Theater: This weekend, the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine fairy tale mash-up, Into the Woods, joins a stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, in repertory at Boca Raton’s Florida Atlantic University for its 2017 Festival Rep, the 20th annual showcase of the drama department’s graduate student pool. Bruce Linser, a local Sondheim maven, directs the sophisticated … [Read more...]
Archives for June 2017
Miami Music Festival’s fourth season includes Heggie opera, orchestral bash for Fourth
Starting tonight, the Miami Music Festival begins presenting productions from its Opera Institute, opening with Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. The opera repeats Saturday and alternates Friday night and Sunday afternoon with Leos Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen. Both operas will be presented at the festival’s home base at Barry University in Miami Shores, but … [Read more...]
Entr’acte’s energetic troupe ideal for ‘Putnam County Spelling Bee’
By Dale King The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a send-up of those silly, nerve-wracking, angst-producing, word competitions that caused us no end of anxiety in our youth. The production now playing at the newly opened PGA Arts Center in Palm Beach Gardens provides an entertaining evening of fun, songs and smartly written parody. The 2005 musical that went on … [Read more...]
Mainly Mozart closes with evocative, engaging ‘Jewish Bride’
For the past four years, the Mainly Mozart Festival in Coral Gables has ended its summer concerts of chamber music with a multimedia, multidisciplinary finale that includes video, guest artists and world premiere dances choreographed by a member of the Miami City Ballet. For as ambitious as that sounds, it’s a workable formula. Audiences show up in large numbers on a late … [Read more...]
Happily ever after? FAU’s ‘Into the Woods’ takes on the question
In the often lightweight genre of musicals, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim has tended towards the grim, in shows about a homicidal barber, presidential assassins and America’s opening and despoiling of Japan. Then there is his Grimm musical, Into the Woods, written with his Sunday in the Park with George collaborator James Lapine. Its first act, which interweaves several … [Read more...]
Appreciation: Michael Hall, South Florida theater pioneer
One of the true pioneers of South Florida professional theater has died. Michael Hall, 77, co-founder and artistic director of Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre company, died June 15 of complications from pancreatic cancer. With seed money from James R. Caldwell, founder of the Rubbermaid kitchen utensils company, Hall was encouraged to create a not-for-profit playhouse in … [Read more...]
Wick’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ delightful treat for summer
As managing executive producer Marilynn Wick readily concedes in her pre-show speech, she has purposely aimed her summer show, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, at youngsters and at developing an audience of tots. Then she has chosen well, with one of the Mouse Factory’s most popular animated features, transformed into the company’s first Broadway venture in 1994, a … [Read more...]
Eloquent Debussy stands out in pianist Salov’s recital
By Dennis D. Rooney A Ukrainian native now residing in Montréal, Québec, Serhiy Salov’s shoulder-length hair and all-black dress bore more than a casual resemblance to Franz Liszt. But that virtuoso pianist composer’s music was not on the program of Mozart and Debussy that Salov played at the Mainly Mozart Festival XXIV on June 11 at the Alhambra Ballroom in Coral Gables’s … [Read more...]
Filmmaker Nesher returns to Holocaust subject in ‘Past Life’
For nearly 40 years, Israeli filmmaker Avi Nesher has been making award-winning movies like his latest, Past Life, which opened in South Florida last week. The film, already acclaimed in Israel and at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, concerns two sisters – one a shy classical musician and the other an outgoing tabloid journalist – who delve into the mystery … [Read more...]
In ’47 Meters Down,’ an overzealous cage match with terror
When pretty white girls are marooned in Mexico, things rarely end well. At least that’s the impression you get from watching too much horror cinema or Nancy Grace. In an agonizing example of the former, Lisa (Mandy Moore) and her sister Kate (Claire Holt), the suffering couple at the center of 47 Meters Down, decide to spruce up their south-of-the-border getaway by cage-diving … [Read more...]