Bartók for Halloween: New opera company mounts ‘Bluebeard’ If you’re not really in the mood for zombies on Halloween, a new arts group in West Palm Beach has something else you might be interested in: An operatic masterpiece. Opera Fusion, a startup founded by soprano Birgit Fioravante and bass Dean Peterson, will present Béla Bartók’s one-act Bluebeard’s Castle at the Lake … [Read more...]
Plaza Theatre closes, citing lack of funds
By Dale King The stage at The Plaza Theatre in Manalapan will be bare this season. No music or dialogue will be heard. The lights will remain dark and the seats empty. The owner of the cash-strapped, nearly three-year-old entertainment venue that replaced Florida Stage, which operated for 19 of its 24 years in the same storefront location at Plaza Del Mar, locked the place up … [Read more...]
Remembering Bacall: An interview with one tough cookie
I once worked for a newspaper in Washington, D.C. that spent extravagantly to say the least. It preferred to fly me to interview celebrities that I could talk to almost as productively, and certainly more cost-effectively, on the telephone. The thought is prompted by the death this week of the legendary Lauren Bacall, at 89, of stroke complications. Thirty years ago, I flew … [Read more...]
Sundays: The Great War’s technology lesson
One hundred years ago this month, Europe was in the throes of a buildup to catastrophe in the aftermath of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28. It would climax, as we all know, in a four-year conflict that for its savagery and scale of destruction was unequalled in all of human history. World War I set in motion the even more cataclysmic … [Read more...]
Sundays: The Great War’s technology lesson
One hundred years ago this month, Europe was in the throes of a buildup to catastrophe in the aftermath of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28. It would climax, as we all know, in a four-year conflict that for its savagery and scale of destruction was unequalled in all of human history. World War I set in motion the even more cataclysmic … [Read more...]
Sundays: The era of alt-delete
By Myles Ludwig Erase thyself. This might very well turn out to be the 11th Commandment of the early 21st century. It could be the Holy Grail of semi-privacy or just a cure for the bewildering, often incapacitating condition of Kardashiana, popularly known as TMI. Like most cures (the off-label uses of moldy bread, for example), this one was discovered by accident. Thanks … [Read more...]
Sundays: On the cutting-room floor
By Myles Ludwig Imagine this: a sea of screens with waves of 70-inch flat TVs breaking on the shore; riptides of wall-mounted Vizios trailing their HDMI cables like the sperm we used to see projected on the roll-up screen in our high school hygiene classes, before the storm surrounding sex education; a beach of upturned satellite TV dishes curling in on themselves in the … [Read more...]
Sundays: The man who turned a hubcap into a hat
By Myles Ludwig My pal Tony Palladino passed into another dimension this week. He was – still is — my friend and mentor for some 40 years and one of America’s premier graphic designers, illustrators and adventurers in art. TP, as he called himself, grew up in Manhattan. His family spoke Italian, not English, so to communicate he taught himself a way of drawing that could … [Read more...]
Sundays: The mother of us all
By Myles Ludwig I’m musing about motherhood. The great Momenator hovers above us all like a sacred but impenetrable meme: Mother Russia, mama grizzly, mother of all battles, mothers who eat their young, mother of dragons, Mother Teresa, tiger mom, Monica Lewinsky’s mom, the anguished mothers of the stolen Nigerian schoolgirls and, of course, the heroic American mom and her … [Read more...]
Sundays: Ukrainian basketball
By Myles Ludwig Ukraine and basketball were the stories dominating the mainstream media this week, elbowing aside the tragedies of the sinking ferry in South Korea (“This is the end of me” was the heart-rending headline in the New York Times); the so-far failed search for the lost Malaysian airplane and apparent callousness of expelling the grieving families of those lost … [Read more...]