By Greg StepanichWEST PALM BEACH -- It doesn't take a great ballet company to make a successful Nutcracker. In many cases, all a dance group has to do is go heavy on the cute factor with mouse suits and child dancers, and a holiday-minded audience ready to embrace it eagerly does so.Then again, it does takes a fine company to demonstrate just how much can be made of this … [Read more...]
Archives for December 2008
Weekend Arts Picks
Daniel Ricardo Teran,a resident artist and teacherat the Armory Arts Center,recently demonstrated hiswheel-throwing techniques to theCeramic League of the Palm Beaches,which met at The Craft Gallery recently.(Photo by Katie Deits) Armory Arts Center: As we are busy with holiday festivities, visiting local art galleries and museums can add quiet contemplation time.And then, as … [Read more...]
Film: Florida Film Critics’ best of 2008 (and my rebuttals)
Ayush Mahesh Khedekar in a scene from Slumdog Millionaire.By Hap Erstein ’Tis the season . . . For year-end film awards from critics’ groups, like the Florida Film Critics Circle, which I belong to and vote in, now representing Palm Beach ArtsPaper.All such groups like to believe that they are a bellwether of the Oscars and … [Read more...]
Theater review: Dramaworks masters the absurd in ‘The Chairs’
Dan Leonard and Barbara Bradshaware Old Man and Old Woman inPalm Beach Dramaworks' productionof The Chairs.By Hap Erstein Need a reminder that life has no meaning? You could either turn on the news or head to Palm Beach Dramaworks and catch the company’s production of Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs. Ionesco, a major figure of the Theater of the Absurd movement, took a dim … [Read more...]
Film review: No ‘Doubt’ about the superlative performances
Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius in Doubt.By Hap Erstein Hollywood demands happy endings that will leave an audience reassured and uplifted. John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play — and now movie — prefers disquieting ambiguity. But if he has no intention of presenting us with the answer to the moral puzzle he spins (not whodunit, but … [Read more...]
Weekend Arts Picks
GEORGE PLATT LYNES (American, 1907–1955): Jean Cocteau, 1934. Gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 in.Gift of Baroness Jeane von Oppenheimin honor of Charles Stainback, 2006.18.© Estate of George Platt LynesArt: Only a couple of weeks are left to see two of the outstanding exhibitions at the Norton Museum of Art: "A Tradition Redefined: Chinese Paintings from the Chu-tsing Li … [Read more...]
Music review: Trio shines in Beethoven Triple Concerto
By Greg StepanichPALM BEACH — It's true, as the program notes indicated, that the Triple Concerto of Beethoven gets slight respect from scholars, but the Goldstein-Kaler-Peled Trio made as a good a case for this hybrid work Tuesday night as you could hope to hear.Appearing at the Society of the Four Arts with the Palm Beach Symphony, the three players — pianist Alon Goldstein, … [Read more...]
Commentary: Dark days ahead for Broadway, and perhaps theater in general
Monty Python's Spamalot By Hap ErsteinT.S. Eliot was wrong. April is not the cruelest month. It is January, at least when it comes to the Broadway theater. Usually a tough month for the survival of marginally successful shows, next month is going to be disastrous for the New York commercial theater in the economy we are currently suffering through.Eleven shows, from … [Read more...]
Five discs for the holidays
By Scott SimmonsThe Christmas season is here, which means standard listening fare gets put on hold in favor of a few choice holiday recordings. Yes, there's holly, there's ivy and there's a heaping helping of good cheer. This is what's in my CD player:1. In the Spirit, Jessye Norman (Polygram) — Norman wraps her voluptuous soprano around some of the great sugarplums of the … [Read more...]
Theater review: ‘Mezzulah’ a winning portrait of larger-than-life tomboy
Theo Allyn, left, and Deborah Hazlett in Mezzulah, 1946.By Hap ErsteinThe year is 1946. World War II is over and the residents of Monroe, Wash., are eager to move on with their lives.Except for teenage tomboy Mezzulah Steiner, who is intent on holding onto her wartime “Rosie the Riveter” job on the assembly floor of the local Boeing aircraft plant. The other women in town … [Read more...]