If getting an established opera off the production ground is difficult and enormously expensive, it’s even tougher when the work is brand-new. So what’s the aspiring Wagner of today to do? One answer, as Sabrina Peña Young will tell you, is to choose the early 21st-century default option and go online — to be Wagner 2.0, if you like. Peña Young, a bubbly, intensely energetic … [Read more...]
Sexuality, subjugation drive powerful ‘Augustine’
Sometimes, under the auspices of a director with a vision, a film’s opening shot can subtly reveal a lot, providing a prologue that foretells the grand theme. Such is the case with Augustine, debut French filmmaker Alice Winocour’s study of the real-life 19th century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his vulnerable teenage patient Augustine. The opening image is of a crab, … [Read more...]
Postcard from New York No. 2: Bette’s back in ‘I’ll Eat You Last’
Sunday in New York, a two-show day after a tasty brunch at the Brooklyn Diner, a justifiably popular theater district eatery. This afternoon it was I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers, a one-woman show about the mega-powerful Hollywood talent agent of the ’80s and ’90s, starring Bette Midler in her first return to Broadway since appearing in Fiddler in the Roof in her … [Read more...]
Violinist St. John follows her own sharp instincts
When Lara St. John graduated from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia at age 16, she hit the road, in search of travel and new musical experiences. That quest led the young Canadian violinist to, of all places, what was then the Soviet Union, where she took up post-graduate study at the Moscow Conservatory. “And I learned so much there, about songs, about Gypsy culture … it … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Oct. 20-21
The documentary Side by Side, which opened Friday and runs through this week at the Lake Worth Playhouse, is as inside-baseball as movies get. An unlikely passion project for narrator Keanu Reeves, this studious doc features Reeves interviewing countless directors, cinematographers, producers, editors and actors about the inexorable transition from 35mm celluloid to hi-def … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2012-13: Palm Beach County visual art
Each year in Palm Beach County, after a summer lull that seems endless, art starts happening again like Snow White gently waking from her sleep, bright-eyed, bushy tailed and — thanks to some local wizards — with remarkably plumper lips and a less-furrowed brow. After all, we do live in a veritable fantasyland of opulence and wealth and the “season” motivates us all to break … [Read more...]
‘Haywire’ all style, no substance — but that’s some style
I watched Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire less than 24 hours ago, and I’m already having trouble remembering exactly what the picture was about – some gobbledygook about private government contractors double-crossing one another, with one rogue special-ops agent targeted for knowing too much, or for the appeasement of her vengeful ex-boyfriend/employer, or something like that. But … [Read more...]
Cancer comedy ‘50’/50’ an odds-on winner
The idea of a comedy about cancer is hardly unheard of. After all, the cable series The Big C is based on exactly that premise. But the very savvy new film 50/50 -- named for the odds of surviving the cancer that young NPR radio segment producer Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) contracts -- handles the precarious tonal balancing act with impressive ease. The film is written by … [Read more...]
Controversial comic Maher pushes all the buttons at Kravis
Bill Maher can be -- and undoubtedly has been -- called many things, including the accurate (and printable) tags of talk show host, social critic, actor, author, and documentary filmmaker. But the 54-year-old Maher started out as a stand-up comic while attending Cornell University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English that’s come in handy since 1978. The New York … [Read more...]
All-Florida show at Boca Museum rich and rewarding
I have never been a fan of having artists explain their work with their own words, but with a show as diverse as the 59th Annual All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition it might just prove useful. The competition, the oldest of its kind, gives new and established artists residing in the state a chance to expose their work. Of about 1,400 entries submitted this year, 92 … [Read more...]