If it’s true that a serious musician doesn’t really know any genre boundaries, then it’s even truer for the two men who make up Black Violin. These two Fort Lauderdale natives and graduates of the Dillard High School for the Performing Arts (now the Dillard Center for the Arts) have for 10 years been forging a career out of an original style of music that takes them from Bach … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: Goofy fun at Summer Shorts; moving ‘Lughnasa’ at Dramaworks
When you are trying to capture audience attention and tell a complete story in about 10 minutes, you might as well stick to comedy. That is apparently the lesson that Miami’s City Theatre has learned in its 18 years of producing Summer Shorts, an annual seasonal festival of playlets that accentuates the humorous and occasionally the out-and-out wacky. In recent years, Shorts … [Read more...]
Bernini Quartet masterful in Flagler program
String quartets these days are relatively big business, and listeners have many opportunities to hear live and recorded performances of masterworks (and otherwise) by fine ensembles from around the world. Most of the time we hear quartets with a modern edge, on instruments with metal strings whose sound cuts through the sonic murk of our noisy everyday. But when the string … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2012-13: Loss of theaters doesn’t slow promising season
The past season saw the second shoe drop in Palm Beach County. Boca Raton’s 37-year-old Caldwell Theatre Company closed its doors, soon after Florida Stage ended its operations, and area theatergoers are still reeling from both abrupt losses. Add Broward County’s now-defunct Promethean Theatre ― or rather subtract it ― and the theatrical landscape is substantially thinner as … [Read more...]
Manzarek-Rogers are hit-and-miss at Bamboo Room
On paper, a band co-led by former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek and former John Lee Hooker slide guitarist Roy Rogers might not seem likely. But when their common agent suggested the pairing, the two collaborated on their 2011 debut CD Translucent Blues (Blind Pig), a dark yet accessible take on modern blues-based musical structures. After all, the 73-year-old Manzarek was … [Read more...]
Principals make FGO’s ‘Rigoletto’ do justice to Verdi
Florida Grand Opera’s third production of the season, Verdi’s Rigoletto, closes tonight at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, and if you can catch it before it leaves, you’ll catch a really fine operatic evening, and see a young soprano on her way up. FGO produced this 1851 Verdi classic only six years ago, and the current mounting is the ninth in the company’s … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: Life as a wrestling ring, or a cabaret, old chum
At one end of Palm Beach County, at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, we are told that “Life is a cabaret, old chum.” At the other end, at Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre, it turns out that life is actually more like professional wrestling. The latter news flash comes from Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist that examines the scripted … [Read more...]
The View From Home 8: New releases on DVD
For My Father (Film Movement) Release date: June 1 Standard list price: $22.49 I normally reserve the space for the largest review in this column to wonderful films that are worthy of your time, but occasionally a film so indefensible – so patently contemptible – will arrive on my doorstep that it prompts the need to vent for more than 150 words. For My Father, the latest … [Read more...]
Jazz phenom Eldar charts course of steady growth
At the age of 23, most jazz musicians are still figuratively getting their feet wet in both their art and their lives. Which puts young pianist Eldar Djangirov at least up to his waist by comparison. Going by only his first name since starting his recording career nine years ago, Eldar (eldarjazz.com) released Virtue, his sixth CD overall and fourth for Sony Masterworks, last … [Read more...]
‘Brothers’ a shattering story of the cost of war
The release date couldn’t be more fortuitous. Hitting theaters nationwide the week Barack Obama announced his plans to send an additional 34,000 troops to secure Afghanistan, Jim Sheridan’s family drama Brothers is at once timely and transcendent. An explosive and sobering reminder of the emotional and mental cost of war at home and abroad – and particularly this war, in its … [Read more...]