There’s something to be said for a well-done, straightforward thriller – the kind that doesn’t treat its audience like Silly Putty to be shaped and reshaped on a twisty roller coaster. Danny Boyle’s dreadful, masturbatory Trance contains a narrative puzzle so dense and disconnected that its logic doesn’t hold up to the most generous scrutiny. But, as simple marionettes in … [Read more...]
Archives for April 2013
Strong Britten should be the start of something important for PBO
It is not too much to say that Palm Beach Opera inaugurated a new and exciting era for itself this week with its two presentations of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. And as it happens, it was quite a good production, with strong singing, smart staging and good orchestral playing of a very challenging score, and the company can justly be proud of it. But the most … [Read more...]
Sundays: The objects of all (teen) men’s desires
By Myles Ludwig We learn a lot early in our lives, even when we don’t know we’re learning. Those early impressions of childhood set the standards that accompany us for the rest of our lives, for better or worse. We don’t understand them then, and if you’re at all sensitive to the sashaying vagaries of your moods, you can choose to remain a prisoner in the cellular structure … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire, Renaissance jam band bring Ponce de Leon’s era alive
It takes a leap of empathy and a sizable amount of scholarship to take an audience back five centuries to a time too remote from our own to be entirely understandable, yet recognizably humanist in a way that we still emulate. That Seraphic Fire was able to do this with its program of late medieval and early Renaissance music from Spain – in honor of Juan Ponce de León’s … [Read more...]
First Tortuga Festival pledges ‘music and meaning’
Four years in the making, the Tortuga Music Festival lands on Fort Lauderdale Beach this weekend, bringing a strong lineup of country and rock music stars, including multi-platinum artist Kenny Chesney, platinum-selling country music artist Eric Church, Lynyrd Skynyrd and alt-folk rock quintet Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, fresh off their European tour. Organized by Rock the … [Read more...]
‘Waiter’ offers good life lesson amid the hilarity
By Dale King It’s said that truth can be stranger than fiction. In the hands and mind of comedian Brad Zimmerman, truth is not only stranger, but is certainly a whole lot funnier, than fiction. Zimmerman, an ordinary-looking guy with a whip-crack wit, has been taking his production of My Son, the Waiter: A Jewish Tragedy to various South Florida venues. It finally landed at … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: April 12-14
Music: One of the most interesting aspects of the current cultural Zeitgeist is its emphasis, particularly among the young, on marrying entertainment to social change. Thus cometh the first-ever Tortuga Festival hosted by the marine conservation group Rock the Ocean on Fort Lauderdale Beach this Saturday and Sunday. To focus attention on the plight of the world’s seas, … [Read more...]
PB Symphony’s Spanish evening ends season sensationally
The Palm Beach Symphony closed its 39th season in stunning fashion Tuesday night at the Kravis Center with a night of music inspired by Spain. The orchestra had 87 players, double its usual size, with a pianist, Tao Lin, and eight percussionists. The ensemble was led by its conductor, Ramon Tebar, a native son from Valencia, Spain, a city that can be justly proud of his recent … [Read more...]
Young Artists take PBO stage for Britten’s ‘Turn of the Screw’
Opera has a great bounty of composer anniversaries this year, with the 200th birthdays of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, and the 100th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. Britten had what would today be considered a relatively short life, dying at age 63 in 1976 after several years of heart disease-related decline, perhaps exacerbated by a bout of syphilis. He … [Read more...]
Snow White, brilliantly (and silently) reimagined
Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves is an art-house trifecta: It’s black-and-white, foreign, and silent, triple the insurance that it will alienate the “average moviegoer.” Which is a shame, because the film, which rescues Snow White from its Disneyfied associations and restores to its Grimm foundations, is filled with exactly the kind of escapist excitement and pure imagination that … [Read more...]