Theater: A summer tradition in South Palm Beach County is Florida Atlantic University’s Festival Rep, a series of productions in rotating repertory featuring current and recent students of the department of theater and dance, plus a few working professional mentors. This season the emphasis is on the works of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim through two of his shows — the … [Read more...]
Archives for June 2013
‘Wedding Singer’ pleasant, but lightweight
Once you make your reputation with edgy, unconventional musicals like Bat Boy, Assassins and Side Show, it is hard to switch gears, go mainstream and be completely satisfying. That is the challenge facing the adventuresome Slow Burn Theatre Company, which feels obligated to pull back from the offbeat during the summer, when its available audience pool is smaller. So it has … [Read more...]
In ‘The Attack,’ a gritty look at depth of Middle East divide
How’s this for a premise most filmmakers wouldn’t touch with a pole the size of the Gaza Strip: An Arab surgeon who has become fully acclimated in Israeli society receives a career-crowning award from the nation’s medical establishment. The very next day, a bomb explodes in an Israeli café, killing 17 people and maiming many others, including children. The suicide bomber who … [Read more...]
Community theater: ‘Spamalot’ delights at Crest
By Dale King There was a time, not too very long ago, when the mention of Monty Python raised specters of irreverent humor, out-of-control mirth and a general demeanor of silliness. It was the post-Beatles era when Brits began to show their funny sides — sometimes literally — and the Python crew held sway on the stage of craziness, challenged perhaps only by Benny Hill. … [Read more...]
Community theater: An excellent slice of Simon’s early life
By Dale King Brighton Beach Memoirs could easily be subtitled Neil Simon’s Family in Crisis. But the playwright didn’t do that. Instead, he crafted a stellar autobiographical drama that melds whimsy with pathos, anger and, ultimately, forgiveness. He takes the time to develop the characters and spotlight their ability to deal with adversity without ripping apart the family … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 21-23
Theater: Slow Burn Theatre Company usually opts for dark-toned musicals like its recent triumphs with Side Show and Sweeney Todd. But in the summer, the troupe lightens up — as they did last summer with Xanadu — and they don’t come much lighter than The Wedding Singer. This show, based on the 1998 Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore movie about a hapless wedding band crooner has a … [Read more...]
Whedon’s take on Shakespeare is really something
By its very title, Much Ado About Nothing is immune to criticisms about its triviality. In its central conceit, it’s one of Shakespeare’s silliest comedies, and he must have known it. But its structure of combative, polarized characters gradually coming to love one another has become a romantic comedy archetype for the ages, and its other, opposite storyline, about an … [Read more...]
Ariana Savalas: A chip off a different gene pool
In the same way that we worry where the next generation of theater composers and lyricists are coming from, there is a similar concern over the future crop of cabaret performers. It is not a genre that young vocalists are drawn to. Nor, with the upward spiraling prices for an evening of cabaret, will you find many young people in the audience. Still, this month at the Colony … [Read more...]
New Miami chamber music group makes an important debut
It could be that the audience at the University of Miami’s Gusman Hall on Sunday afternoon was witness to the birth of a musical organization that will take South Florida into the kind of direction only the New World Symphony has gone heretofore. And it may be too early to tell. But the event, ostensibly the closing day of the 20th Mainly Mozart Festival, inaugurated a concert … [Read more...]
Sundays: The spectacle of justice
By Myles Ludwig Justice. Now here is a concept as thin and as slippery as a fine slice of sashimi and as complex as a celebrity fragrance profile. Philosophers have been arguing about it since Socrates and Plato, parsing into as many cultural and ethical Apps as iTunes can stock and it’s still not really clear what it is or how it works. Except as some kind of culture-bound … [Read more...]