By Dale King Student actors from the Department of Theatre and Dance at Florida Atlantic University wrap up their 2015-2016 performance season this weekend with performances of what many consider to be William Shakespeare’s greatest play, King Lear. The show opened last week to a sellout crowd at the Studio One Theater on the Boca Raton campus. Based on a Celtic folk tale, … [Read more...]
Sparkling Weber, gritty Nielsen at Lynn Philharmonia
I have heard many student orchestras in my time. The Lynn Philharmonia’s third program this past weekend, which began with Dvořák’s Othello overture and ended with Carl Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony, surpassed all the others with disciplined playing that sounded very professional. Granted the enthusiasm of youth, with its high energy output, has much to do with what we heard, but … [Read more...]
Community theater: Gritty, powerful ‘Cabaret’ closes LW Playhouse season
By Dale King If you’ve never seen the musical Cabaret, you still have time to catch the show at Lake Worth Playhouse before this well-tooled performance about sordid pre-war Berlin closes with a matinee Sunday. And if you’re already seen Cabaret, you are strongly advised — no, make that urged — to return. The Lake Avenue venue wraps up its 2014-2015 season with a production … [Read more...]
Mamet’s gritty ‘Glengarry’ impresses at Maltz
The real estate world of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Glengarry Glen Ross is a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog business, where the salesmen are pitted against each other to see who will win a Cadillac and who will lose his job. It is Mamet’s jaundiced view of the American way of commerce, an all-male landscape brimming with testosterone and casual profanity. As seen at the … [Read more...]
Gritty but empty, ‘Sunlight Jr.’ revels in urban misery
The best thing Sunlight Jr. has going for it is its setting. Laurie Collyer’s sophomore film was shot in Clearwater, one of the sprawling eyesores of metro Tampa, but it looks a lot of like certain stretches of Lake Worth, or Oakland Park, or North Miami, or hundreds of other depressed stretches of dollar stores, fast-food joints and scalding macadam, where the city meets the … [Read more...]
Gritty performances lift Arkansas swamp thriller
If anything can connect the ambitious young oeuvre of writer-director Jeff Nichols, it’s the sense of angst and dread permeating flyover country. The filmmaker behind Shotgun Stories, set amid a sibling feud in Arkansas, and the extraordinary Take Shelter, about a doomsday prepper in Ohio, Nichols is back in Arkansas for his third feature, Mud, an appropriate title for a grimy … [Read more...]
Gritty ‘Ajami’ gains power without preaching about Mideast life
There’s enough action in the opening five minutes of the Oscar-nominated Israeli film Ajami to fill the hourly quota of any prime-time drama: A young boy murdered, contract-style, in broad daylight while washing his car, a man defending himself by planting a bullet in a threatening, pistol-waving Bedouin mobster, that mobster’s family taking its paralyzing revenge on the … [Read more...]