For those with a low tolerance for delayed gratification, be forewarned. Hot Shoe Shuffle, the tap dance musical from Australia now being revived by Boca Raton’s Wick Theatre, does eventually heat up, but it takes until the second act for its temperature to rise. That slow combustion is really built into the show’s storyline. You see, it concerns the seven performing … [Read more...]
Archives for October 2019
Area arts organizations breathe easier as state ups cultural funding
By Christina Wood When Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the state budget earlier this year, nonprofit arts and cultural organizations across Florida breathed a sigh of relief. Making sure the arts receive their fair share of the pie is always an uphill battle. The moneys provided in the budget for fiscal year 2019-2020 weren’t particularly generous, but it was a big improvement … [Read more...]
The well-mannered beauty of ‘Expanding Horizons,’ at Ann Norton
In case you have not heard, photography is done cloning pieces of reality. It signed a clause reading until atrocity, cruelty and ugliness do us part and they have all arrived. This breach of contract has rendered the camera free to roam and invent an alternative universe. More specifically, to birth the works on view at Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens. Aside from its … [Read more...]
‘Pain and Glory’: Almodóvar’s marvelous memory film
“In the cinema of my childhood, it always smells of piss … and of jasmine, and of summer breezes.” It’s a line so good it appears twice — or is it three times? — in Pedro Almodóvar’s tender new memory film, Pain and Glory. Tactile in its descriptiveness, and elegant in its poetic juxtaposition — in the lovely ellipsis separating the pungent and the perfumed — it struck me … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2019-20: In Broward, art venues explore the lighthearted
By Sandra Schulman The art season in Broward County looks to be heavy with lighthearted art, from the big name laden Happy! show at NSU to the merry visual mischief of Mr. Brainwash. Artist studios get the artists point of view treatment at Art and Culture Center, while Fort Lauderdale’s ArtServe celebrates 30 years. NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale Get your upside on … [Read more...]
‘Hot Shoe Shuffle’ promises tap razzle-dazzle at The Wick
A tap-happy musical romp, Hot Shoe Shuffle, was a big hit in its native Australia in the early ’90s, and then went on to similar acclaim in London’s West End. Although next aimed for Broadway, the show never made it to New York, but decades later the revived show arrives this weekend at the Wick Theatre in Boca Raton. Managing executive producer Marilynn Wick went … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2019-20: Pop scene moving away from familiar faces
Unlike most previous years, the expected familiar faces aren’t dotting the 2019-2020 South Florida pop concert season landscape. One’s impressions of the results depend on whether they see that situation as glass half-full or half-empty. Elvis Costello and Sting make rare appearances only days apart; soul icons the Isley Brothers stop in 65 years after the group’s formation, … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2019-20: Birthday boy Beethoven will be a big presence in 2019-20 season
The shade of Ludwig van Beethoven looms large over this season, as he will the next, because the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth falls in 2020. No fewer than five performances of the Ninth Symphony are coming our way this season, but there’s also plenty of the master’s chamber music to be had this time around, too (including several readings of his late string … [Read more...]
Community theater: Delray Playhouse’s ‘Calendar Girls’ uncovers a heart of sweetness
By Dale King Here’s the skinny on Calendar Girls, the sexy, comic stage production with a tender and heartwarming backstory that opens the 2019-2020 season at Delray Beach Playhouse. The more mature may think the show has something to do with singer Neil Sedaka, who had a hit song of a similar name around 1959. No, in truth, Calendar Girls is based on actual events that … [Read more...]
Director keeps ‘Lucy in the Sky’ grounded in freak-show territory
Eleven years after seeing The Hurt Locker for the first and only time, the scene that’s most ingrained in my memory has nothing to do with IEDs in a godforsaken desert. It’s Jeremy Renner back home, lost in the supermarket, stymied by a wall of cereal. Describing a kind of domestic impotence, it remains the quintessential poetic image of war’s addictive pull. The battlefield … [Read more...]