By Dale King Delray Beach Playhouse drops the curtain on its 2018-2019 theatrical season with the comedy God of Carnage, a 90-minute one-act that has entertained audiences around the world and received both the Tony Award and London’s Olivier Award as Best Play of the Year. The performance slowly but steadily morphs from a sophisticated discussion between two upwardly … [Read more...]
Archives for May 2019
Schwarz named director of Palm Beach Symphony; Spady Museum gets NEA grant
PALM BEACH — Gerard Schwarz, who led the Seattle Symphony to national prominence in his 26 years with the orchestra, has been named artistic and music director of the Palm Beach Symphony. Schwarz takes over from Spanish conductor Ramón Tebar, who has led the orchestra since 2009. This is the second South Florida appointment for Schwarz, who earlier this year was appointed to … [Read more...]
Comics-influenced art at Boca Museum more about bold heart than bright colors
To widen perceptions of comics and contemporary art has a cost. A new exhibition inspired by superheroes takes the masks off and throws lightweight topics out the window in favor of troubling themes. Among the first facts that becomes blatantly obvious upon entering Beyond the Cape! Comics and Contemporary Art is that this is not a show for kids. Happy ends go rogue. Flat … [Read more...]
‘Non-Fiction’: What we talk (and talk and talk) about
When is there too much of a good thing? This question looms over Olivier Assayas’s exhaustively intelligent Non-Fiction, a zeitgeist-targeted ensemble comedy stuffed with so many statements about the Way We Live Now that we can hardly be expected to process them all. Assayas’ script is like a torrent of Snapchat missives that disappear into the nether, to be replaced by the … [Read more...]
FGO ends season with beautifully sung, handsome ‘Werther’
Florida Grand Opera closed its 78th season on May 11 with a beautifully sung, attractively presented mounting of Jules Massenet’s Werther, which many scholars of French opera consider to be the composer’s masterpiece. The opera, based on Goethe’s breakthrough novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, tells the story of a young poet who falls desperately in love with a woman he … [Read more...]
Lead actors keep madness of ‘Blue Leaves’ in canny check at Dramaworks
By Dale King The House of Blue Leaves, the darkly seriocomic John Guare play, is appropriately apt as the finale for Palm Beach Dramaworks’ 19th season. The show that packed the West Palm Beach venue on opening weekend homes in on characters who desperately want their hopes and dreams to work. But a realistic assessment says they probably won’t happen. The Obie … [Read more...]
‘Journey to a Mother’s Room’: Masterful character study illumines quiet lives
The Spanish import Journey to a Mother’s Room opens on a two-shot that wordlessly crystallizes the relationship between its characters. The mom of the title, Estrella (Lola Dueñas), is asleep on her sofa next to her slumbering daughter, Leonor (Anna Castillo), a young woman of indeterminate age but who is certainly too old to share a makeshift bed with her mother. They’re even … [Read more...]
Dramaworks sees profundity in dark comedy of ‘Blue Leaves’
Palm Beach Dramaworks is closing out its 18th season uncharacteristically with a comedy – John Guare’s 1971 dark farce, The House of Blue Leaves. But director J. Barry Lewis insists it is not a departure for the company. “I believe that drama is comedy and comedy is drama. I think that they are one and the same,” he says prior to a recent rehearsal. “Comedy is an … [Read more...]
Garbage brings out the sun during a soggy SunFest Sunday
By Hali Neal There was a brief two-hour window on a rainy Sunday where it actually looked like SunFest was going to live up to its name. That window was when the Wisconsin rockers by the name of Garbage took the stage. Scottish lead singer Shirley Manson strutted up and down the stage in a white kimono/dress, hot pink hair pulled into a bun as she nailed every note on … [Read more...]
‘Charlie Says’: Yesterday’s, and today’s, American psycho
As Charles Manson well understood, the flipside of the revolutionary liberation movements of the Sixties is authoritarian control; the obverse of communism, fascism. Or, as Orwell phrased it so succinctly some two decades prior, freedom is slavery. The two-faced duality of this charismatic psychopath is at the heart of Mary Harron’s Charlie Says, a slow-burning, rewarding … [Read more...]