Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton. (Photo by Joan Marcus) With this week’s Tony Award nominations, the Hamilton juggernaut continues. The Lin-Manuel Miranda musical about the first Secretary of the Treasury has been a scorching hot ticket since it arrived on Broadway last summer. Now, with this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama in its pocket and only half-kidding … [Read more...]
Take Heed Theater Co. finds new home, seeks funding
Lake Worth’s Take Heed Theater Company, a nomadic and sporadic professional performance troupe, has found a permanent home. Now all the company needs is to raise enough money to turn the former storefront church on Belvedere Road in West Palm Beach into a habitable playhouse. “For about twelve years, it was some sort of a church,” says artistic director Dave Hyland, an … [Read more...]
Broward Stage Door’s ‘Promises, Promises’ revives spirit of Swinging Sixties
By Dale King Promises, Promises, the musical now playing at the Broward Stage Door Theatre, brings together assorted material from seemingly disparate sources. Still, the show holds together very well, particularly in the second act when the comedy kicks into overdrive and the players truly find their vocal and acting muses. The show, which completes its five-week run with a … [Read more...]
Fun staging, excellent singing mark Miami Summer Music Festival’s closing ‘Don Giovanni’
The Miami Summer Music Festival closed its second season on Sunday afternoon with a remarkable performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, epic and uncut, and featuring several standout singers in the festival’s Opera Institute program. Smartly and snarkily staged by Jeffrey Marc Buchman, who updated the opera to contemporary times in a gambling resort, this Don Giovanni lost only … [Read more...]
All-sculpture show riveting at the Cultural Council
By Lucy Lazarony At the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County, the walls of the main gallery have gone white. Not a single piece of two-dimensional art is on display. Instead, the focus is on the three-dimensional art of acclaimed sculptors and Palm Beach county residents Alexander Krivosheiw, G.E. Olsen and Jeff Whyman. Krivosheiw expresses himself through hand-forged … [Read more...]
All in all, ‘Wild’ is a worthwhile journey
Like the memoir on which it’s based, Jean-Marc Vallee’s Wild opens with Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon), a 26-year-woman escaping a life of self-destruction by hiking 1,100 miles on California’s brutal Pacific Crest Trail, in a jam. She’s just witnessed one of her boots tumble down a cliff, never to be seen again. In a fit of understandable rage, she tosses the other boot … [Read more...]
Essay: Keeping dance all about the art
By Tara Mitton Catao Dance competitions are multiplying in profusion these days, forcing those of us in the art form to have mixed feelings about a growing popularity that seems to treat dance more as a sport than an art form. Dance has always relied heavily on technique because it uses the human body as its tool for artistic expression. The more technique a dancer has, the … [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...]
‘Sixth Extinction’ is an urgent, chilling warning
More than 60 million years ago a 6-mile-wide asteroid crashed into Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs. Four other mass extinctions in the past 450 million years destroyed countless other animal and plant species. In her profound new book, The Sixth Extinction, science writer Elizabeth Kolbert argues that Earth could be heading for another extinction that would kill off many … [Read more...]
Three blues masters find the jamming is easy as a supergroup
Bandleaders in general, and blues bandleaders in particular, are notorious lone wolves -- stereotypical alpha males who often seek stardom by being songwriters, lead vocalists and their band’s primary soloists and dominating the spotlight. So how is it that three of them, all rising young blues stars with their own bands, combined forces to create a regional all-star group? … [Read more...]