The novelist and short story writer Richard Ford lives in Maine, with a small apartment in Harlem for the two days a week he teaches at Columbia University. So of course he’s looking forward to his visit to Boca Raton on Sunday — but not for the reasons you might expect. He’s more interested in spring training baseball than in escaping the brutal weather in the Northeast. “I’m … [Read more...]
‘It’s just so human’: ‘La Bohème’ to open PB Opera season
If your task is to direct the most popular opera ever written, you might not have to stretch your conceptual-overhaul muscles all that much. “It’s a traditional opera that’s OK to keep traditional. You don’t get bored with it,” said Fenlon Lamb, who is directing Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, Palm Beach Opera’s season opener. “Coming to this and knowing it was going to be … [Read more...]
Sundays: Other eyes are keeping score
By Myles Ludwig All Hail Snowdenia, as Groucho might have said. The Angry Birds have been de-flocked and added to the No Fly list. Just when we thought this tawdry, lingering spy story might be coming to an end — finally — we learned this week that you folks (and you know who you are) who’ve been playing Angry Birds to wipe away the previously unoccupied hours have been … [Read more...]
Sundays: What we hath wrought
By Myles Ludwig Everything falls apart. Guaranteed. Here we stand on the threshold of the Age of Entropy rather than what we hoped might look like a renewal of the Age of Good and Plenty. And the view ain’t pretty. Entropy abounds. Find its ugly Medusa head of snakes in the electronic looting of Target; the bureaucratic, who me? boondoggle that crashed the Obamacare Website: … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 7-9
Film: There are so many major award-worthy movies playing now that a better-than-average film with a strong ensemble cast of box office names gets relegated to our digital art houses. I refer to A Late Quartet, a first feature from documentary maker Yaron Zilberman about an internationally known string quartet facing a threat to its survival when one of the group is diagnosed … [Read more...]
Quiet abstract sculpture at Norton speaks volumes about forms
Entering Beyond the Figure at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, one enters a darkened gallery in which strange forms emerge from the shadows. Although artifacts from our own culture, these forms also point toward a parallel universe — a realm where we understand and know objects with all our senses and our imaginations. The roughly 20 sculptural works on view do not … [Read more...]
Cellist Gabetta a standout at Detroit SO concert
If Sol Gabetta had done nothing else besides come out and play her concerto, the young Argentine cellist might have attracted additional attention for the balletic, kinetic way she moved behind her cello, or the way she smiled and nodded her head along with the music during the moments she wasn’t playing. But Gabetta also came out and did a fascinating encore, and with that, … [Read more...]