| 30 July 2010
Julie Kent and Marcelo Gomes.
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
Dave Matthews in concert at the Cruzan in August 2009. (Photo by Thom Smith/Palm Beach ArtsPaper file)
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.
Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848).
It’s the final weekend of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, and the musicians will end their 19th 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
Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone.
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
Felicia P. Fields and Mississippi Charles Bevel in Low Down Dirty Blues.
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
From left: Hanna Thaw, Kendall Clark, Carolina Chavez, Julia Harvey and Maria Olea. (Photo by Kelli Marin)
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 19th and 20th 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
In the Swamp (1917), by Charles Burchfield, from the upcoming Norton exhibit.
| 23 July 2010
Hey Monday.
Music: Things might be a little soggy out there thanks to Tropical Storm Bonnie, but as of this writing, the Vans Warped Tour, 2010 edition, is set to hit the Cruzan Amphitheatre on Saturday for a day of bands and extreme sports. The skateboard company Vans, which launched this festival in 1995, welcomes 72 bands to this year’s tour, one of them being West Palm’s own Hey Monday. Lead singer Cassadee Pope, who’s just 20, has one of those big, powerful, keening female pop voices that seem so prevalent nowadays, and the band has built a steady fan base since forming out of Wellington High two years ago. The music starts at 12 p.m. Tickets are $31.93 and are available through Live Nation.
Weird Al Yankovic.
Or if your taste runs more to musical parody, you can catch Weird Al Yankovic on Saturday night at the Mizner Park Amphitheatre in Boca Raton. Yankovic has a had a successful career in a niche that’s very hard to sustain past initial novelty, and much of the credit for his longevity has to go to Yankovic’s basic musicianship and respect for the sources of his work. The concert starts at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $26.50-$46.50, and are available through Ticketmaster.
Earthquake 01.12.10, by Philippe Dodard.
Art: Haitian artist Philippe Dodard will be appearing Wednesday night as part of a new summer lecture series down at the Frost Art Museum on the campus of Florida International University in Miami. Dodard, born in 1954, studied in his native country and in France, and produces colorful, intense work – paintings, drawings and sculpture -- that he sees as spiritual reflections on the Caribbean and the African diaspora. Dodard will speak about his work during the lecture, which begins at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, call 305-348-2890 or visit thefrost.fiu.edu.
A scene from The Kids Are All Right.
Film: Car chase and secret agent fans can wallow in the silliness of Salt -- the movie, not the condiment -- but if you want something smart about real people, try The Kids Are All Right, a family comedy that is genuinely funny without being jokey. It concerns a lesbian couple (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) and their two well-adjusted teenage offspring, who have grown curious about the guy who donated the sperm that helped them come into the world. They probably should have left well enough alone, but meeting their biological dad, a footloose L.A. restaurateur (Mark Ruffalo) tests the family in unexpected ways.
Director/co-writer Lisa Choledenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon) gets some terrific performances from her cast, particularly Bening as the mom who is wound up too tight. In area theaters today. – H. Erstein
Barbara Bradshaw and Peter Haig in The Gin Game.
Theater: The official opening was postponed a week because of technical difficulties -- A playing card malfunction -- so Palm Beach Dramaworks unveils its summer production, D.L. Coburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning dark comedy, The Gin Game, this weekend. This tale of two seniors who meet, spar and come to an understanding over a gin rummy grudge match at a seedy old age home never really deserved the Pulitzer, but it does have two terrific, juicy acting roles. There is every reason to believe area veterans Peter Haig and Barbara Bradshaw will devour them handily, under J. Barry Lewis’s direction. As long as the technical difficulties do not get in the way. Continuing through Aug. 15. Call (561) 514-4042 for tickets. – H. Erstein
| 16 July 2010
Blue Boy, by Tammy Marinuzzi.
Art: Work in ceramics by a group of artists who all have connections to the University of Florida opens today at West Palm Beach’s Armory Art Center and runs through Aug. 28. The 13 artists, assembled under the rubric Motley Moxie, shared the same working environment or instructors at UF, but have widely varied approaches to clay. The artists, in alphabetical order, are Pavel Amromin, Renee Audette, Andrew Cho, Lynn Duryea, Magda Gluszek, Yumiko Goto, Holly Hanassian, Tammy Marinuzzi, Conner McKissack, Beau Raymond, Jeremy Randall, Shawn Rommevaux and Alyssa Welch.
Homeward Bound, by Pavel Amromin.
The opening reception begins at 6 p.m. today and runs through 8 p.m. Admission is $5, or free for Armory members. The center gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays. Call 832-1776 for more information, or visit www.armoryart.org.
Ellen Page and Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception.
Film: Most special-effects action thrillers ask us to leave our brains at the door and be satisfied watching the computer-generated eye candy. Then there is Inception, the marvel of a thinking person’s puzzle movie that takes some work to keep up with, but pays off in very satisfying ways. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a master extractor, a guy adept at cracking into the dreams of others and stealing their ideas for profit. Now in his last job before he hopes to retire -- uh-oh -- he is asked to do the opposite, to burrow into a corporate executive’s mind and plant a destructive idea.
The film takes place inside dreams, with a dream’s lack of logic or gravity, and there are levels and layers to these dreams to keep moviegoers further off-balance. Inception is the brain child of director-writer Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight), who moves up even higher in the Hollywood pecking order. – H. Erstein
Felicia Fields in the Chicago-area production of Low Down Dirty Blues.
Theater: The big event this weekend, theatrically speaking, is the debut of Florida Stage’s new home, a drastically reconfigured Rinker Playhouse within West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center. The space has been turned into a thrust stage theater, by placing the action on the floor and surrounding it with seats on three sides. The company may have lost a little of the intimacy it had in Manalapan, but it gains in stage height and depth, which will pay dividends in scenic and lighting possibilities.
The inaugural production is Low Down Dirty Blues, Randal Myler and Dan Wheetman’s revue of the sassy, double entendre-laden blues songs rolled out in an after hours Chicago club. It premiered recently at Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Ill., where the local critics raved about the four-member cast. Florida Stage’s box office phone number remains the same, (561) 585-3433. – H. Erstein
Mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts.
Music: The Palm Beach Opera offers a preview Tuesday night of the coming season with an event at the Harriet Himmel Theater in CityPlace featuring soprano Wendy Jones, mezzo Irene Roberts and baritone Graham Fandrei. The singers, accompanied by pianist Bruce Stasyna, will perform selections from the four operas taking the stage for the 2010-11 season: Verdi’s Nabucco, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Mozart’s Così fan Tutte, and Puccini’s Tosca. The concert is preceded by a mixer at City Cellar and followed by a $125-per-ticket dinner (reservations due today) with the artists at Pistache, the French brasserie on Clematis Street.
Jones was recently seen as a fine Lady Billows in the company’s workshop production of Britten’s Albert Herring, and Roberts, who sang Emilia in Verdi’s Otello and Mercédès in Bizet’s Carmen last season, won second prize in the recent Palm Beach Opera vocal competition with a performance of the aria Nobles seigneurs, salut! from Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. Both are former members of the Young Artists program, and Fandrei, a well-known South Florida baritone, will be singing in Florida Grand Opera’s upcoming production of Cyrano, a new opera (2007) by American composer David DiChiera. The concert, which is sponsored by Kretzer Piano’s Music of the Mind series, begins at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Harriet. Tickets are $10, and proceeds go to benefit the company’s education programs. For tickets or more information, call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org. – G. Stepanich
Louis-Nicolas Clérambault (1676-1749).
King Louis XIV had a lofty sense of style, and he drew some of the finest artists in France to his court during his reign, which at 72 years was the longest of all European kings and queens. Last night, Seraphic Fire’s summer concert series continued with the first night of The Court of the Sun King, an evening of music by two of the best-known composers of Louis’ time. Sopranos Kathryn Mueller (a fine soloist in a Bach cantata earlier this year) and Rebecca Durren are joined by Seraphic Fire founder Patrick Dupré Quigley at the keyboard for sacred music by François Couperin and Louis-Nicolas Clérambault. Featured are four motets by Clérambault for the king, the Virgin Mary, Christmas Day and Mardi Gras, and three surviving Leçons de Ténèbre of Couperin.
This is exquisite, absorbing music, and marks another notable concert in what has been an exceptional season and off-season of Baroque music. Tonight’s concert begins at 7:30 p.m. at First United Methodist Church in Coral Gables. Saturday, it can be heard at All Saints Episcopal in Fort Lauderdale beginning at 8 p.m., and at 4 p.m. Sunday the program is presented for the final time at Miami Beach Community Church. Tickets are $30; call 305-285-9060 or visit www.seraphicfire.org. – G. Stepanich
| 09 July 2010
Noomi Rapace in The Girl Who Played With Fire.
Film: Those who clamored about The Twilight Saga last week can now take in a far better, darker trilogy, now that they have that out of their system. It is the Swedish mystery novels by the late Stieg Larsson, whose introduction on film was the riveting The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, about a Goth computer hacker named Lisbeth (the terrific, deadpan Noomi Rapace), who teams up with a disgraced journalist to solve enigmatic crimes. Now comes the second installment, The Girl Who Played With Fire, about an attempt to expose the sex traffic industry and the two freelance magazine authors who are killed for their crusading efforts. This second film is more conventional than the first, playing like a standard crime procedural, albeit a kinky one. Still, Lisbeth is a fascinating character and the movie is way above par for a summer release. In area theaters beginning today. – H. Erstein
Gordon McConnell and Nick Duckart in Secret Order.
Theater: Area theater companies usually lighten up in the summer, grabbing a popular comedy or a musical revue. Not Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre, which prefers to challenge its audience a bit with a drama about a young scientist who may have discovered a cure for cancer, the father-figure mentor for bankrolls the effort to bring this medical breakthrough to the marketplace, and the issues of ethics and commerce that stand in the way of their success.
The play is Bob Clyman’s Secret Order, which came very close to opening on Broadway in 2005, but has been kicking around in regional theaters since then. Tom Bloom, who was involved in the play’s earliest development almost 15 years ago, directs the Caldwell production, which features Nick Duckart as the naïve scientist and Gordon McConnell as the older, wiser lab administrator. Opening Friday and running through Aug. 1. Call (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432 for tickets. – H. Erstein
Composer Kenneth Frazelle, at Lynn in January.
Music: Back in January, composer Kenneth Frazelle was treated to a mini-festival of his music at Lynn University, and the closing concert, which included work from a wide arc of his career, presented music by a composer whose style has become more concentrated and simplified over the years, but which has gained in power by doing so. One of the pieces heard then was a world premiere, Gee’s Bend Pieces, a work for trumpet, piano and percussion inspired by the quilters of a rural Alabama town. Tonight, that piece will be heard again in Palm Beach County on the opening concert of the 19th season of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, which opens at Persson Hall on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach and runs for the next four weekends at three different venues in south, central and northern Palm Beach County.
This year, the festival will have concerts on Friday nights, Sunday afternoons and Monday nights (instead of Saturday nights) for four consecutive weekends ending Aug. 2. Also on the 8 p.m. concert tonight are the Schubert String Trio in B-flat, D. 581, Randall Thompson’s Suite for oboe, clarinet and viola, Handel’s Passacaglia, arranged for violin and cello by Johan Halvorsen, and the Nonet for string trio, wind quintet and bass by Bohuslav Martinů (H. 374). The same program can be heard at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach, and at 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. In its nearly 20 years of existence, this festival has become one of the most durable, rewarding concert series in all of South Florida, and serious devotees of classical music never miss it. Tickets: $22; call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org. – G. Stepanich
Lorenzo Turchi-Floris.
James Brooks-Bruzzese’s Symphony of the Americas plays host starting tonight to the Mont Blanc Chamber Orchestra of France, based in the border region of France, Italy and Switzerland where the big white mountain holds sway over imagination and landscape. Founded in 1998 by conductor Lorenzo Turchi-Floris, the group plans three local concerts this week before heading to Panama for a week and then returning to South Florida for seven more concerts.
On the program are Turchi-Floris’ own one-movement piano concerto, played by himself, and a variety of Baroque works – pieces by Corelli, Vivaldi and Telemann – showpieces (Paganini’s Witch’s Dance and Sarasate’s Introduction and Tarantella, played and arranged by well-known area violinist Laszlo Pap, and Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, arranged for flute by Marilyn Maingart), and orchestral favorites by Elgar (Serenade for Strings) and Copland (Hoedown). Tonight’s concert is a free outdoor performance beginning at 7 p.m. on Deerfield Beach, Saturday it begins at 8 p.m. in Fort Lauderdale’s Sunshine Cathedral, and at 4 p.m. Sunday, the orchestra can be heard at Florida Atlantic University’s University Theatre. For more information, call 954-545-0088 or visit www.sota.org. -- G. Stepanich
Last Cow, Last Light (2009), by Margena Burnett of Ponte Vedra Beach.
Art: The Boca Raton Museum of Art announced this week that it will be closing its galleries for renovations from Aug. 9 to Oct. 12 as it prepares to mark the 10th anniversary of its move to the building at Mizner Park. So this weekend might be a good one to see the three exhibits currently there: the 59th annual All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition, the biennial Boca Raton Museum Artists’ Guild exhibition, and a collection of 70 “tribal art” works from the museum’s collections called African, Oceanic and Meso-American Treasures. When the museum reopens Oct. 12, it will do so with exhibitions devoted to the work of Italian pop artist Valerio Adami, photorealist painter Robert Cottingham, and Romanticism to Modernism: Graphic Masterpieces from Piranesi to Picasso, a look at the evolution of the European Modernist style through graphic art. For more information, call 392-2500 or visit www.bocamuseum.org.
| 02 July 2010
Marisa Berenson, Pippo Delbono, Tilda Swinton, Alba Rohrwacher, Mattia Zaccaro, Flavio Parenti and Maria Paiato, in I Am Love.
Film: There is an alternative to the vampires and werewolves of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and the sci-fi fantasy of The Last Airbender. It’s I Am Love, a sensuous film from debuting Italian director Luca Guadagnino with a starring performance by Oscar winner Tilda Swinton that is her best work yet on celluloid. She plays the Russian-born wife of a Milanese businessman who has just inherited the family textile and clothing business, but the film turns on her sexual awakening with the chef friend of her son. Guadagnino has clearly studied former Italian master filmmakers and is not afraid of over-the-top passions. That includes a passion for sex as well as food. Catch this one quickly, before it gets crowded out by Hollywood summer fare, or at least add it to your Netflix queue. Opening this weekend at area theaters. – H. Erstein
Theater: Former Broward Stage Door artistic director Dan Kelley has long wanted to stage and star in the Tony Award-winning musical comedy The Drowsy Chaperone and, from all reports, he handles both assignments well. The show is a Canadian import about a guy called simply Man in Chair, who is nostalgic for the golden era of musicals and disdainful of what has happened to the genre. Breaking the fourth wall, he invites us to listen along with him to a ’30s-era show called The Drowsy Chaperone, a frothy confection, and as we hear the record he plays on his phonograph -- yes, he is that retro -- the show comes alive in his tiny apartment.
I was headed to see the production Thursday night, but the performance was called off because of a medical emergency suffered by the title actress, Eileen Faxas, but the show is expected to resume this weekend. Broward Stage Door in Coral Springs, (954) 344-7765. – H. Erstein
Sting.
Music: The English singer and songwriter Gordon Sumner, better known by his uni-moniker Sting, has compiled a large and impressive catalog of attractive music in the more than 30 years since Roxanne enlivened the airwaves of 1978. The chief of The Police is a writer of remarkable range as well, bringing to a wide variety of styles a body of well-crafted, humane lyrics and a gift for melody without which no songwriter can truly be popular. Tonight at the Cruzan, Sting appears in concert with a vigorous ensemble called the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, led by Steven Mercurio; if you saw them on one of the late-night shows backing Next to You a couple weeks ago, shimmying in their seats while playing their violins, violas and cellos, you’re in for something distinctly un-stuffy. 8 p.m. at the Cruzan. Tickets: $27-$157, available through Live Nation. – G. Stepanich
Misha Dacic.
The music of Frederic Chopin is so much a part of the daily classical repertoire that celebrations of his 200th anniversary this year (he was born in Zelazowa Wola, Poland, on March 1, 1810) don’t look all that different from a regular year in which his music is routinely played. But on Saturday, the Serbian-born pianist Misha Dacic will perform the master’s Preludes (Op. 28), an extraordinary body of miniatures that include beautiful inspirations such as Nos. 4 in E minor and No. 15 in D-flat major, the grace of No. 7 in A and the fire of No. 12 in G-sharp minor, the astounding harmonies of No. 2 in A minor (so bold for 1839), and the immensity and grandeur of No. 24 in D minor. Dacic, a regular guest of Abram Kreeger’s Piano Lovers series, is a graduate of the University of Miami and a formidable pianist in the grand Romantic tradition. 5 p.m. Saturday, at the Steinway Gallery in Boca Raton. Tickets: $20 in advance, $25 at the door. For more information, call 929-6633 or visit www.pianolovers.org. – G. Stepanich
