If I told you the first hotel run solely by robots just opened and it features a dinosaur concierge, where in the world would you picture it? It counts if you mention anywhere in Japan — though, technically, it opened in Nagasaki. The Land of the Rising Sun is also proving to be the most machine-loving, with an invigorating robot culture and a robotic technology that is … [Read more...]
SunFest adapts, survives for changing times
SunFest is a little younger than Saturday Night Live, but bears similarities to the iconic TV series that recently celebrated its 40th anniversary. Starting out small and grass-roots in 1983, the sprawling West Palm Beach event, set for April 29-May 3, now calls itself “Florida’s largest waterfront music and art festival.” And as is the case with SNL, some people prefer the … [Read more...]
Preview to the Tonys, No. 1: ‘Gentleman’s Guide,’ ‘Beautiful,’ ‘If/Then’
For the runup to the Tony Awards on Sunday, ArtsPaper’s Hap Erstein takes a series of looks at the shows up for Broadway’s highest honors: Here are three of this season's Broadway musicals, vying for a box office boost from the Tony Awards broadcast Sunday: A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder — Romance is the motor of most musical comedies, but a team of writers, designers … [Read more...]
Sundays: Here, in my head, be dragons
By Myles Ludwig I worry that I’m losing my mind. I worry that the indefinable, ungraspable spirit that somehow, magically, animates my character, clicks on my personality, is slipping away, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, quark by quark, that my synapses are plaquing up and starting to slow down the everyday neural transmissions. For a writer, it’s one of the worst … [Read more...]
Time with the ‘Angels’ is well worth spending
Any art exhibit containing “Old Master” in its title takes the gambling out of the museum visit. There is no question that the art is going to be good. And so it is with Offering of the Angels: Old Master Paintings and Tapestries from the Uffizi Gallery, in which the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale has given us an easy one, with plenty of drama and musculature. More than 40 … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 27-June 1
Theater: Ed Asner as Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is one liberal icon playing another liberal icon in the one-man show FDR, opening a brief five-day run at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton beginning Wednesday evening. The play, written by Roosevelt scholar Dore Schary (Sunrise at Campobello), looks at the public man who presided over the country during the Great Depression … [Read more...]
‘Memory Palace’ a haunting story of illness, loss and remembrance
Norma Kurap Herr was a talented musician when she started hearing voices at age 19. She struggled with schizophrenia for the rest of her life, and was in and out of psychiatric wards and often homeless before she died at age 80. In this new memoir Mira Bartok, one of Herr’s two daughters, describes in heartbreaking detail her mother’s descent into chaos and its effect on the … [Read more...]
Here’s our Tony Awards quiz: Do better than Hap and win a prize
You read Palm Beach ArtsPaper, so chances are you are a theatergoer and you actually care who wins the Tony Awards this Sunday evening. You realize this puts you in a very small minority of the population, don’t you? Well, theater writer Hap Erstein considers himself in that group, too, and he hereby challenges you to a Tony Awards predictions duel. All you have to do is guess … [Read more...]