So many shows that initially are shocking soon lose that ability to startle and outrage us. Fortunately, six-and-a-half years after it first conquered Broadway, The Book of Mormon still feels as blasphemous and funny as it ever did. Now on its second visit to the Kravis Center through Sunday, the scabrous send-up of the loopy contemporary religion is well represented … [Read more...]
Archives for November 2017
Stage Door unloads a powerhouse ‘Dreamgirls’
Broward Stage Door is rapidly becoming a theater company to reckon with. Over the years, its resources and artistic output have been nothing if not erratic, but the Coral Springs troupe keeps setting the bar higher, announcing its intention to do complex shows that seem way over its head and then flooring us with its achievement. Earlier this year, it mounted a miraculous … [Read more...]
‘BPM’ paints tough, unsentimental picture of AIDS crisis in 1990s
In this renewed era of protest — by women, by scientists, by environmentalists, by antifascists, by Black Lives Matter — BPM revisits one beleaguered minority whose redress of grievances took the form of guerilla actions and bracing street theater. Writer-director Robin Campillo and co-screenwriter Philippe Mangeot drew on their own experiences with the activist AIDS … [Read more...]
Outré’s ‘American Idiot’ disappoints despite strong cast
By Dale King Outré Theater Company’s production of American Idiot, a rock opera spun from an album written and recorded by the rock group Green Day, has a lot of potential. The production, which closes with a matinee Sunday at Outré’s new home in the Pompano Beach Cultural Center, features a dozen actors with first-rate credentials and admirable voices. The show has a … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 18-19
Dance: Miami City Ballet opens its first show of the season this weekend at the Kravis Center with his triptych, Jewels. Divided into Emeralds, Rubies and Diamonds, and set to the music of Fauré, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky, this three-act ballet evokes French Romanticism, 20th-century modernism and Imperial Russia. While MCB has branched out considerably in its past few years, … [Read more...]
Gogol it: FAU’s ‘Government Inspector’ shows good satire never really dates
By Dale King Student actors in Florida Atlantic University’s Department of Theatre and Dance have finally been loosed from a hurricane-prompted delay that postponed the opening of their 2017-2018 season from October to the period just before Thanksgiving. As a result, the political satire, The Government Inspector, written by Nikolai Gogol in the mid-1830s and adapted … [Read more...]
‘Last Flag Flying’: Grief and hope, down to the last detail
As Mark Twain reputedly said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. I thought about this aphorism more than once during Last Flag Flying, Richard Linklater’s alternately amusing and somber heartstring-tugger about the victims of America’s misbegotten wars. Iraq was hardly a repeat of Vietnam, but it rhymed with bitter lucidity: two bloody occupations of nations … [Read more...]
Cultural Council CEO Blades stepping down
LAKE WORTH — Rena Blades, president and CEO of the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County for the past 13 years, will step down from her post, effective Jan. 15, the council said today. Upon Blades’ departure, Kathleen Alex, the council’s interim director, will oversee the agency’s grants, manage the cultural tourism programs under the Tourist Development Council, manage … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire triumphs in challenging look at American hymnody
In its decade and a half of concertizing in South Florida, Seraphic Fire has occasionally featured concerts drawing on the music of the American church, usually that arising from the Protestant and African-American traditions of the 19th century. In its second concert of the season, the Miami choir again turned to American hymnody, but in the program assembled by guest … [Read more...]
Fine singing triumphs over spare production at FGO’s ‘Lucia’
Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor has returned to Florida Grand Opera for the third time in a dozen years, opening the Miami company’s 77th season with a visually stripped-down but well-sung production of this 1835 bel canto favorite. The production itself, which has no built set, comes from Houston Grand Opera and was designed by Britain’s Liz Ascroft to be sung in … [Read more...]