Most of the featured acts at the Colony Hotel’s Royal Room are fixtures of the New York cabaret scene. While West Palm Beach’s Avery Sommers has made some inroads in that world, she is better-known for her musical theater work, on Broadway and across the country on tour. So it is understandable that her latest act, a one-hour set that opened Friday evening and continues at … [Read more...]
Archives for November 2011
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 18-20
Art: This is the first weekend for three art exhibits that opened Thursday at the Lighthouse ArtCenter in Tequesta. The shows – Landscapes 2011; Fong Choo: The Artful Teapot Invitational; and the annual faculty exhibition – will run through the end of the year at the center. Choo, a master of the miniature teapot, is a Louisville, Ky.-based potter whose works emulate the Yixing … [Read more...]
Director Kennedy brings new energy to Master Chorale
Leaving a place where your colleagues in academia went boogie-boarding in the Pacific Ocean every Friday morning can’t be an easy thing to do. And so it was for Karen Kennedy, who left her job at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and directorship of the Honolulu Symphony Chorus to come back to the mainland, first to Baltimore, and then to Miami. “It was very hard for me to … [Read more...]
Boca Guild’s ‘Allergist’s Wife’ marks advance for company
Still trying to establish its status as a professional theater company, Boca Raton Stage Guild makes a major move in that direction with the selection of Charles Busch’s boulevard comedy, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, and the casting of two South Florida veteran actresses, Patti Gardner and Barbara Sloan, in the leading roles. In what was playwright Busch’s Broadway … [Read more...]
‘Martha Marcy’ grounded in harrowing, tactile reality of cult life
Back in January, Ramin Setoodeh wrote a memorable article for Newsweek titled “Crazy Chick Flicks,” which pointed to the tendency for actresses to go psycho to win Oscars. Natalie Portman, who scored an undeserved statuette for Black Swan, was the most prominent example at the time. Her character was also typical in that she expressed a sexual mania along with her … [Read more...]
Dramaworks opens new home in superb style with ‘All My Sons’
Arthur Miller’s 1947 drama All My Sons, his first commercial success on Broadway, has numerous thematic and narrative similarities to Death of a Salesman, the Pulitzer Prize winner that premiered two years later. But if the earlier play has been under the shadow of the playwright’s masterwork, you would never know it from the powerful new production at Palm Beach Dramaworks. … [Read more...]
Music roundup: Adventures in new music at Lynn, Arts Garage
New Music Festival: Thomas McKinley (Nov. 10, Lynn University) For six years now, Lynn University’s Lisa Leonard has been running a weeklong fall-season festival devoted to new music and to the work of a featured composer. Past composers have included Gunther Schuller and Kenneth Frazelle, but this year, Leonard stayed close to home by choosing Thomas McKinley, a Lynn … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 11-13
Theater: The numbers 11-11-11 have been drummed into us for most of the past year by Palm Beach Dramaworks, and now it is here -- the day the company unveils its substantially renovated new digs at Clematis and Narcissus in downtown West Palm Beach. The auditorium of the former Cuillo Centre for the Arts has been leveled and rebuilt, removing the stadium seating that so many … [Read more...]
Evenhanded ‘J. Edgar’ mostly shies away from sex life
When I was a kid, before I knew who J. Edgar Hoover was, I associated him with cross-dressing. I’m not alone. “Cross-dressing” is the seventh-most-popular Google search accompanied with the phrase “J. Edgar Hoover,” behind “movie,” “biography,” “trailer,” “building,” “president” and “black” (something about Hoover’s rumored African-American ancestry). It tops even “FBI” in … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: From ‘Red’ to the ghoulish black of ‘Addams Family’
“What do you see?” demands intense abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko, referring to the massive red canvas with two darker red vertical lines that dominates the stage. He is speaking to his new assistant, a would-be artist named simply Ken, hired to do all manner of grunt work, freeing up Rothko to ruminate, cogitate, bellow and, only occasionally, paint. And he is … [Read more...]