Men in dark suits and ties are seen voraciously tackling the phone, their blurry faces fixed on the screens higher up and on their desks. They wear watches, glasses and sport thinning hair. This used to be the image of a respectable man. An exhibition of paintings by Ben Aronson, currently running until Feb. 10 at the Ann Norton Scuplture Gardens, may not be the hottest show … [Read more...]
Archives for January 2013
Momix’s ‘Botanica’ stunning at Duncan
Momix never disappoints. Audiences go knowing that they will be visually satisfied and expecting something new and exciting to excite their tastebuds. After all, Momix has been doing just that since it was founded 30 years ago. It is similar to returning to one’s favorite gourmet restaurant, being served multiple exotic courses and knowing that one will leave sublimely … [Read more...]
Maltz Jupiter Theatre, Palm Beach County lead Carbonell nominations
Palm Beach County theaters, and particularly the Maltz Jupiter, dominated the nominations for this year’s 37th annual Carbonell Awards, announced on Friday. The Maltz will be competing for 23 of the statuettes for excellence in South Florida professional theater, almost twice as many as the next highest nomination-getter ― Coral Gables’ Actors’ Playhouse ― which received 12. … [Read more...]
Conductor Schwarz advocates for American music, cellist son
You can forgive Gerard Schwarz some special fatherly pride when he talks about his youngest son, Julian. They are, after all, in the same business. “He’s got tremendous gifts, and he’s had quite a bit of success already,” said Schwarz, an eminent American conductor who led the Seattle Symphony to major-league status over a 26-year directorship before stepping down in 2011. … [Read more...]
A lurid, explosive premiere for Arts Garage
Florida Stage had one of its biggest successes in its penultimate season with Israel Horovitz’s gritty drama, Sins of the Mother. And it seemed headed for another hit with the playwright’s Fighting Over Beverly, set to feature two-time Tony Award winner Frances Sternhagen, but the company closed its doors before that could happen. Still, as artistic director Louis Tyrrell says … [Read more...]
Leibovitz at the Norton: Scenes from the eye of a ‘reluctant director’
By Tom Tracy Leonardo DiCaprio is wearing a living swan around his neck, while Allen Ginsberg is caught tying his shoe in a grungy bathroom. And the Rev. Al Sharpton sits in a beauty salon with his hair up in curlers under a dryer. Yet the laid-back Annie Leibovitz, one of American popular culture’s leading portrait photographers for four decades, said she has never pushed … [Read more...]
‘Traviata,’ Cast 2: Sarah Joy Miller triumphs as Violetta
There were many young people at Saturday’s performance of Palm Beach Opera’s La Traviata: They came to hear tenor David Miller, a member of Simon Cowell’s Il Divo group, who’ve sold 37 million CDs already. He did not disappoint, giving the lead performance of his life as Alfredo. Miller’s tenor is warm and well-produced. He is very convincing as a singing actor and his finest … [Read more...]
Sundays: My naughty madeleine, on the auction block
By Myles Ludwig Yesterday’s auction of ephemera from Studio 54 at Palm Beach Modern Auctions on Bunker Road was a Proustian picture of my past refracted through a disco mirror ball. I walked into the auction house and was immediately confronted with a rogue’s gallery of black-and-white happy-snaps of ghosts fixed to the wall. There was a laughing ex-girlfriend who had … [Read more...]
PBO’s ‘Traviata’ has impressive Violetta, Germont
Today’s opera singers are expected to be persuasive actors, and that can be a challenge given the very short dramatic trajectories their characters must ride in the pages of most libretti. In the case of Violetta Valéry, the doomed heroine of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, sopranos have enough splendid music that if their acting is less than persuasive, they can still make a … [Read more...]
Political, personal meld intriguingly in ‘Royal Affair’
Like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Nikolaj Arcel’s prestige drama A Royal Affair tells of a real-life arranged marriage between a foreign teenager and a narcissistic monarch, and for a while, it pulses with the same sense of feminist rage. Just as in Antoinette, the new Queen Caroline (Alicia Vikander) doesn’t love the king – that would be Christian VII, of Denmark (Mikkel … [Read more...]