Vocabulary fans, the word for today is “zoetic.” It’s an adjective, meaning “pertaining to life,” so it is not a bad name for a new live stage company, unless you happen to worry that theatergoers in South Florida will not buy tickets for a troupe it cannot pronounce or spell, let alone know what it means. Still, welcome Zoetic Stage, the brainchild of producing artistic … [Read more...]
Soldiers of ‘Untold War’ bear awful moral burden alone
Most civilians are unaware of the physical and psychic horrors endured by soldiers, according to this timely new book by Nancy Sherman, a professor at Georgetown University. Sherman says up front that The Untold War “is not a political tract for or against a war.” Rather, it is about “the inner battles … the moral weight of war that individual soldiers carry on their shoulders … [Read more...]
Broadway season was strong in new plays, weak in musicals
You know the drill by now. Sunday night’s Tony Awards ceremony will do its best to put a happy face on the Broadway season, but in fact, this was the worst year for musicals in a long time. Note the Best Score category, which could only find two musicals to nominate and had to settle for singling out two plays for their incidental music. Of the four shows nominated for Best … [Read more...]
New West Palm dance company sets May 1 debut
Ballet Florida, a West Palm Beach institution for almost a quarter-century, closed its doors in June 2009, leaving a vacuum that a new not-for-profit professional dance company hopes to help fill. Explore Dance Theater, founded in 2009 by two former principal dancers of Ballet Florida, Tracy Mozingo and Douglas Gawriljuk, is hosting its premiere company showing at the … [Read more...]
New Norton chief aiming her museum for the top
A couple of weeks separate the Norton Museum from its new chief: Hope Alswang, a New York City native with a first name that sounds like a promise. This is who the museum's board of trustees chose as director and chief executive officer after conducting a national search that begun soon after Christina Orr-Cahall left in May of last year. The announcement came last month. … [Read more...]
Lynn opens new concert hall; venues set 2010-11 classical series
Lynn University on Thursday opened its new $14.9 million concert hall, adding a much-needed venue for theater and music in south Palm Beach County. The Keith C. and Elaine Johnson Wold Performing Arts Center, which took about 18 months to build, features a 752-seat hall with adjustable acoustic panels, a video studio, plus scene and costume shops, and soon will have an … [Read more...]
Grief memoir moving, but oddly unhelpful
Kay Redfield Jamison has often written and spoken eloquently about her lifelong struggle with manic depression, otherwise known as bipolar illness. In her new book, Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir, she writes with the same honesty and passion about coping with the death of her husband, Richard Wyatt, from cancer. Both were well-known psychiatrists at Johns Hopkins University … [Read more...]
Violinist Numata shows power, wide range in Duncan recital
If eclecticism is the name of the game for today's younger virtuosi, then to be successful these days requires that you play all those different kinds of pieces equally well. It won't do, in other words, to have a middling Mozart but an incandescent Shostakovich. Too much is expected, but that doesn't mean you can't shine a little brighter in some things more than in others. … [Read more...]
New West Boca theater troupe to bow with ‘Bat Boy’
Welcome to the area the Slow Burn Theatre Company, a new professional troupe that is the passion project of Patrick Fitzwater and Matthew Korinko, two former St. Louis performers-directors who moved here in 2008 and have wanted to start their own stage operation ever since. They will be the first to acknowledge that the shaky economy does not make this an ideal time to begin … [Read more...]
Lou Tyrrell sees a great new future for Florida Stage at the Rinker
On Nov. 30, Florida Stage and the Kravis Center announced a partnership agreement in which the Manalapan theater company that specializes in developing new plays would move its operation to the Rinker Playhouse, a flexible “black box” performance space within the West Palm Beach complex, beginning in July 2010. In mid-December, Palm Beach ArtsPaper’s Hap Erstein sat down … [Read more...]