The two big questions for the new American work now in its world premiere at Palm Beach Opera are these: Does it succeed as a compelling piece of theater? And does it have a future? The answer to both of these questions is Yes, but for the second question, it may take some more work for the opera to have the kind of legs its producers and well-wishing audiences would dearly … [Read more...]
Classic ‘Our Town’ beautifully realized at Dramaworks
By Dale King True to its promise to provide “theater to think about,” Palm Beach Dramaworks opened its 2014-2015 season this past weekend with Thornton Wilder’s unadorned but hauntingly personal play, Our Town. The play, written in 1938, is a delight to the ears and eyes, even though Wilder decreed there be no sets or props. A fine 20-member cast of veteran players and … [Read more...]
Music roundup: Cuarteto Latinoamericano at Flagler; PB Symphony brings out brass
I first heard the Cuarteto Latinoamericano in 1984 making their New York City debut. They were managed by a friend I’d met years before at Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. My friend asked for a report and I was honestly able to say they had great promise, and that all their black shocks of Brylcreemed hair would certainly win over the ladies. Fast … [Read more...]
A compelling American quintet in chamber fest’s Week 2
It is one of the great mysteries of American musical life: Why, in a country that has produced so many fine classical composers, does the average person know nothing of their music? There are any number of reasons that are usually trotted out to explain this phenomenon, from the overwhelming dominance of American popular music worldwide to the lack of arts education in the … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: Terrific ‘Millie’; sensational ‘In the Heights’
The musical theater, that uniquely American invention, has come a long way in the past 90 years. But if you yearn for the good old days when musicals made little sense and their cartoonish plots were little more than excuses to get from one production number to the next, then, boy, has the Maltz Jupiter Theatre got a show for you. It is Thoroughly Modern Millie, based on the … [Read more...]
Song of destiny? Seraphic Fire awaits Grammy results
By the time the last notes of J.S. Bach’s great B minor Mass have sounded at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton on Sunday afternoon, the audience will know whether it has been listening to a Grammy-winning ensemble. Seraphic Fire, a concert choir founded 10 years ago in South Miami, is one of the few local classical ensembles to have been honored with Grammy nods. … [Read more...]
The 2011-12 season in Miami-Broward art: A widely varied menu
The visual arts season in Broward and Miami-Dade counties offers its usual host of dichotomies, plus some surprises. There are trippy, hallucinatory drawings and religious icons; Baroque paintings and contemporary female-centric photographs; sculptures both austere and intricate and installations inspired by the American palate, vinyl records, Beethoven and the Beats. If we … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 12-14
Film: As Andy Warhol once said, we will all be famous for 15 minutes, and the corollary to that seems to be that most of us will become the subject of a documentary. At the moment, it is late night comic Conan O’Brien’s turn, featured in a breezy bio-flick called Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, which understandably focuses on the shabby way he was treated by impatient NBC executives … [Read more...]
Recent American brass trio proves smart switch at chamber fest
The second concert of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s 20th season underwent a programming change, but its tried-and-true finale, which didn’t change, worked its customary magic. A large audience at the Crest Theatre on Sunday afternoon warmly applauded that last work, the Death and the Maiden Quartet (String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810) of Franz Schubert. In one … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Sept. 24-26
Art: This weekend, the historic African-American neighborhood on Fort Lauderdale’s Sistrunk Boulevard is the site of the Midtown Urban Arts Show, part of a nonprofit effort to support revitalization of the Sistrunk corridor, named for the pioneering black physician who tended to its residents in the early 20th century. Restoration projects have been ongoing for many years in … [Read more...]