Having compiled my ten favorite films of 2015 — and therefore, by subjective definition, the best of the year — I realized a decided bias towards films about writers, writing and filmmaking. My number one film centers on the investigative reporting team for The Boston Globe and, in addition, I have great affection for one about a prominent blacklisted screenwriter, an aged film … [Read more...]
Archives for December 2015
The year in review: The theater’s top 12
Several theater companies went out of business in 2015, while others moved to more comfortable digs, hoping their audiences would follow. Of those that stayed put, many pushed themselves by producing challenging works, particularly mega-musicals and powerful new dramas. There was too much quality happening to contain the year in 10 productions, so here instead (in my … [Read more...]
At Lafayette’s, rocker Henry Gross covers career, looks forward
Quick, name the youngest artist who performed on the main stage at Woodstock in 1969. No, it wasn’t Carlos Santana, Janis Joplin, Richie Havens, Sly Stone, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix, or any of the members of the Grateful Dead, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, or The Band. It was an 18-year-old singer/guitarist named Henry Gross, who performed with doo-wop vocal ensemble Sha Na Na. … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire, times two: “Messiah” and “The First Noël”
By Rex Hearn George Frideric Handel, looking down from heaven, gathered his Baroque composer friends and revealed to them the mystery of the angels on earth called Seraphic Fire. “St. Cecilia must have chosen each member of The Sebastians orchestra,’’ he said, “because they are so good. And young Patrick Dupré Quigley, their conductor, used 17 perfect singers, as did I back … [Read more...]
‘Concussion’ keeps the rough stuff at bay
One element is clearly missing from Peter Landesman’s Concussion: concussions. Landesman’s earnest biopic about the neuropathologist who diagnosed traumatic brain injuries in NFL players and fought an uphill climb to expose them is, like Friday Night Lights, a football movie that is critical of football. But by never taking its cameras onto the gridiron and aurally pummeling … [Read more...]
Anderson and Roe make marvelous return to Palm Beach
I’m lucky enough to have heard three sets of piano duos in person in my lifetime: Cyril Smith and Phyllis Sellick in England; Arthur Whittemore and Jack Warren Lowe at a private concert given in honor of Alistair Cooke; and David Bradshaw and Cosmo Buono, who took Europe by storm in the 1980s with a little advice from yours truly. The young duo of Elizabeth Joy Roe and Greg … [Read more...]
‘Youth’: It may not mean much, but it’s beautiful to look at
There is virtually no story in Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, and it hardly matters. Cinematic visions this grandiose and immaculately composed don’t come but once a year, and Sorrentino is usually the one to deliver them. Sorrentino established his legacy as the heir to sumptuous late-period Fellini with the 2013 Oscar winner The Great Beauty. That movie’s depiction of wealthy … [Read more...]
First-rate cast makes Dramaworks’s ‘History Boys’ one for the books
England’s Alan Bennett first came to prominence in the early ’60s, as one of the four collegiate satirists who wrote and performed an evening of sketch comedy called Beyond the Fringe. It was fairly cerebral as revues go, but it did not suggest the major playwright Bennett would become, penning such thought-provoking, yet still entertaining scripts as The History Boys, on the … [Read more...]
Tarantino’s ‘Hateful Eight’ takes us to a familiar gory place
Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight begins with a lengthy overture. We know this because the word “Overture” fills the screen in black 1950s-movie typeface, over a mountain landscape tinted the gaudy red of an Italian giallo. The film is then divided into six chapters, each functioning like a movement in a composition, and a 12-minute intermission divides the experience … [Read more...]
Fine new voices make mark at PB Opera’s waterfront opener
The third free opera concert at the waterfront given by Palm Beach Opera was an artistic success. But who were the artists? Getting off to a good start with the national anthem and Bernstein’s Candide overture, conductor Greg Ritchey then introduced the wonderful Metropolitan Opera baritone Michael Chioldi and the next singer, Robert Watson, but forgot to name the other … [Read more...]