For more than 25 years, Lou Tyrrell has been discovering and showcasing new, young playwrights, developing their work for productions in South Florida and perhaps beyond. While the industry already knows Daniel Maté — the recipient of this year's Kleban Prize for most promising new lyricist and other awards — it is Tyrrell who has given Maté his first fully staged … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 1-3
Theater: For more than 25 years, Lou Tyrrell has been producing new work by emerging young playwrights, but I cannot remember him being as excited over a relatively unknown talent like he is about composer-lyricist Daniel Maté. He is so excited that he has devoted two of the slots in The Theatre at Arts Garage’s season to shows by Maté — a song cycle on contemporary … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Oct. 19-20
Art: This weekend, the Wimberley Library at Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton campus welcomes Alaskan artist and bookbinder Susan Share for the opening of an exhibit featuring her work that will be on view until Jan. 19. Last night, Share gave a performance featuring her art, which incorporates movement, costumes and experimental books, all of it as a way of invigorating … [Read more...]
Contemporary American works add much interest to PBCMF’s second fall concert
By Donald Waxman The planets must have been in alignment last Thursday evening when the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival players, with their accustomed professionalism and virtuosity, presented an uncommonly interesting program at Lynn University’s Wold Center for the Performing Arts auditorium, arguably one of South Florida’s most beautiful and comfortable new performing … [Read more...]
For grieving daughter, modern medicine was the villain
Eleven years ago, doctors told retired Wesleyan University professor Jeffrey Butler that he needed a pacemaker to ensure that his heart did not stop during hernia surgery. So he was outfitted with the device, which kept his heart going, “while doing nothing to prevent his slide into dementia, incontinence, near-muteness, misery and helplessness.” A year earlier, Butler had … [Read more...]
The troubled vintage of fathers and sons
It cannot be a spoiler to say that Paul de Marseul (Niels Arestrup), the hulking and obstreperous central figure in You Will Be My Son, dies. It’s not a spoiler because the very first scene is Paul’s casket sliding, with graceful elegance, toward its incineration in a crematorium. Paul’s milquetoast son Martin (Lorant Deutsch) watches with disbelief, his face a harsh map of … [Read more...]
‘Don Jon’: Porn and the single bro, with depth
One of actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s motivations in writing and directing the feature film Don Jon must have been the opportunity to provide himself with a wildly different character than he’s accustomed to playing. The creature he inhabits for the film’s 90 minutes is a far cry from the sensitive hipsters he’s cultivated over his career. He stars in the film as Jon, so called … [Read more...]
‘Artist and the Model’ finds depth in beauty
Jean Rochefort is now 83, with a résumé of more than 150 films to his credit. Many of them are great — The Clockmaker of St. Paul, The Phantom of Liberty, Man on the Train — but it may be that it’s taken him five decades to contribute his defining role. In Fernando Trueba’s The Artist and the Model, a twilight sonata of passion and frustration both artistic and sexual, … [Read more...]
Sundays: Trial by media ordeal
By Myles Ludwig I had really hoped today would be a NoZimZone. I had hoped to be free of this issue — this murder or manslaughter, this fear and self-defense, this profiling as prejudice — but no such luck. As soon as I woke up and turned on my TV, the first thing I saw was the news of George Zimmerman’s acquittal and his tragic involvement with Trayvon Martin. As the late … [Read more...]
Community theater: An excellent slice of Simon’s early life
By Dale King Brighton Beach Memoirs could easily be subtitled Neil Simon’s Family in Crisis. But the playwright didn’t do that. Instead, he crafted a stellar autobiographical drama that melds whimsy with pathos, anger and, ultimately, forgiveness. He takes the time to develop the characters and spotlight their ability to deal with adversity without ripping apart the family … [Read more...]