Film: Whether you played with Lego building blocks as a kid or were first introduced to them by the delightful animated Lego Movie last year, you are likely to enjoy A LEGO Brickumentary, the even more unlikely non-fiction film about the Danish-born creation that has grown into the second largest toy company in the world. Yes, it’s everything you always wanted to know about … [Read more...]
Archives for July 2015
PBCMF No. 4: Exquisite Debussy is a festival high point
After the ailing Claude Debussy finished his Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp in 1915, he wrote to a friend that the music reminded him of an “antique” Debussy, writing as he had done 20 years before in the Nocturnes. Not antique, perhaps, so much as distilled to its purest essence, as a performance of this work showed last weekend in the final concerts of the Palm Beach … [Read more...]
Symphony of the Americas joins Austrian orchestra for Summerfest
For nearly 25 years, the musicians of the Symphony of the Americas have presented Summerfest, a series of concerts and cultural exchanges that take the Fort Lauderdale-based group to other parts of the Americas as well as venues across the tri-county area and Treasure Coast. This summer, the group’s string section is joined by the Arpeggione Chamber Orchestra of Hohenems, … [Read more...]
Creatures and robots enliven summer at Morikami
If I told you the first hotel run solely by robots just opened and it features a dinosaur concierge, where in the world would you picture it? It counts if you mention anywhere in Japan — though, technically, it opened in Nagasaki. The Land of the Rising Sun is also proving to be the most machine-loving, with an invigorating robot culture and a robotic technology that is … [Read more...]
It’s a Sondheim summer at Delray Center, Kravis
South Florida can go for years without a production of songs by Stephen Sondheim, but this summer will see two back-to-back. First there was Palm Beach Dramaworks’ superb concert version of A Little Night Music and now MNM Productions gives us a reconceived Side by Side by Sondheim, the musical revue from 1977, directed by Bruce Linser with musical direction by the ubiquitous … [Read more...]
Philosophy trumps romance in ‘Irrational Man’
Paunchy and laconic, Joaquin Phoenix mumbles and mopes his way through the first half of Woody Allen’s Irrational Man, seeming to channel Morrissey from his first ragged moment onscreen as the self-flagellating miserablist Abe Lucas. Abe is a radical philosophy professor newly installed at a leafy Ivy League college, and he takes the world’s existential questions a bit too … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 25-26
Theater: J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is one of the best known, most enduring stories ever written. So much so that there are numerous adaptations — like Peter and the Starcatcher, Finding Neverland and the soon-to-be-released movie Pan — that draw on our collective awareness of the boy who never grew up. Tonight, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre presents Peter Pan Jr., a live stage … [Read more...]
PBCMF Concert 3: French flavors and a rare clarinet quintet
There is something about French musical culture that inclines it toward woodwinds — perhaps because of the sound of French language — and when it comes to the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, French music has played a powerful role in its 24 season of concerts. Two French rarities were featured Saturday night at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens during the … [Read more...]
MacGraw, O’Neal charm in ‘Love Letters’
Playwright A.R. Gurney has made a career chronicling the waning traditions of upper-class WASPS. First there was the formality of the dining room and, in 1989’s Love Letters, he wrote of a lifelong relationship as seen through the dying art of correspondence. He takes us back to a time — not that long ago — before e-mail or text messages, when people sat down, pen in hand, and … [Read more...]
‘Pixels’: The empty-headed summer blockbuster returns
From Furious 7, Mad Max: Fury Road and Avengers: Age of Ultron to Jurassic World, Spy and Ant-Man, this summer’s rollout of blockbusters has been, to the surprise of this critic at least, creatively robust. It’s about time an expensive, unsalvageable bomb landed on a thousand screens and returned the blockbuster to its comfortable place of intellectual hollowness and artistic … [Read more...]