Theater: Director Clive Cholerton has a way with staged readings of musicals, and especially with shows by the great composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, as he demonstrated several times at the Caldwell Theatre and now at Palm Beach Dramaworks with 1970’s Company. This look at the nature of marriage and relationships is said to be the first “concept musical,” full of … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 2-4
Music: For most of its 25-year existence, Fort Lauderdale’s Symphony of the Americas has presented summer programs in Broward and Miami-Dade counties and abroad, particularly Panama, where conductor James Brooks-Bruzzese grew up. This weekend, it plays one of its final Summerfest concerts Saturday night at the Crest Theatre at the Delray Beach Center for the Arts. Musicians … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 26-28
Film: James Cromwell, a perpetual supporting player, gets the lead role in an impressive independent film called Still Mine, about a Canadian farmer battling to keep his farm afloat just as his wife of 61 years (Geneviève Bujold) begins drifting into dementia. A capable carpenter, he decides to downsize to a new home he will build himself, but that is how he runs into the brick … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 19-21
Music: Dave Matthews is one of those fortunate pop stars with a fan base that is essentially an extended family. Tonight he returns with his band to the Cruzan Amphitheatre for two nights of concerts in which the Dave Matthews Nation will surely be in force. At the end of this year he returns to his native South Africa for a series of concerts that are selling out, and which … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 12-14
Theater: The idea of a concert reading of a musical sounds like it would be a very static event, but Palm Beach Dramaworks shows us that doe not have to be the case. Thanks to director Clive Cholerton, late of the late Caldwell Theatre Company, the concert of 1965’s tribute to idealism, Man of La Mancha, is extremely moving, both physically and emotionally. The show, with a … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 28-30
Theater: A summer tradition in South Palm Beach County is Florida Atlantic University’s Festival Rep, a series of productions in rotating repertory featuring current and recent students of the department of theater and dance, plus a few working professional mentors. This season the emphasis is on the works of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim through two of his shows — the … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 21-23
Theater: Slow Burn Theatre Company usually opts for dark-toned musicals like its recent triumphs with Side Show and Sweeney Todd. But in the summer, the troupe lightens up — as they did last summer with Xanadu — and they don’t come much lighter than The Wedding Singer. This show, based on the 1998 Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore movie about a hapless wedding band crooner has a … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 14-16
Art: An exhibit titled County Contemporary: All Media Juried Show, composed of 44 works by 36 Palm Beach County artists using a wide range of media, is on display beginning today at the main gallery of the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County in Lake Worth. Mark Richard Leach, the executive director of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 7-9
South Florida Jazz wraps its 2012-13 season this Saturday night with an appearance by the jazz singer Kurt Elling, who made his mark at Chicago’s legendary Green Mill while studying the philosophy of religion as a grad student during the day. A Grammy winner and a regular audience favorite, Elling has a flexible voice and style more akin to Al Jarreau than to Johnny Hartman, … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 1-2
Art: This is the last weekend to see Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Landau is a philanthropist and a preeminent collector of postwar art in the United States and the exhibition on display at the Norton is a selection of the more than 300 paintings, sculptures, photographs and works on paper that Landau gifted to the … [Read more...]