A searing contemporary opera about Auschwitz and the completion of an unprecedented 28-year effort to present all of the operas of Giuseppe Verdi are among the high points of the coming operatic season in southern Florida. While the Sarasota Opera’s end of its Verdi Cycle will draw international attention, operaphiles closer to home will be eager to see Palm Beach Opera’s … [Read more...]
Arts preview 2015-16: The season in jazz
It’s a somewhat predictable 2015-2016 season in South Florida jazz. The biggest names, like the ageless, 89-year-old Tony Bennett, perform in our region often — and are realistically on the fringe of the genre. Jazz, especially at so-called jazz festivals, now seems to have expanded to include R&B, adult contemporary, pop, and any other style that includes horns (yet may lack … [Read more...]
Arts preview 2015-16: The season in pop
There are plenty of predictable megastars among South Florida’s 2015-2016 pop touring docket, so much so that most are purposely not listed here. Yet scratching the surface to reveal the remainder will pay dividends. Among the arena and ampitheater shows, smaller venues like the Culture Room and Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale, the Fillmore and Knight Concert Hall in … [Read more...]
Armory Art Salons: Elle Schorr’s art of community
By Sandra Schulman Artist, photographer, community organizer, curator Elle Schorr gets to see everything — well, almost everything — while constantly searching out the best art and artists in Palm Beach County for her Art Salon talks at the Armory Art Center. She also shows her own work at various galleries including Arthouse 429 in Northwood. Her latest body of work — of … [Read more...]
The View From Home 72: Ferrara, Resnais, Truffaut and Esmail, plus World War I, Patrick Stewart and Vincent Price
Welcome to New York: Even while changing the names of everyone involved and preceding his narrative with a lengthy disclaimer, Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York (IFC, $18.78 DVD, $14.59 Blu-ray) borders provocatively on slander, and that’s partly what makes it so exciting. Gérard Depardieu plays Devereaux, a French politician transparently modeled after Dominique … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 26-28
Music: Dean Peterson, a fine operatic bass with world-class credits (Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, etc.) whose work is familiar to South Florida audiences — most recently as Bluebeard in Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle for his new Opera Fusion company — is the subject of a fundraiser this Sunday at First Presbyterian Church in … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 19-21
Theater: Twenty years ago, Miami’s City Theatre began an annual festival of one-act plays, roughly 10 minutes in length. Over time, Summer Shorts has grown into one of the region’s most anticipated stage institutions. This year’s edition seems purposely downsized – only nine plays, performed by a versatile cast of six – but for once there is not a clunker in the bunch, either … [Read more...]
Wonderful ‘Inside Out’ another original triumph for Pixar
Most of us don’t spend our days thinking of where our thoughts come from, or how we think, or why we think. Pete Docter, the director of the Pixar masterpiece Up, isn’t like most of us. In his latest film, Inside Out, arguably the most existential title in the luminous Pixar canon, he has gone beyond thinking about the inner workings of the brain. He’s conceived an elaborate … [Read more...]
Delray SQ, Aleida deliver impressive Danielpour at Mainly Mozart
For two centuries or more, the string quartet has been the favored medium for a composer’s most intimate, profound thoughts. In his series of quartets, the American composer Richard Danielpour has explored themes of the Holocaust (No. 3, Psalms of Sorrow) and farewell (No. 6, Addio), and for his Quartet No. 7, which received its world premiere May 31 in Coral Gables at the … [Read more...]
Community theater: Dated ‘Barefoot in the Park’ holds up well at Delray Playhouse
By Dale King In just a few days, the Delray Beach Playhouse will close the doors on its 68th season. Summer camp kids will take over the venue for a while, then the theater opens again for its 69th season of live mainstage performances in October. There’s still time to catch the final show of the season. Barefoot in the Park, an endearing early-career effort from prolific … [Read more...]