The Palm Beach Symphony Orchestra scheduled Benjamin Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra to begin an afternoon of music celebrating the culmination of a year’s teaching program. The Kravis Center was filled with children of all ages on Sunday, Oct. 5. I first heard this work in England in 1946. Senior High School classes from my birth city, Manchester, … [Read more...]
‘Good People’ speaks its truth in searing Maltz production
“Write what you know” goes the clichéd but all-too-true route to theatrical success, and playwright David Lindsay-Abaire knows about escaping poverty. Born and raised in a blue-collar neighborhood of South Boston, he became a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist (Rabbit Hole) as well as the adapter of his play Kimberly Akimbo into a much-acclaimed musical on Broadway this season. … [Read more...]
‘Steel Magnolias’: Definitely not a pity party
Maltz Jupiter Theatre audiences have usually seen director Marcia Milgrom Dodge’s innovative work on musicals (The King and I, Fiddler on the Roof), but she jumped at the opportunity to stage Robert Harling’s tragicomic Steel Magnolias, about a handful of Southern women who gather each Saturday at a makeshift beauty salon. While fueled by comedy, their mettle is tested when the … [Read more...]
First-rate ‘Iguana’ launches Dramaworks season
The Night of the Iguana may not be top-drawer Tennessee Williams, but it is receiving a first-rate rendering at Palm Beach Dramaworks, where the tale of connection and redemption at seedy Costa Verde hotel on the Mexican coast opens the company’s 17th season. The 1961 work explores whether, in Williams’ words, “two unstable lives can set the world on fire.” In its portrait … [Read more...]
With ‘Iguana,’ Dramaworks tackles Williams at his most personal
Palm Beach Dramaworks prides itself on producing plays by great American playwrights such as Edward Albee, Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill. Yet in its 17 seasons is has never tackled a script by the lyrical Southern dramatist Tennessee Williams. Until now. Its season has kicked off with The Night of the Iguana, the 1960 tale of a defrocked, unhinged minister and a reserved, … [Read more...]