Film: Having delayed its opening until January, the month for dumping sub-par movies on the market, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit will get no awards or be taken the least bit seriously, but this reboot of the franchise based on the late novelist Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst action hero is still pulse-racing entertainment, far better than expected. Chris Pine, the young Captain Kirk of … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Jan. 10-13
Art: Few forms of art are as cheeky and yet communicative as Pop Art, and this weekend, the Boca Museum of Art opens a three-month exhibition of works by artists who not only have come to define the movement but are well-known by non-specialists as well: Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, among others. They made careers out of adopting the styles and sometimes the … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Jan. 4-5, 2014
Theater: Opening on Tuesday evening at West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center is that great folk opera, Porgy and Bess, reclaimed from elitist opera houses and reconceived as a Broadway-scale musical by director Diane Paulus, who has owned the Best Revival Tony Award for the past three seasons (Hair, Porgy, Pippin). In this case, the DuBose Heyward script has been shaken up by … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 28-29
Art: No matter what its other attractions, the basic fact of the state of Florida is the water: Most of it is a sandbar in the sea, so it’s only fitting that so many artists of the state have turned or aqueous reality for inspiration. At the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County’s art gallery in its converted movie theater on Lake Street in Lake Worth, The Deep and the Shallow … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 20-22
Music: It’s the last weekend before Christmas, and if you haven’t had enough of the usual seasonal ear-tide, here’s your chance for a little bit more semi-sacred Gemütlichkeit before it’s on to the homefront. Tonight, Seraphic Fire comes to St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton for its annual reading of Messiah, George Frideric Handel’s hit from 1742 that is as much a … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 13-15
Art: Was there any artist so indelibly associated with the late 1960s as Peter Max? The Art Students League-trained painter’s bright colors and quirky figures did as much to define the look of the age as hippiedom did. Max has continued working since those high-profile days, and has recently been painting portraits of singer Taylor Swift, which will be on sale Saturday when the … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 7-8
Theater: With the comic strip musical Annie, director Mark Martino does not pull off the sort of new look reconceiving that he did with The Music Man at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre a couple of seasons ago, but he renders the show with plenty of heart and pizzazz. He doubles as the musical’s choreographer and stops the show twice with a raucous, bump-and-grind Easy Street and a … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 29-Dec. 1
Dance: Cue the Mouse King. It’s time once again for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s indelible ballet, The Nutcracker, which premiered in 1892. Oddly enough, the composer didn’t care for it, thinking he had written himself out. No one would agree with that sentiment today, and his sparkling score has become particularly beloved for young ballet companies with lots of children. Lovers … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 23-24
Music: The Master Chorale of South Florida began life as the chorus for the Florida Philharmonic, providing massed vocal heft when it was time for the Beethoven Ninth Symphony or Belshazzar’s Feast. The orchestra dissolved 10 years ago, but the chorus has continued, and in that decade it’s had three different directors. Now it’s on its fourth, young Brett Karlin of Boca Raton, … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 16-17
Film: By a quirk of release patterns, you can now see two recent films starring Naomi Watts on area theater screens. The two roles she plays in Diana and Sunlight Jr. are a real display of her acting range, portraying two vastly different women separated by an ocean and by the gulf of their financial circumstances. Diana is, of course, about Princess Diana, and her love affair … [Read more...]