Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in The Lobster. Film: Summer movies are supposed to be a vacation from challenging fare, but The Lobster challenges that assumption. It is a satirical slice of science fiction with as loopy a premise as you could ask for. Set in the near future, it offers a society where marriage is compulsory and the unattached have 45 days to find a life mate. … [Read more...]
Arts buzz: Photos by a rock muse, at the Kravis; Norton plans Holocaust remembrance
Pattie Boyd and George Harrison. Even before the rock video era started in the 1980s, the visual element has often been as important as sound in popular music. In the multi-media presentation Behind the Lens, two architects of this blend through the 1960s and 1970s, Pattie Boyd and Henry Diltz, share their stories and images in a tell-all slide show. Boyd inspired husbands … [Read more...]
Arts Garage’s ‘Smoke’: Kinky, but not a lot to say
Connie Fernandez and Clay Cartland in Smoke. Sexual attraction can be benign, but more often than not — at least onstage — it is a prelude to a tug-of-war power skirmish. That is how it plays out in Kim Davies’ sadomasochistic Smoke, a kinky two-character tango which fittingly bookends a season that began with Sex with Strangers. We are starting to wonder about the personal … [Read more...]
The war that never ends: Historian Winter to discuss WWI at Festival of the Arts Boca
French soldiers in the trenches during World War I. Imagine a world in which Great Britain and Germany are the major powers, and the United States and Russia are only minor players on the global scene. It’s a world of relatively conservative politics, where there was no World War II, no Holocaust, and no one but their families had ever heard of Adolf Hitler or Vladimir … [Read more...]
Sommers stunning as Bessie Smith in Arts Garage’s ‘Devil’s Music’
Elijah Taj Gee and Avery Sommers in The Devil’s Music. (Photo by Alex Shapiro) For the third show of his first season at the helm of The Theatre at Arts Garage, Keith Garsson has selected a bioplay-cum-concert featuring the song stylings of Bessie Smith, the Depression-era performer considered to be the “Empress of the Blues.” Featuring over a dozen musical numbers delivered … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Feb. 19-21
`Opera: The Palm Beach Opera opens its second mainstage production tonight with Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, one of the bel canto’s most charming and radiant scores. Janai Brugger is Norina, David Portillo is Ernesto, Lucas Meachem is Dr. Malatesta, and Carlo Lepore sings Pasquale in a production directed by Fenlon Lamb and conducted by Antonino Fogliani. The plot of this 1843 … [Read more...]
Arts buzz: Brief notes in local arts
Flagler Museum director Blades retiring after 21 years PALM BEACH — John Blades, executive director of the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, will retire at the end of this month, the museum said. Blades has been the museum’s executive director since June 1995, and is credited with overseeing the revitalization of the museum, which began life as Henry Flagler’s Whitehall mansion. … [Read more...]
At the Four Arts: The lost glory of a Southern capital, recaptured
An ongoing exhibition at the Society of the Four Arts tells the story of how the golden era of Charleston, S.C., came and left, while its fruits went everywhere. An Eye for Opulence: Charleston through the Lens of the Rivers Collection consists of more than 200 mahogany furniture pieces, silver objects and fine art representing the city’s enviable prosperity during the … [Read more...]
Arts preview 2015-16: The season in classical music
The classical music season for 2015-16 will be its usual overstuffed self, especially if you’re keen to travel outside Palm Beach County. Inside the county, things incline to the tried and true, but further south, they’re edgier. Nevertheless, it’s a rich and bountiful season, and the first three months of the new year will present concertgoers with a huge menu of possible … [Read more...]
Arts preview 2015-16: The season in Miami-Dade art
By Michael Mills With more museums and galleries than the rest of South Florida combined, Miami-Dade County still hogs the region’s cultural conversation. And that’s not even counting the multilingual chatter Art Basel generates once a year. Museums splinter and evolve, galleries come and go, sometimes the talk turns contentious, as it should in a living and … [Read more...]