Chances are your first impression of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man is not of the dancing. Unless you see the new hyper-kinetic production at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre. It is not that director Mark Martino and choreographer Shea Sullivan ― the Carbonell Award-winning duo that conjured up a tap-happy Crazy for You two seasons back ― have put some conceptual overlay on … [Read more...]
Archives for December 2012
Pianist Simmons brings new savvy to the old business of classical music
When she took part in the Musical Awakenings educational outreach program for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, Jade Simmons tended to take the students she saw by surprise. “It takes you into 20 schools in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with a mostly minority demographic,” said Simmons, who as an African-American female is a rarity in the world of classical … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 1-2
Art: The American version of Impressionism is perhaps best-known in the work of painters such as Mary Cassatt and Childe Hassam, but there is a rich tradition that comes from eastern Pennsylvania, and today the Society of the Four Arts opens an exhibition that brings that tradition to a wider audience. Painting the Beautiful contains more than 60 paintings from the James A. … [Read more...]
Violinist Zhu joins mentor Entremont at Boca Symphonia
The Violin Concerto of Robert Schumann was written in the fall of 1853, at the end of the composer’s productive life, and only in 1937, more than 80 years after it was composed, did it get its first performance. It’s one of the young Chinese-born violinist Dan Zhu’s favorite concertos, and deep in the recesses of YouTube he can be seen playing it with the Schleswig-Holstein … [Read more...]
Heat and chill trade places in MCB’s first program
In its first program of the season, Fire and Ice, Miami City Ballet brought the work of three very different choreographers to bear, and with surprising results. The “ice” part of the program was Sir Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs, a light-hearted winter wonderland of skaters on a frozen pond that was reminiscent of a Hallmark Christmas card. Les Patineurs, set to music by … [Read more...]