Film: As Variety puts it, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is the first slam-dunk of the year for a best picture Oscar nomination. Possibly so, but certainly in a summer season crowded with comic book-based superhero epics, Nolan’s tale of the crucial World War II battle in Northern France sticks out as a serious history lesson aimed at an adult audience. That is not to say there … [Read more...]
Dramaworks’s ‘Sweeney Todd’ will have a steampunk sensibility
Over the past eight years, Clive Cholerton has directed several of Stephen Sondheim’s challenging musicals, first at the now defunct Caldwell Theatre and more recently at Palm Beach Dramaworks. Although he considers the 1979 “musical thriller,” Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, to be the composer-lyricist’s masterpiece, Cholerton had shied away from producing … [Read more...]
Powerful acting brings quirky souls of ‘Inishmaan’ to vivid life
On the tiny, isolated island of Inishmaan, off the western coast of Ireland, either there is something peculiar in the water or the residents are genetically predisposed to quirkiness. Either way, few ever escape from their homeland. But at least Billy Claven, the so-called Cripple of Inishmaan, a 17-year-old orphan with a body mangled since birth, can dream of leaving his … [Read more...]
‘Cripple of Inishmaan’ leavens bleakness with dark humor
Palm Beach Dramaworks’ audiences can relax a little after the cerebral workout of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. The West Palm Beach stage company ends its 17th season with the less heady, but perhaps more emotionally involving, dark comedy The Cripple of Inishmaan by acclaimed Irish playwright – and occasional screenwriter – Martin McDonagh. “This is a narrative story in the Irish … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: April 21-23
Art: This Saturday, there will be demonstrations across the country in defense of science and the environment, both of which progressives think are under attack by the new administration in Washington. Whatever your political leanings, giving a thought or two to Mother Earth on Saturday is a laudable thing to do, and a small Lake Worth art shop, the Clay Glass Metal Stone … [Read more...]
‘Arcadia’ a feast of intellectual riches at Dramaworks
Far too many evenings of theater leave one hungry for mental nourishment. Then there are the plays of Tom Stoppard, who challenges the brain with heady subject matter and tickles the funny bone with audacious wordplay. Introduced to the world in 1966 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his deconstruction of Hamlet by way of Waiting for Godot, Stoppard was long … [Read more...]
Stoppard’s ‘Arcadia’ may be Dramaworks’s biggest challenge
Palm Beach Dramaworks audiences have had to grapple with the weighty plays of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee and such absurdists as Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. But with its first foray into the canon of Great Britain’s Tom Stoppard, producing his Olivier Award-winning Arcadia, as dense with ideas as it is with wordplay, the company may be serving up its most … [Read more...]
Teacher-student dance strongly acted in Dramaworks’s ‘Collected Stories’
The symbiotic relationship between mentor and protégé — teacher and student —comes under the microscope in Donald Margulies’ cerebral two-character play, Collected Stories, now receiving a smart, impassioned production at Palm Beach Dramaworks. First performed in 1996, this tale of artistic and personal ethics has particular resonance these days with charges of plagiarism in … [Read more...]
Dramaworks to give ‘Domestic Animals’ its first audience encounter
Palm Beach Dramaworks has been serving up thought-provoking productions of classic plays for 17 seasons, but it also understands the importance of developing new works for the theater. So it created the Dramaworkshop, a program of staged readings, workshops and bare-bones productions, searching for material for its mainstage, plays that can vie side-by-side with Albee, Williams … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 30, 2016-Jan, 1, 2017
Film: In 1981, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim and director Harold Prince adapted a Depression-era play on the ironies of show business success, Merrily We Roll Along, and opened it on Broadway to such critical and popular indifference that it destroyed their much-acclaimed string of musical collaborations. Now, 35 years later, original cast member Lonny Price looks at the … [Read more...]