Warner Home Video has waited near Father’s Day to market and release two exceptional new Blu-ray collections of gangster cinema, old and (comparatively) new. If these are the kind of gifts the studio has prepared for dads, I’d happily take a Father’s Day every month. The Ultimate Gangsters Collection: Classics ($44.98) features four titles from the ’30s and ’40s, when Warners … [Read more...]
Archives for May 2013
Sundays: The only thing we can save
By Myles Ludwig Watching the Oklahoma tornado victims sifting through the debris of their lives night after night, newscast after newscast, is heartbreaking, of course. Each stick and splinter, each broken toy, each chair leg or slice of dining table, each refrigerator is a signifier of a piece of a once-treasured past now lost, a piece of heart torn away by the present. … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 24-26
Theater: Palm Beach Dramaworks ends its season with Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, a fictionalized tale of his mother and her four spinster sisters, who lead a repressed, impoverished life in the Irish village of Ballybeg. But when they are at their lowest, they manage to kick up their heels and give in to the spirit of the pagan harvest festival of Lughnasa, capturing a … [Read more...]
Harid marks 25 years with three celebratory programs
Reared in the orphanages of rural southwest Brazil, Gleidson Vasconcelos found his future one day as he looked into a window he was passing, and saw a girl dancing to the sound of a music box. “’She must be having a really great time doing what she is doing. She is so beautiful and free,’” Vasconcelos remembers thinking. Seen at the window by a dance teacher, the 10-year-old … [Read more...]
‘Cock’: Battle of words enlivens question of sexual identity
There is an art to upping a play’s controversy quotient with its title. Certainly Stephen Adly Guirgis knew he was stirring up trouble and attention when he called his 2011 stage work The Motherf***** with the Hat. The same probably goes for British writer Mike Bartlett, who named his verbal tug-of-war play Cock, a title that the exceedingly prudish New York Times refused to … [Read more...]
‘Frances Ha’ a heroine worth rooting for
Greta Gerwig – intelligent, gangly, un-classically beautiful and uniquely fetching -- is now poised to be the new Parker Posey. That is, if there wasn’t already a new Parker Posey I missed, some indie-film It Girl throbbing the hearts of hipsters in the first decade of the Aughts. At any rate, after a number of memorable supporting roles, she’s ready for her close-up, and she … [Read more...]
Community theater: Charming ‘Sylvia’ closes Delray Playhouse season
By Dale King The literary device known as the “willing suspension of disbelief” is “an essential element when experiencing any drama or work of fiction,” said poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who coined the phrase in 1817. “We may know very well that we are watching an actor or looking at marks on paper, but we wilfully accept them as real in order to fully experience what the … [Read more...]
Sundays: Standing in the corner with Kafka
By Myles Ludwig I’m not surprised that Franz Kafka woke up one morning and imagined he was some kind of giant beetle. He needed someone to talk to. A writer’s life is a lonely life, particularly a writer who makes fiction or poetry. There you are with a world in your head, struggling with near impossibility of describing it perfectly, not only to yourself, but to someone … [Read more...]
Chameleon ends season with worthy revival of forgotten composer
It’s surely the case that most of the readers of this review have never heard of the Swedish woman composer Elfrida Andrée (1841-1929), whose career ran into the standard gender roadblocks of the Victorian era into which she was born. But Andrée’s music is well worth hearing, and last Sunday (May 12), the Chameleon Musicians chamber music series in Fort Lauderdale closed its … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 17-19
Art: Transformations, a solo exhibition of mixed-media paintings, wall reliefs and sculptures by artist Yvonne Parker, has just opened at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens Museum in West Palm Beach. Parker, who was born and raised in southern Germany, was encouraged by her father to explore multiple media in her artwork from a young age. She studied porcelain painting in … [Read more...]