odd couple match to be profound, but Coburn’s real achievement was creating a couple of acting roles that two wily veteran performers could sink their teeth – or dentures – into.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and J. Barry Lewis, the company’s chief director, seemed to have cast the play well with Peter Haig and Barbara Bradshaw as the compulsive gamesman with a paramount need to win and the complete novice who stumbles into beating him, time after time. Individually, they are fine, but the play is a fragile duet and even after a week’s delay of the press opening, they seemed to be occupying completely different plays.

As curmudgeonly Weller Martin, Haig takes a broad approach, pumping his foot like a sewing machine pedal to the rhythm of his dealing, barking out the cards by number, erupting with foul-mouthed anger with each defeat. Bradshaw underplays straitlaced Fonsia Dorsey, subtly suggesting her thoughts through facial expressions as she goes from innocent glee to embarrassment to a new-found competitiveness as she plays.

Both performances are right for the characters, who are vastly different, but for the rhythms of the dialogue to work, the actors need to mesh better. Chances are that intangible quality known as chemistry will develop over time, but at the performance I saw, the added spark that the play so needs from its cast was not yet evident.

The Gin Game’s strength is in the clash of characters, though Coburn also tosses in some social commentary about the way we warehouse our elderly. Both Weller and Fonsia are guarded and secretive, so it is anything but surprising when their mutual protective armors get punctured in the second act and they are revealed to be different from their initial claims.

The entire play is set on the old age home’s porch, nicely realized by scenic designer Michael Amico. But with so much time devoted to the card games, the stage action is necessarily quite static. Lewis does what he can to counteract that problem, but the fact that the notion comes to mind suggests that the performances do not sufficiently draw attention away from the play’s limitations.

THE GIN GAME, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 322 Banyan Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Aug. 15. Tickets: $42-$44. Call: (561) 514-4042.

Greenberg (Universal)

Release date: July 13

Standard list price: $18.49

If I were Roger Greenberg – the literate, perpetually disgruntled protagonist in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg – I would definitely be hand-writing a letter to Universal right about now that would go something like this:

Dear Universal Home Entertainment,

Eager to discover more about the motion picture featuring myself, I recently purchased your newly released digital video disc of Greenberg. But upon accessing the supplemental materials on the disc, I soon learned that the so-called “special” features were not special at all. Your DVD misleadingly advertises three featurettes on the back of its snap-case, withholding the vital information that the featurettes in question barely total two minutes each – and most of those miniscule durations are taken up by recycled clips from the film. Shame on you, Universal, for squandering an opportunity to provide in-depth analysis of this Criterion-worthy film in favor of lazily repackaging promotional fluff in the guise of three bonus features. Barring a dramatic change in your DVD production line, this will be the last Universal title I add to my collection!

Sincerely,

Roger Greenberg

But I’m not Roger Greenberg. Suffice it to say that the bonus features on Universal’s Greenberg disc are indeed pithy, generic and worthless, but the movie is worth owning no matter how bare-bones the DVD.

As the film’s irascible anti-hero, Greenberg (Ben Stiller) always has something worth complaining about, from the proliferation of horn honks in Manhattan to the leg room of his airplane seat, to the bland music piped through Starbucks’ speakers. Rather than let life’s little annoyances go, as most of us would, Greenberg writes letters to every person or company that has wronged him.

Like many characters portrayed by Larry David and Woody Allen before him, Greenberg is a privileged New York nebbish who may often be doing the right thing in principle, but his form and presentation are way off-base. As with Jeff Daniels’ pompous professor in Baumbach’s previous success The Squid and the Whale, I found myself agreeing with most of Greenberg’s observations while disparaging his woeful, elitist negativism. Walking a thin tightrope between enviably intelligent and disturbingly tactless, he’s a three-dimensional character more complex than those who dismiss him as simply an unlikable misanthrope, and Baumbach and Stiller deserve enormous credit for crafting this fascinating dichotomy.

When we’re introduced to Greenberg, he’s in a state of deliberate stasis. A former musician from a band he personally dissolved at the apex of its commercial breakthrough, Greeberg has just been released from a mental institution (his condition is never revealed, but depression, bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder are top candidates, not to mention crippling anhedonia), and he’s about to turn 41. Rather than confront aging with existentialist soul-searching (as Allen has done), Greenberg is postponing adulthood, maturity and the normalcy of midlife by “trying to do nothing for a while.” The opportunity to housesit in Los Angeles during his wealthy brother’s vacation in Vietnam provides Greenberg the chance to do just that.

Between meeting old friends from the band, building a doghouse for his brother’s pooch and, of course, mailing complaint letters, Greenberg begins to stumble through a relationship with his brother’s personal assistant Florence (mumblecore queen Greta Gerwig in a star-making turn), a beacon of life-changing joy next to Greenberg’s inherent dourness.

Equal turns authentically dramatic and wryly comic (To a guest at a party, Greenberg describes his life as “Middling – Leonard Maltin would give me two-and-a-half stars”), Greenberg is both an untraditional romantic comedy and an intimate homage to character-driven ’70s cinema whose depth and insights are large as its potential audience is small. Here’s hoping it has a strong cult afterlife.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (First Run Features)

Release date: July 20

SLP: $20.99

You know Daniel Ellsberg as the policy wonk who worked under Robert McNamara in the lead-up to the Vietnam War and later released the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page secret history of the war, to the media and the U.S. Congress, risking imprisonment to discredit a dishonest war machine. This documentary by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith profiles Ellsberg before, during and after his pivotal security breach, focusing especially on his transformations from hawkish employee of the Defense Department to outspoken leftist gallivanting with anti-war radicals such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. It’s obvious where Ehrlich and Goldsmith stand in this interesting but hagiographic portrait – Ellsberg himself narrates about half the movie, and an advertisement for his website and blog are included in the bonus features. Still, the history contained in the film is especially relevant to our extreme political climate, when those who don’t subscribe to one party’s dogma are ostracized as traitors by the other side and when the media are more content to cover fluffy non-stories than speak truth to power. The Most Dangerous Man in America is a reminder that dissent is patriotic – and that the media’s job is to question government, not echo its talking points.

Barking Dogs Never Bite (Magnolia)

Release date: July 20

SLP: $24.49

The first feature by popular South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho contains none of the delightfully schlocky self-consciousness of his B-movie throwback The Host, nor any of the psychological complexity of his recent The Mother. Instead, this overambitious genre mash-up meanders into thematic and aesthetic oblivion, and it takes a trying 110 minutes to do so. Barking Dogs Never Bite is essentially about an unlikable, part-time college lecturer whose murder of a yapping dog in his apartment complex leads to a series of canine-related calamities and threatens his plans to become a fully paid professor. There’s also some overwrought nonsense about a dog-eating basement dweller, a haunted boiler room and a pet-loving bookkeeper who longs to thwart a high-profile criminal and thus make it on public television. The film is every bit as disjointed as it sounds. Barking Dogs Never Bite is also available in Magnolia’s three-disc Bong Joon-ho Collection (SLP $46.49), packaged alongside The Host and The Mother.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Vol. XVIII (Shout! Factory)

Release date: July 13
SLP: $39.49

The latest installment in the never-ending quartets of Mystery Science Theater episodes features four new ones to DVD. The box set includes the Season Two entry Lost Continent, a schlocky adventure picture about a group of scientists who land on a continent populated by dinosaurs; Season Four’s Crash of the Moons, a hilariously nonsensical sci-fi yarn; Season Six’s The Beast of Yucca Flats, a silly scientist-turned-beast monster movie whose episode is perhaps more notable for the preceding short Money Talks, about a kid who gains financial advice from a poorly bewigged Benjamin Franklin; and Jack Frost, an antique Russian Cinderella story whose title character doesn’t even appear until the end of the film. Special features include new introductions by MST3K cast members Frank Conniff and Kevin Murphy and a “Look Back at The Beast of Yucca Flats.” Sounds like hours of varied, sardonic fun from the world’s best riffers.

Editor’s note: This story has been edited after posting to correct a factual error and incorrect image.