To paraphrase a famous quote by Jerome Kern about Irving Berlin: “Jan McArt has no place in South Florida theater. She is South Florida theater.” Certainly she was producing and appearing in stage shows from Key West to Boca Raton when there was no other theater in the region to speak of. Most particularly, she built and ran the Royal Palm Dinner Theatre in Boca for 24 … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: March 17-18
Film: Love, Simon is a fairly conventional coming-of-age story about a high school senior, except that he is unapologetically gay and – once he comes out to them – his friends and family are uniformly supportive of his sexual orientation. That makes for a lack of dramatic conflict, but still the film is surely a first by a major studio (Fox 2000). The only pushback comes from a … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: March 18-19
Music: Florida Grand Opera continues its remake of itself as more of a cutting-edge company today as it opens the first of five presentations of Before Night Falls, the 2010 opera by Cuban-American composer Jorge Martín, which is based on the memoirs of the dissident Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. The opera tells the story of Arenas’s talent, his homosexuality and suffering from … [Read more...]