Mondays are even harder to find a show to see than Sunday nights. In fact, with most of the city’s museums closed, it was shaping up as a day without art. Until... After breakfast, I was walking the streets around Times Square when I spied a poster for the Discovery Museum and “the world's largest display of Lego art.” It seems there is a guy named Nathan Sawaya, a lapsed … [Read more...]
Archives for April 2014
Postcard From Broadway No. 3: A little Easter, and ‘Heathers’
“Does anyone still wear a hat?” asked Elaine Stritch derisively in her legendary performance in 1970’s Company. I can now categorically answer “Yes,” having spent some time on Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday, when the swells and swell-wannabes strolled the street, open only to pedestrians for much of the day. But my chapeau-spying was brief, for my wife and I — both certified … [Read more...]
Sundays: The medium is the memory hole
By Myles Ludwig I was busy searching for the plane this week. I looked in the clouds of Google and Microsoft, but they were obscured by bad weather and massive hacker attacks. Nearly lost my identity. I sifted through the wreckage of the Washington state mudslide, pushed aside the giant snowballs of the Mt. Everest avalanche hoping for a sign, and stalked the rubble of the … [Read more...]
Postcard From Broadway No. 2: ‘Act One’ and ‘A Gentleman’s Guide’
A few days before I arrived in New York, it snowed here, as most residents are eager to point out, as they enjoyed today's bright, sunny, 65-degree spring day. I naturally celebrated the great weather by burrowing indoors to take in two shows. In the afternoon, it was Act One, James Lapine's epic adaptation of writer-director Moss Hart's 1959 autobiography of escape from the … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway No. 1: Eight days, 12 shows, and 42 degrees
I’m up in New York, where the temperature when my plane landed was a brisk 42 degrees, up considerably from the previous few days. Good thing I brought my winter coat. Over the next eight days, I'll be seeing 12 shows. That means I’ll be in the theater whenever there is a performance, including a rare Tuesday matinee of that perennial favorite, the Easter Bonnet Competition. … [Read more...]
‘Gabrielle’ a touching coming-of-age story
I challenge you to find even one false note in director Louise Archambault’s Gabrielle, a sweet but unsentimental drama selected by Canada as its entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the recent Oscars. Authenticity is paramount, and the film feels like a documentary most of the time. It’s a fictionalized account of a real-life choir group of developmentally disabled singers, … [Read more...]
‘The Trouble With Doug’: Musical reimagines Kafka, with whimsy
Nearly eight years ago, a couple of NYU musical theater students began working on a show that was loosely inspired by Franz Kafka’s nihilist social satire, Metamorphosis. In development at theaters from New York to Palo Alto to London ever since, The Trouble With Doug begins performances this evening at the Theatre at Arts Garage in Delray Beach. It has been a long road for … [Read more...]
Pompano’s Bailey Contemporary Arts offers first look
In its cultural arts master plan, the Pompano Beach Community Redevelopment Authority (CRA) writes: “Something wonderful is about to happen.” The something they had in mind – a cultural arts district and destination in a formerly underused area of east Atlantic Avenue — kicked off its soft opening tonight with ArtHall, a monthly art exhibit, and a street party with live music … [Read more...]
Les Amies trio splendid at Chamber Music Palm Beach
By Donald Waxman The setting: Mar-a-Lago, the storied, palatial Palm Beach estate of the late Marjorie Merriweather Post, extensively renovated by its current owner, Donald Trump. The occasion: the sixth concert in the inaugural season of the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach. The artists: The highly acclaimed flute, viola and harp trio, Les Amies. The program: an all-French … [Read more...]
‘Le Week-End’: Nick and Meg aux enfers
Le Week-End, the scabrous new dramedy from Notting Hill’s Roger Michell, is sort of like a feature-length extrapolation of the Morrissey song “Everyday Is Like Sunday,” to which a Brit like Michell is undoubtedly familiar. In the sadcore hit from 1988, Moz is on a beachside holiday, but he’s miserable, of course — praying for Armageddon to decimate the coastal town where “every … [Read more...]