Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca is, with the exception of the one-act Il Tabarro, the most veristic of the Italian composer’s works, and it needs a lot of good red blood to make it work. I don’t mean literal blood, of course, though there could have been some in several spots in the opera Saturday night at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, but the figurative kind: A … [Read more...]
Strong Brahms, radiant Chopin at PB Symphony
Under the 16 glittering chandeliers of Mar-a-Lago, the most tastefully decorated concert hall in America, Palm Beach Symphony played to the great, the good and the glamorous: scattered among the 600 guests were stand out beautiful young women in designer evening gowns — a coterie from Donald Trump’s Miss America pageant, perhaps? Thanking Trump for his hospitality, Symphony … [Read more...]
Strong lead performances lift Ballet Palm Beach’s ‘Romeo’
It was an interesting experience to see Romeo and Juliet at Ballet Palm Beach in the middle of the Winter Olympics at Sochi; if ice dancing is a somewhat clunky country cousin of the ballet, it has the same general wish to express profound emotion through the arc of the body. In its performance Feb. 15 at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens, Colleen Smith’s … [Read more...]
Community theater: A strong ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ at LW Playhouse
By Dale King Lake Worth Playhouse has taken a bold step in its decision to present One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a generally grim drama. Based on the 1962 Ken Kesey novel that shed a cold, clinical light on the insensitive methods used to treat inmates at an insane asylum, the stage presentation adapted a year later by Dale Wasserman fell flat. Milos Forman breathed new … [Read more...]
Strong corps of singers lifts charming ‘Barber’ at PB Opera
There is a celebrated passage in Stendhal’s Life of Rossini in which the French writer describes an outing he and his friends took to Lake Como exactly 200 years ago, in the summer of 1814. The party had a wonderful time on the road from Brescia to Como, and an even better time staying at the beautiful inn run by one of Stendhal’s other friends once they got there. That night, … [Read more...]
Community theater: Strong acting trio drives ‘Crimes of the Heart’
By Dale King In the play, Arsenic and Old Lace, the lead character, Mortimer Brewster, comments on the mental stability of his relatives. “Insanity runs in my family,” he says. “Actually, it gallops.” The same might be said of the three MaGrath sisters in Crimes of the Heart, the tragicomedy now playing at the Broward Stage Door Theatre. While their cerebral processes may … [Read more...]
Community theater: Strong acting helps ‘Lovers’ at Delray Playhouse
By Dale King If you need a lightly comic play with a whimsical plot and likeable characters, you can usually find one among the dozens of shows crafted by Neil Simon. Delray Beach Playhouse has plucked Last of the Red Hot Lovers to open its 67th season. The play, which premiered in 1969 and was made into a movie three years later, hearkens back to the sexual revolution of the … [Read more...]
Strong singing makes for a rich ‘Traviata’ at FGO
South Florida has been a good place for the Mexican soprano Maria Alejandres. She has sung Lucia for Palm Beach Opera, Manuel de Falla for the Palm Beach Symphony, and Juliette for Florida Grand Opera, and Saturday night she returned to FGO as the best-loved of Giuseppe Verdi’s heroines, Violetta Valery, the doomed courtesan of La Traviata. She was joined by a very fine … [Read more...]
Strong Britten should be the start of something important for PBO
It is not too much to say that Palm Beach Opera inaugurated a new and exciting era for itself this week with its two presentations of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. And as it happens, it was quite a good production, with strong singing, smart staging and good orchestral playing of a very challenging score, and the company can justly be proud of it. But the most … [Read more...]
Strong lead performances stand out in FGO’s ‘Flute’
Because of its high content of fantasy and madcappery, Die Zauberflöte has always offered its presenters an irresistible opportunity to take any number of theatrical risks, confident that Mozart can take it. He can, and while the just-closed Florida Grand Opera production of Mozart’s great 1791 singspiel played it relatively safe from that standpoint, it nevertheless … [Read more...]