For nearly 25 years, the musicians of the Symphony of the Americas have presented Summerfest, a series of concerts and cultural exchanges that take the Fort Lauderdale-based group to other parts of the Americas as well as venues across the tri-county area and Treasure Coast. This summer, the group’s string section is joined by the Arpeggione Chamber Orchestra of Hohenems, … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 25-26
Theater: J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is one of the best known, most enduring stories ever written. So much so that there are numerous adaptations — like Peter and the Starcatcher, Finding Neverland and the soon-to-be-released movie Pan — that draw on our collective awareness of the boy who never grew up. Tonight, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre presents Peter Pan Jr., a live stage … [Read more...]
‘Pixels’: The empty-headed summer blockbuster returns
From Furious 7, Mad Max: Fury Road and Avengers: Age of Ultron to Jurassic World, Spy and Ant-Man, this summer’s rollout of blockbusters has been, to the surprise of this critic at least, creatively robust. It’s about time an expensive, unsalvageable bomb landed on a thousand screens and returned the blockbuster to its comfortable place of intellectual hollowness and artistic … [Read more...]
The View From Home 71: A French ‘Twin Peaks,’ Czech surrealism, Hitch, Ibsen, Schiller and more
Li’l Quinquin: We’re barely 10 minutes into this three-and-a-half-hour Bruno Dumont epic (Kino, $22.99 Blu-ray, $19.99 DVD), and surrealism has gripped us for the long haul: A helicopter airlifts a cow from its resting place in a seemingly inaccessible bunker, a shot as majestically strange as the Christ statue hovering over the Roman aqueduct in La Dolce Vita. Only this symbol … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 19-21
Theater: Twenty years ago, Miami’s City Theatre began an annual festival of one-act plays, roughly 10 minutes in length. Over time, Summer Shorts has grown into one of the region’s most anticipated stage institutions. This year’s edition seems purposely downsized – only nine plays, performed by a versatile cast of six – but for once there is not a clunker in the bunch, either … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 12-14
Theater: Slow Burn Theatre goes less edgy for the summertime, with more popular fare to mark its final production in West Boca before moving its operations permanently to the Broward Center. Aiming at the entire family, the company serves up Little Shop of Horrors, the Howard Ashman-Alan Menken musical about a nerdy florist, his self-esteem-challenged girlfriend and an alien … [Read more...]
The bling’s the thing in sparkly exhibit at Delray Center’s Cornell Museum
By Lucy Lazarony The art of Bling: Art That Shines, does just that: It shines, sparkles, glitters and glows. And some pieces even light up. It’s art that gives you a lift. Pop artist Camomile Hixon proclaims “YES” in one painting and the word “DREAM” is repeated 17 times in another. There are wildly colorful works such as Ashley Longshore’s paintings of Kate Moss and Audrey … [Read more...]
Delray SQ, Aleida deliver impressive Danielpour at Mainly Mozart
For two centuries or more, the string quartet has been the favored medium for a composer’s most intimate, profound thoughts. In his series of quartets, the American composer Richard Danielpour has explored themes of the Holocaust (No. 3, Psalms of Sorrow) and farewell (No. 6, Addio), and for his Quartet No. 7, which received its world premiere May 31 in Coral Gables at the … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 29-31
Film: Pass on the apocalyptic nonsense of San Andreas and head instead to a muted French film, In the Name of My Daughter, about a triangular tug-of-war in Nice. Catherine Deneuve plays the manager and part owner of a tony casino, Guillaume Canet is her lawyer and business advisor Maurice and Adèle Haenel is Agnes, her daughter, who returns home from Africa, fresh from a … [Read more...]
The Broadway season, reviewed (Part 2): ‘On the 20th Century,’ ‘Hand to God’
Between her as yet unsuccessful attempts to get a foothold in the movies or on television, Kristin Chenoweth keeps returning to Broadway, and the theater is richer for it. This season, she has jumped headlong into a role she was born to play, movie star Lily Garland in a snazzy revival of 1978’s On the Twentieth Century, a screwball showbiz comedy adapted into an over-the-top … [Read more...]