Film: Pass on the apocalyptic nonsense of San Andreas and head instead to a muted French film, In the Name of My Daughter, about a triangular tug-of-war in Nice. Catherine Deneuve plays the manager and part owner of a tony casino, Guillaume Canet is her lawyer and business advisor Maurice and Adèle Haenel is Agnes, her daughter, who returns home from Africa, fresh from a … [Read more...]
Archives for May 2015
Broadway reviews, continued: ‘Finding Neverland,’ ‘It Shoulda Been You,’ ‘Wolf Hall’
With the same umbrage that it greeted the arrival of the Disney machine two decades ago, the theater community has turned a cold shoulder to Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who has muscled his way onto Broadway with Finding Neverland, a musical adaptation of his 2004 film. The show received absolutely no Tony nominations, but audiences are flocking anyway to this mawkish … [Read more...]
Uneven ‘Aloha’ launches into familiar rom-com sky
In the romantic comedies of Cameron Crowe, and perhaps only in the romantic comedies of Cameron Crowe, the most beautiful people you’ve ever seen are also the most hopeless, loveless and clueless. They are wayward neurotics who nonetheless possess perfect bodies, ineffable charm and a writerly wit. His films are set in a world we recognize, but the glamorous screw-ups that … [Read more...]
Danielpour’s new quartet outlines search for inner divinity
In 1995, the composer Richard Danielpour marked the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps in a string quartet he subtitled Psalms of Sorrow. That quartet, his third, featured a baritone singing texts from Stephen Mitchell’s translation of some of the Psalms. Last year, Danielpour returned to the string quartet for a seventh essay in that form, and also … [Read more...]
Theater reviews: ‘Lady Day,’ ‘Dames at Sea’
' With many a stage biography of a show business legend, there is the rise to stardom from humble roots and then the frequently inevitable descent in the second half of his or her life. Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, an intermissionless biographical nightclub act of the great jazz singer-songwriter Billie Holiday – born Eleanora Fagan – is almost entirely descent. The … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 23-24
Film: For those obsessing over growing old, Swedish director Felix Herngren serves up a puckish comedy, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, starring a renowned comic actor from his country, Robert Gustafsson, as a man who makes his escape from his nursing home just as he approaches his century mark. He does indeed slip out a window and relives his … [Read more...]
Godden, Fredmann works to be featured on Harid spring show
In a room on the Harid Conservatory campus off Potomac Road in western Boca Raton, aspirant young professional dancers were working late last week to bring a contemporary ballet to life. As faculty members Victoria Schneider and Meelis Pakri, music coordinator Michael Lazzaro and the dance school’s director, Gordon Wright, watched intently, the Harid students ran though the … [Read more...]
The Broadway season, reviewed (Part 2): ‘On the 20th Century,’ ‘Hand to God’
Between her as yet unsuccessful attempts to get a foothold in the movies or on television, Kristin Chenoweth keeps returning to Broadway, and the theater is richer for it. This season, she has jumped headlong into a role she was born to play, movie star Lily Garland in a snazzy revival of 1978’s On the Twentieth Century, a screwball showbiz comedy adapted into an over-the-top … [Read more...]
The Broadway season, reviewed: ‘Curious Incident,’ ‘Fun Home,’ ‘Something Rotten,’ ‘The Audience’
In the same way that the children’s book War Horse could never be harnessed onstage, Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — the story of an autistic boy’s struggles and eventual triumph over the challenges of everyday life — would seem an unlikely choice for theatrical adaptation. The two plays are not haphazardly compared, for both were … [Read more...]