Plenty of jazz artists make return trips to South Florida for the 2016-2017 season, although many haven’t performed here in recent memory. Yet what stands out most, as long as concert-goers are patient enough to wait until early 2017, are some intriguing pairings of artists. Those include Gonzalo Rubalcaba playing with influential fellow pianist Chick Corea; vocalist Kurt … [Read more...]
Archives for September 2016
2016-17 Season Preview: Pop music
There are, as usual, plenty of 2016-2017 pop highlights under the all-encompassing musical blanket that the sub-genre term provides, with many featuring time-honored artists in genres from classic rock and folk to R&B and country. What’s pleasantly surprising for this season is how many of the standouts among them are female artists, and what a wide swath they cover across … [Read more...]
‘Queen of Katwe’ captures underdog story beautifully
Chess in movies is never just about chess. It’s about geopolitics, as in Pawn Sacrifice, or self-actualization, as in Queen to Play, or the tribulations of coming of age, as in Searching for Bobby Fischer. And in the greatest of all chess films, The Seventh Seal, it’s literally a matter of life and death. For a game so pensive, cerebral and seemingly un-cinematic, it’s … [Read more...]
‘Not In My Town’: New opera makes a strong impact
In a politically unsettled time, it’s helpful to have artworks that take on the issues of the day and give us something to think about. Not In My Town, a new opera by Wilton Manors-based composer Michael W. Ross, is nothing if not politically engaged. The story of the 1998 torture-killing of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, was part of the impetus for a … [Read more...]
Shepard hate-crime opera set for world premiere
When a selection of scenes from South Florida composer Michael W. Ross’s new opera, Not In My Town, were performed in June at Fort Lauderdale’s Sunshine Cathedral, it came only days after the massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Since the subject of the opera is the 1998 murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, it was an almost-instantaneous … [Read more...]
Act of the money God: ‘Deepwater Horizon’ hymns greed’s victims
It was only six years ago that the BP-contracted Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. But it feels like a lifetime of news cycles has pushed the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history into the depths of our collective memory bank. Try and conjure the images associated with the spring and summer of 2010: The pelican soaked in mud. The oil gushing … [Read more...]
Director pulls Jerry Lewis out of retirement for tender ‘Max Rose’
When director-screenwriter Daniel Noah began planning a film about his beloved grandfather, a jazz musician-composer-arranger, only one name came to mind to play him – Jerry Lewis. But Lewis – then in his early 80s, now 90 – had not made a film in years and considered himself retired. “There was no protocol for submitting a script to him. He didn’t have an agent,” says Noah … [Read more...]
Appreciation: Edward Albee (1928-2016)
Edward Albee’s Broadway debut in 1962, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is one of a handful of great plays of the 20th century. And while he would have a career that spanned more than a half century, until his death at 88 on Friday, including Pulitzer Prizes for A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women, he was always perplexed by theatergoers who yearned for him to … [Read more...]
Fine cast shines in ‘The Rothschilds’ at Broward Stage Door
By Dale King The Broward Stage Door Theatre is back in full production mode about a month before most other performing arts venues have raised their opening night curtains. The 22-year-old arts center in Margate is still riding the crest of its successful summer production of the jukebox musical, The Soul of Motor City, which is scheduled to conclude its lengthy run on … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Sept. 16-18
Theater: Many a musical has made fun of the process of making musicals. Think The Producers or Something Rotten! Now, from off-Broadway in 2007 comes the improbable Gutenberg! The Musical!, a two-man spoof of a pair of over-zealous, but alas untalented, musical theater writers. Yes, they have written a show about the inventor of the printing press and movable type, which, let’s … [Read more...]