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...]
PB Symphony takes its place with the majors in Benjamin Hall
Like a top-league soccer coach, Ramón Tebar has gotten his team to World Cup level. The Palm Beach Symphony, playing Jan. 27 at the new auditorium of Benjamin High School in Palm Beach Gardens, sounded like a major orchestra from Europe or the Americas. In my time covering this ensemble, Tebar has taken it from a refined chamber music ensemble of 35 players to a well-crafted … [Read more...]
First-rate cast makes Dramaworks’s ‘History Boys’ one for the books
England’s Alan Bennett first came to prominence in the early ’60s, as one of the four collegiate satirists who wrote and performed an evening of sketch comedy called Beyond the Fringe. It was fairly cerebral as revues go, but it did not suggest the major playwright Bennett would become, penning such thought-provoking, yet still entertaining scripts as The History Boys, on the … [Read more...]
Three-nation youth orchestra to perform in Delray
A youth orchestra concert with roots in a rural Mexican library comes to Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre on Sept. 19. The concert, called “Harmony Without Borders,” will feature children from the Imagina Symphonic Orchestra in León, Mexico; 24 children from the Siman Orchestral Foundation in Miami; and 10 children from the Pequeñas Huellas cultural project in Turin, Italy. They … [Read more...]
Postcard From Broadway No. 6: “The Audience”
New York is not a very good city for shopping malls, but I learned Thursday that it has a couple of first-rate upscale food courts. Next time you’re here, check out Chelsea Market (9th Avenue, between 15th and 16th St.), full of gourmet food shops, like Lobster Place, which sells great looking seafood and — I can report from first-hand knowledge — first-rate sushi. If that … [Read more...]
At the Festival of the Arts Boca: Michael Grunwald on the unfinished business of the Everglades
Almost 10 years have passed since the publication of Michael Grunwald’s groundbreaking first book, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, which was greeted as the most important — and readable — book on the subject since Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s classic, River of Grass. But today Grunwald has one regret: Climate change. “There is climate change … [Read more...]
The View From Home 68: Family angst, goofy Godard, bleak Tsai, race matters; plus Rivette, rabbits and Britt
Force Majeure: For approximately the first two minutes of this confrontational, uncomfortable Swedish drama (Magnolia, $13.49 Blu-ray, $12.14 DVD), its central family of four is having a happy vacation in the Les Arcs ski resort in Savoie, France. Some laughs are exchanged and photographs are taken, as father Thomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and … [Read more...]
Violinist Johnson brings the blues — successfully — into his parlor
Violinist Gareth Johnson creatively started his downstairs “Parlor Series” concerts last summer after moving into a two-story condo just west of the downtown area of Lake Worth. With a master’s degree from the Lynn Conservatory of Music in Boca Raton, the 29-year-old is often paired with fellow classical musicians in the intimate, 40-seat room — his Jan. 18 presentation … [Read more...]
Youthful Calidore Quartet wins over Flagler audience
Four young student string players met at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles in 2010 and decided to form the Calidore String Quartet. They quickly won four American grand prize competitions, and the Munich and Hamburg equivalents in 2012. On Feb. 3, the Flagler Museum music series was host to their winning ways. All in their mid-20s, it was appropriate that the … [Read more...]
Footnotes: A night with The Dancers’ Space
Editor’s note: This is the first of an occasional series of short notes on local dance by dance writer Tara Mitton Catao. By Tara Mitton Catao Saturday night, in support of the local dance scene, I went to the Duncan Theatre to see create.Dance.florida. Eight works were presented by 45 dance artists. Although there was a great variety in the caliber of the performers and the … [Read more...]