The Sonoran Desert in Arizona is a very impressive place. Imagine seeing it for the very first time if you grew up on a dairy farm in rural Vermont. How would you react? Moses Pendleton — who did — was so impressed that he created his own version of it to put on the stage. Although he is not really known as a choreographer, he created his first incarnation of Opus Cactus as … [Read more...]
Archives for March 2017
Broward Stage Door brings back magic of Danny Kaye
By Dale King With a bit more than a week left in its run, the biographical comedy/musical, The Kid from Brooklyn: The Danny Kaye Story, is still drawing bounteous audiences to the Broward Stage Door Theatre in Margate. Director and co-writer Peter Loewy premiered the tale of the multi-talented, red-haired, singer, actor, comedian and philanthropist at the West Sample Road … [Read more...]
Concertos by Mozart, Diamond make Symphonia concert special
Every musical season in South Florida brings with it a plenitude of concerti featuring the violin, the piano, and the cello, with an occasional clarinet or flute doing the honors. But it’s rare to hear a concerto for the horn, and so it was especially welcome Sunday to hear the next-to-last concert of the season by the Symphonia Boca Raton, which featured the well-known … [Read more...]
‘Zookeeper’s Wife’: Heroism amid the animals in uniforms
World War II movies never went away, but they’re especially en vogue now. This young year has already welcomed at least three on the art-house circuit — Land of Mine, Fanny’s Journey, Alone in Berlin — while 2016 saw its share of Oscar successes (Hacksaw Ridge), blockbuster failures (Allied) and projects in between (Anthropoid), to say nothing of the masterly, divisive 2015 … [Read more...]
Fierce reading of Rose drives strong ‘Gypsy’ at Maltz
As imported ringers go, Vicki Lewis continues to be a welcome visitor to the Maltz Jupiter Theatre. The 5-foot-1 “bundle of dynamite” – to borrow a phrase from her current triumph in Gypsy – has won over audiences here in such unlikely roles as the pushy title matchmaker in Hello, Dolly! and comic villainess Miss Hannigan in Annie. But neither performance quite prepared us … [Read more...]
Salvatore Meo: Finding poetry in the everyday and the every thing
One will never find Salvatore Meo’s name listed among the leading artists of any art movement and yet, his body of work looks very familiar. That’s because it consists of everyday objects commonly found flattened on the streets. Having exhibited along Roberto Matta, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, the Philadelphia native born in 1914 to Italian immigrants surely must have … [Read more...]
PB Opera’s Liederabend a fine showcase for standout young singers
If you’re looking for the next Marilyn Horne, Luciano Pavarotti or Herman Prey, look no further than the Young Artists of Palm Beach Opera. I heard eight of them sing last March 16 in the lovely Royal Poinciana Chapel meeting room on Palm Beach, in which every seat had been sold. This was the opera troupe’s fifth annual Liederabend — German for “evening of song” — an … [Read more...]
Stoppard’s ‘Arcadia’ may be Dramaworks’s biggest challenge
Palm Beach Dramaworks audiences have had to grapple with the weighty plays of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee and such absurdists as Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. But with its first foray into the canon of Great Britain’s Tom Stoppard, producing his Olivier Award-winning Arcadia, as dense with ideas as it is with wordplay, the company may be serving up its most … [Read more...]
New-look ‘Phantom’ a mixed bag, but singing is splendid
Having created the most successful entertainment in history, pulling in an estimated $5.6 billion, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and his producer Cameron Mackintosh can afford a new redesigned and refreshed take on Phantom of the Opera, taking advantage of the advances in technology since the quasi-operatic musical opened on Broadway 29 years ago. Whether you are an … [Read more...]
Bennett Group plays impressive concert of jazz crossover
With brick-and-mortar retail music stores having mostly fallen by the wayside in our current, internet-driven musical reality, genres and stylistic labels have become less important for categorization — and the New York City-based Daniel Bennett Group is taking full advantage, with its namesake, multi-wind-instrumental leader having realized long ago that such tags weren’t all … [Read more...]