A striking candlelight effect may be the loudest marking of one of the greatest artists in the history of art, but a new exhibit extinguishes it in favor of his other theatrical — and humane — sensibilities. Detail-soaked biblical passages, scenes of street life and portraits of the distinguished and the marginalized have aligned at the Society of the Four Arts to … [Read more...]
Archives for December 2019
2019’s Top 10 in Film: Scorsese’s ‘Irishman’ leads the field
Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime will play a major qualitative role in awards and best lists, if not box office, this year. Everything looks better on a theater screen rather than your home TV, but a film like Martin Scorsese’s epic, three-and-a-half-hour The Irishman seems designed for home viewing, with its ability to accommodate bathroom and nap breaks. … [Read more...]
2019’s Top 10 in theater: ‘Streetcar’ stands out
It was an odd year at the theater in South Florida. Try as I might to include them in the year’s best, two of the region’s most reliable companies – Maltz Jupiter Theatre and GableStage – failed to make the cut of the top 10. Nor did Broward Stage Door, but that is less surprising, since the organization folded in March, after 25 years of operation and eight months after … [Read more...]
‘1917’: All soulless on the Western Front
How’s this for a criticism: There’s something unbearably perfect about Sam Mendes’ World War I picture 1917. On the one hand, the film — specially formatted for IMAX’s expansive 1:90:1 aspect ratio — takes great pains to reestablish moviegoing as a necessary cinematic experience, an increasingly quaint notion in the day-and-date streaming era. But it reaches for this … [Read more...]
‘Villainous Company’ improbable, but actresses make it compelling
Are you in the mood for an old-fashioned parlor game of “who’s conning whom?” None of the three female characters in Victor L. Cahn’s Villainous Company are to be trusted, you see, and unless they are not what they claim to be, a lot of their dialogue rings false. Or perhaps it is playwright Cahn who is doing the conning and we in the audience are the conned. … [Read more...]
Miami Art Week 3: Proof of city’s growth as hub for art
By Sandra Schulman If you were feeling some fair-tigue earlier this month during Miami Art Week, the shows at the city’s museums give breathing room and stellar installations to their artists. Miami saw three new museums open in December, and new exhibits at longtime spaces dug deep. The Rubell family, Mera, Don, and son Jason, have been at the forefront of art collecting … [Read more...]
PB Symphony’s opening Beethoven concert a mixed bag
By Dennis D. Rooney The year 2020 is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven, so we’re going to hear lots of his music this season. The Palm Beach Symphony and Music Director Gerard Schwarz chose to inaugurate its 46th season with an all-Beethoven program Dec. 8 at the Kravis Center. Horacio Gutiérrez was soloist in the opening Piano Concerto No. 4 … [Read more...]
PB Opera’s ‘Hansel’ makes deft use of small Crest surroundings
By Dennis D. Rooney Those of us who as children read the Grimm Fairy Tales, or better yet, had them read to us, know all about creepy castles, evil forests, wicked stepmothers, wily foxes and sanguinary wolves, ungrateful kings, scheming dwarfs, and other bad actors we came to know from the folk tales collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 19th century. There … [Read more...]
‘Little Women’: A masterful, ravishing vision of young adulthood
I’m either the best or the worst person to review the latest adaptation of Little Women. I’ve not seen any of the previous seven adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s coming-of-age family saga — not even the George Cukor; heresy, I know — nor have I read the book. Which is to say that you won’t find any gripes regarding the latest iteration’s fealty to the source, or, … [Read more...]
‘Christmas Story’ a family-friendly, charming departure for edgy Slow Burn
The songwriting team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul will probably long be associated with the angst-riddled Tony Award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen. But five years before it arrived on Broadway, they wrote a whimsical adaptation of Jean Shepherd’s look back on his youth at holiday time, A Christmas Story. True, little Ralphie Parker obsesses over getting a Red Ryder … [Read more...]