The vagaries of fate often determine whether or not we escape our circumstances to rise above our economic surroundings. But perhaps our own actions can affect that fate. That is the issue at the heart of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Tony Award-nominated play from 2011, Good People, which weaves that thought-provoking notion around an entertaining tale of haves and have-nots and … [Read more...]
Archives for July 2013
Mizner Park crowd turns out for the Monkees
By Dale King Monkee-mania gripped Boca Raton for a couple of hours last Saturday night. The surviving three members of the Monkees — the put-together pop quartet assembled by NBC executives in the mid-1960s for a TV show designed to capitalize on the success of the Beatles flick, A Hard Day’s Night, are still performing 47 years later. The Mizner Park Amphitheater concert … [Read more...]
Exuberant Dohnanyi wraps chamber fest’s 22nd summer
A work of teenage exuberance was served up with high spirits and full-on late Romanticism on Sunday as the 22nd season of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s summer season came to a close at Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre. The very first published opus of Ernst von Dohnányi (or Ernö Dohnányi, to give him his Hungarian name), a powerful Brahmsian piano quintet, occupied the … [Read more...]
Sundays: The cries and whispers of summer
By Myles Ludwig As we drift inexorably and aimlessly into the dog days of summer and the annual oppression of August begins to weigh upon us, I have to admit I’m glad not to wake up to the sound of the thundering hooves of the apocalypse again. It’s time for a rest. Outrage is behind us; we can barely work up a smirk about Weiner and Spitzer, a hot political pastrami … [Read more...]
The wrong man pursued, in powerful ‘The Hunt’
Lucas, the protagonist of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, is fond of horsing around. In the film’s opening scene, which looks like something out of the Grown-Ups movies, Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) and his coterie of male colleagues gather around a dock and strip down to their undies, placing bets on whether one of their pack will jump naked into the freezing November water of the … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 26-28
Film: James Cromwell, a perpetual supporting player, gets the lead role in an impressive independent film called Still Mine, about a Canadian farmer battling to keep his farm afloat just as his wife of 61 years (Geneviève Bujold) begins drifting into dementia. A capable carpenter, he decides to downsize to a new home he will build himself, but that is how he runs into the brick … [Read more...]
Judy Garland concert drama at Arts Garage unmissable
Why would Lou Tyrrell bring to his Theatre at Arts Garage a play that he presented at Florida Stage seven years ago? “We are really more in audience development mode than we are in play development mode,” he says of his fledgling Delray Beach operation. And if ever there were a show to attract and expand his audience, it is surely Beyond the Rainbow, a well-crafted biography … [Read more...]
Quintets hit high points in PB Chamber Fest’s Week 3
For all the different varieties of chamber music there can be, strings tend to be heard more often in quartets and winds in quintets. The 22nd edition of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival has no string quartets on its programs this summer, but it came close Sunday at Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre, closing with a string quintet, and opening with two wind quintet miniatures. … [Read more...]
Community theater: Sparkling ‘Dinner’ wraps FAU’s summer rep
By Dale King Despite its length — just over three hours, including two intermissions — The Man Who Came to Dinner is a rapid-fire comedy that demands constant attention from the audience. The three-act play was written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart in 1939, and reflects the screwball comedy genre popular at the time. “The dialogue style of their comic pieces was … [Read more...]
Sundays: The sign of the Stone
By Myles Ludwig I happened to be thinking about semiotics this week — what signs mean, stand for, whether they’re iconic or indexical or just plain cigars — when the new Rolling Stone magazine cover slams into the bandwidth with the angry splat of a Siberian meteor. This must be some kind of cosmic synchronicity, I thought. Here I am trying to get my mind around a rather … [Read more...]