By Dale King If you need a lightly comic play with a whimsical plot and likeable characters, you can usually find one among the dozens of shows crafted by Neil Simon. Delray Beach Playhouse has plucked Last of the Red Hot Lovers to open its 67th season. The play, which premiered in 1969 and was made into a movie three years later, hearkens back to the sexual revolution of the … [Read more...]
Archives for October 2013
The View From Home 53: High school vérité, a horror classic and Bergman & Bergman
The We and the I: The We and the I (Virgil Films, $16.22) is another masterpiece from Michel Gondry, and it’s a film that goes a long way toward rendering irrelevant the distinction between fiction and documentary. Mostly putting his fevered visual imagination on the back burner, Gondry takes a vérité approach in this study of Bronx high schoolers on a real-time bus ride … [Read more...]
2013-14 arts preview: The season in Palm Beach County art
The new art season in Palm Beach County will deliver some surprises as well as “safety objects.” There are some firsts (see Norton’s pick for its RAW series) and there is the repetitious (the influence of Warhol, the legacy of Flagler), but I have to believe even these announcements are good news, for a museum never brings back shows that act as audience repellents. Let us … [Read more...]
Sundays: The sound and the fury
By Myles Ludwig Ladies and gentlemen, the government has left the building. Thank you and good night. It’s times like these that make us glad to see a punky Miley Cyrus embarrass herself on the VMA, then make an amusing, self-conscious effort to redeem herself on SNL by slutting up Michele Bachmann, wearing an ironic throwback jersey and a lacy transparent hoodie jumpsuit … [Read more...]
2013-14 arts preview: The season in opera
The two 200th-birthday boys of 2013, Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, have been staples of the world’s opera houses since middle of the 19th century, and nothing’s changed today. Each of the three area opera companies will feature work by Verdi in the 2013-14 season, and one of them will offer Wagner: Sarasota Opera is mounting The Flying Dutchman. Florida Grand Opera, under … [Read more...]
Gallery Crawl No. 1: Exhibits showcase county’s contemporary bent
New work by heavyweight pop artist Robert Indiana can be seen at Rosenbaum Contemporary in Boca Raton. The octogenarian is the father of the iconic LOVE image, which he created initially as a sculpture in 1966, and has appeared around the world in various high- and low-brow incarnations. Now, he brings us a show entirely focused on another essential word: HOPE. “It’s like the … [Read more...]
Broward Stage Door cast does well with disturbing ‘Twilight of the Golds’
By Dale King The morality drama The Twilight of the Golds asks a question that some might not want to answer: If parents knew their child would be born gay, would they allow the birth or choose abortion? Broward Stage Door Theatre in Coral Springs takes a bold step by opening the 2013-14 season for Theatre II with this taut and tense tragicomedy, which demands responses to … [Read more...]
2013-14 arts preview: The season in classical music
The 2013-14 classical season offers its usual overstuffed bounty for South Floridians, and this time there is a continuation of the new energy and innovation we saw last season, with a good deal of stress on new composition, orchestras widening their reach, and some of the leading performers of the newest generation making their area debuts. Here is a look, by genre, at the … [Read more...]
The troubled vintage of fathers and sons
It cannot be a spoiler to say that Paul de Marseul (Niels Arestrup), the hulking and obstreperous central figure in You Will Be My Son, dies. It’s not a spoiler because the very first scene is Paul’s casket sliding, with graceful elegance, toward its incineration in a crematorium. Paul’s milquetoast son Martin (Lorant Deutsch) watches with disbelief, his face a harsh map of … [Read more...]
All-animated ‘virtual opera’ to premiere in Lake Worth
If getting an established opera off the production ground is difficult and enormously expensive, it’s even tougher when the work is brand-new. So what’s the aspiring Wagner of today to do? One answer, as Sabrina Peña Young will tell you, is to choose the early 21st-century default option and go online — to be Wagner 2.0, if you like. Peña Young, a bubbly, intensely energetic … [Read more...]