Victor Wooten. It isn’t very often that a festival features a combined 13 Grammy Awards between four iconic headliners, and that’s what gives the First Annual Florida Jazz and Blues Jam on Saturday instant name recognition and potential staying power. Its opening act is only John Mayall, the 82-year-old British blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player whose Bluesbreakers … [Read more...]
Ever-popular ‘Carmen’ returns to Palm Beach Opera
Devastated by what he saw as the failure of his latest stage project and under siege from a persistent streptococcal throat infection, Georges Bizet suffered two heart attacks and went to his grave on June 3, 1875, at the early age of 36, never to know how successful that theater piece was to become. Or how successful he’d been in writing it. “In ‘Carmen,’ he hit gold,” … [Read more...]
How ‘The Grinch’ came to the theater
Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, was very stingy, almost Grinch-like, with the performance rights to his popular children’s books. But after the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Company had a big success with a musical version of his 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, written by its resident playwright Tim Mason, in 1994 the Geisel estate allowed the stage company to adapt his How … [Read more...]
‘50 Years’ a standout at Ririe-Woodbury’s Duncan show
By Tara Mitton Catao On Friday night, the Duncan Theatre hosted the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, a Utah-based repertory dance troupe that continues to bear the name of the University of Utah professors who founded it over 50 years ago. However, the program didn’t have the variety that a mixed repertory program usually encompasses. Growing from a local company to an … [Read more...]
The View From Home 32: New releases and notable screenings, Nov. 8-30
American director Alex Cox remains most famous for the first two films he ever made: 1984’s Repo Man and 1987’s Sid & Nancy. He’s continued to be active for more than two decades since, though you wouldn’t know it from the lack of distribution his films have received – Cox seems content with making cult movies for microscopic audiences. A crueler critic might suggest that he … [Read more...]
‘September Issue’ an oddly lightweight Wintour’s tale
Caricature can be an incredibly damning cross to bear. Just ask Yoko Ono, Joan Rivers and Sarah Palin, to name a few prominent women whose names have been partially or forever sullied by the media’s manipulation of their characters. When perception becomes reality, truth blurs into fiction: Sarah Palin never said, “I can see Russia from my house,” just as Marie Antoinette, … [Read more...]