It’s a commonplace of Verdi scholarship that the composer’s “big three” operas of the early 1850s – Il Trovatore, Rigoletto and La Traviata – were game-changers for him in that they announced a consistent mature style in addition to introducing tunes so catchy they hold their popularity today. All of which is true, but it takes an especially sensitive and musical performance … [Read more...]
Archives for January 2019
Kips Bay house in West Palm shows designers at their best
For the second year in a row, the high-profile Kips Bay Decorator Show House, a design showcase staple in New York City since 1973, comes south to Palm Beach bringing with it cutting-edge design trends, high-end and high-tech fixtures, original artwork and antiques. The Show House, which opened Saturday and runs through Feb. 20, offers an opportunity for interior design … [Read more...]
Hard-to-classify ‘Image Book’ a rigorous challenge from Godard
Just a few weeks ago on this site, I reviewed Guy Maddin’s ludic film-history pastiche The Green Fog. In it, I referenced one of the movie’s more rigorous forbears: Histoire(s) du Cinema, Jean-Luc Godard’s eight-part philosophical treatise, completed over a 10-year period and collaged entirely from upcycled images. This must be a boomtime for film essays composed of … [Read more...]
Zoetic serves up fine, compelling ‘Curious Incident’
For a work brimming with pure theatricality, few plays can top The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the tale of an autistic teenage boy’s struggle to make sense of the world around him. Following critical and popular successes in London and on Broadway, the play is now available for stylistic reinterpretation by resident companies, which must have been catnip for … [Read more...]
Mozart’s ‘Figaro’ speaks to a time of #MeToo
By Robert Croan Operagoers may think of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro as a quaint and old- fashioned, lighthearted comedy. That’s wrong, as audiences will learn when they attend Florida Grand Opera’s revival of the work, which opened at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center on Saturday. When Mozart composed his opera in 1786, the play that was its basis was considered so … [Read more...]
Superb singing, direction make South Florida SO’s ‘Porgy’ a triumph
By Robert Croan It’s an admirable and ambitious undertaking for a regional orchestra to put on a staged production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. It’s also expensive ($350,000 budget in this case) and risky. South Florida Symphony took those risks, went all the way and offered Porgy and Bess as its featured production this season, with performances – led by music director … [Read more...]
Plenty of energy, middling payoff at MCB’s Program Two
Though there were some kernels of wonderfulness in the Jan. 19 presentation of Miami City Ballet’s Program Two at the Kravis Center, the overall takeaway was that this program was not up to par with past shows. Presenting two works instead of the usual three or four, the program had some clear flaws. Dances at a Gathering, which opened the performance, was a pastel mosaic … [Read more...]
‘Cold War’ a bleak, brilliant torch song of addictive love
Cold War is one of those black-and-white films that you cannot imagine in color, so austere is the world the characters inhabit. It begins in the Polish countryside in 1949, a desolate landscape of postwar rubble. But even when the setting changes years later, to a go-go Paris of jazz clubs, lavish soirées and bartop dancing, the stark photography still seems appropriate. … [Read more...]
Big box office winners also dominate Oscar nominations
After a year when the Motion Picture Academy scrubbed its bad idea to create an Oscar category for Most Popular Picture, some of the highest-grossing films were nominated for the top statuette of 2019. Black Panther became the first superhero movie to earn a Best Picture nomination, poised to compete against two other mainstream popular high box office films – Bohemian … [Read more...]
Maloney sensational as Fanny Brice in Wick’s ‘Funny Girl’
Barbra who? For more than half a century, theater companies have shied away from producing Funny Girl, the biographical musical of Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice, in part because whoever plays the leading role would be subjected to comparisons with Ms. Streisand. Apparently Boca Raton’s Wick Theatre was unfazed by that hurdle and, boy, have they found an … [Read more...]