Addressing the elegantly dressed audience at the Eissey Campus Theatre on March 20, Ballet Palm Beach’s founder and choreographer, Colleen Smith, said she thought about creating a ballet from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby last season. Written about the excesses of the years after World War I, Smith felt Fitzgerald’s story was really about the American Dream, in … [Read more...]
Powerful Prokofiev, middling Rachmaninov from Jerusalem SO
By Robert Croan There was a sense of intended internationalism and ecumenism about the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra’s Feb. 25 performance on the Broward Center Classical Series. At the start, the orchestra, conducted by Russian-born, American-trained Dmitry Yablonsky, played The Star-Spangled Banner followed by the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah. The repertory was … [Read more...]
Strong singing makes for thrilling ‘Norma’ at FGO
Florida Grand Opera’s current production of Norma, Vincenzo Bellini’s beloved bel canto singfest from 1831, has a little something extra for its patrons: An added aria by Richard Wagner. But it already has the basic thing it needs, and that’s thrilling singing. Working off a strong directorial vision from Nic Muni, FGO’s Norma features standout vocal work from its four chief … [Read more...]
Powerful Prokofiev, Bernstein from Boston Brass, PB Symphony
The quintet known as Boston Brass — two trumpets, horn, trombone and tuba — joined the Palm Beach Symphony on Monday at the Flagler Museum for two memorable pieces dedicated to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: one by Prokoviev, the other by Bernstein. Devoid of its own brass section of 12 players, Palm Beach Symphony fielded strings and percussion only. What an irony: In the … [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...]
Letter from Bard: Powerful production makes good case for ‘The Wreckers’
The Bard (College) Summerscape Festival at Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., has gained fame for digging up old operas and breathing new life into them. Dame Ethel Smyth’s 1906 opera, The Wreckers, ended its five-performance run in the magnificent Frank Gehry Theatre on Aug. 2, selling out to full houses. Leon Botstein, the artistic director and conductor of Summerscape, revived … [Read more...]
Letter from Tanglewood: Concert honors American masters
All music was once new. But in America, ever since Serge Koussevitzky founded the Berkshire Music Center on July 8, 1940, in Lenox, Mass., composers and their new music found a home for experimentation and performance. Randall Thompson’s Alleluia was the inaugural piece that balmy summer afternoon at Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in July and August … [Read more...]
‘Pixels’: The empty-headed summer blockbuster returns
From Furious 7, Mad Max: Fury Road and Avengers: Age of Ultron to Jurassic World, Spy and Ant-Man, this summer’s rollout of blockbusters has been, to the surprise of this critic at least, creatively robust. It’s about time an expensive, unsalvageable bomb landed on a thousand screens and returned the blockbuster to its comfortable place of intellectual hollowness and artistic … [Read more...]
Community theater: ‘Sisters of Swing’ brings Andrews Sisters back, memorably
By Dale King Sisters of Swing, the musical biography of the famed Andrews Sisters now playing at the Broward Stage Door Theatre, is an entertaining bit of harmonious history, a tuneful testament to how three sisters from Minnesota broke free from the pack of mid-20th century vocal groups to create an unforgettable sound that captured the heart of a nation. The show wraps 20 … [Read more...]
The Broadway season, reviewed (Part 2): ‘On the 20th Century,’ ‘Hand to God’
Between her as yet unsuccessful attempts to get a foothold in the movies or on television, Kristin Chenoweth keeps returning to Broadway, and the theater is richer for it. This season, she has jumped headlong into a role she was born to play, movie star Lily Garland in a snazzy revival of 1978’s On the Twentieth Century, a screwball showbiz comedy adapted into an over-the-top … [Read more...]