Unlike the National Enquirer itself, you just can’t make this stuff up. There is actual videotape of Generoso Pope Jr., the media mogul who bought a New York sports/racing broadsheet called the Enquirer and transformed it into the most-read supermarket tabloid in history, arguing with a straight face that his publication is an antidote to the negativity of the mainstream … [Read more...]
Archives for November 2019
What lies beneath: At Flagler, women’s fashion confronts its foundation
What came first, the desire to show off a tiny waist or the corset that squeezed internal organs out of the way? A dynamic new exhibition exploring how women’s fashion has shaped American society, and vice versa, gives a Mobius-strip answer. How is that for a silhouette? The gallery walls of the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum are uncharacteristically colorful these days. They … [Read more...]
‘Fiddler’ still a miracle, as Sher’s version at Kravis shows
Fifty-five years ago, during what we now look back on as the golden age of Broadway, Sholem Aleichem’s folk tales of Tevye the dairy man and his five tradition-challenging daughters were adapted into the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Although considered commercially risky at the time, it went on to become one of the longest-running shows ever on Broadway, and a hit around the … [Read more...]
The power and the infamy: ‘Grace of God’ takes tough look at priest scandal
Sweeping yet intimate, and told with a classicist rigor, By the Grace of God isn’t just the most mature and elegant film from the international enfant terrible François Ozon. It’s also among the year’s most consequential and newsworthy movies, in which the recent events it dramatizes nip at the heels of history — and precedents — in the making. In France in 2016, the … [Read more...]
Norton’s Latin American show tries to reach out for diversity
Santeria reference? Check. Dual-language panels? Check. Diego Rivera? Check. A new art exhibition courts Latin America with good intentions and ends up feeling like a promising blind date. Romancing the unknown is a daunting undertaking, particularly when sensitivity is trending upward and the risk of offending is super high. By all accounts, The Body Says, I Am a Fiesta: … [Read more...]
Man-girl love story isn’t about perversion, author insists
By Sharon Geltner Timing is everything. In this #MeToo era, how does an author announce her book, The Best of Crimes, is about a man in love with a 13-year-old girl? With a spoiler on the cover. “This is … about a man who is faced with temptation but does not succumb.” Yet bloggers, who may not have read the entire book, are already disparaging it and chatting about … [Read more...]
Singer searches for man inside the myth of Don Giovanni
By Robert Croan Mozart’s Don Giovanni was special from the time of its premiere in Prague in 1787: a great drama told in great music, with the combination amounting to something more than either would be on its own. Balancing comic and tragic elements in equal proportions, Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte called the opera a dramma giocoso (playful drama), … [Read more...]
Maltz’s new ‘Dracula’ successfully Stokers the fires of silliness
To paraphrase that renowned philosopher Monty Python, “And now for something completely silly.” To open its 2019-20 season, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre has commissioned a new spoofy take on Bram Stoker’s classic vampire tale, Dracula. Or more accurately, on the general idea of Dracula, since co-adaptors Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen gleefully concede that they never read … [Read more...]
‘Fantastique’ swaggers at Lynn, while Nakamatsu plays it cool
By Dennis D. Rooney Although unmentioned by him in his prefatory remarks, Guillermo Figueroa’s scheduling of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique with the Lynn Philharmonia on the weekend before Halloween was a happy accident if not a deliberate choice. The stupendous innovation of the work, composed only three years after the death of Beethoven, embraces a … [Read more...]
Non-stop weirdness of ‘Greener Grass’ hides tragic core
Speaking about his 1938 classic Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks later said that the film “had a great fault, and I learned an awful lot from that. There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball, and since that time I learned my lesson and don’t intend ever again to make everybody crazy.” Well, even the old masters can be wrong. Yes, Baby was relentlessly … [Read more...]