By Dale King If history had unfolded the way it does in the wacky musical Monty Python’s Spamalot, we might all be riding imaginary horses, negotiating with the knights who say “Ni,” fending off insults from surly Frenchmen and slapping each other with fish. Lake Worth Playhouse drops the curtain on its 2013-14 season with a rollicking rendition of the show adapted from the … [Read more...]
Postcard From Broadway No. 5: ‘Bullets Over Broadway’ fizzles
One reason I usually come to New York this week each year is that it marks the deadline for Tony Award eligibility, and many shows open at the last opportunity, like doing homework in home room just before it is due. But the main reason is to catch The Easter Bonnet Competition, a two-day event that marks the end of the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS fundraising season. To … [Read more...]
Sundays: The medium is the memory hole
By Myles Ludwig I was busy searching for the plane this week. I looked in the clouds of Google and Microsoft, but they were obscured by bad weather and massive hacker attacks. Nearly lost my identity. I sifted through the wreckage of the Washington state mudslide, pushed aside the giant snowballs of the Mt. Everest avalanche hoping for a sign, and stalked the rubble of the … [Read more...]
Postcard From Broadway No. 2: ‘Act One’ and ‘A Gentleman’s Guide’
A few days before I arrived in New York, it snowed here, as most residents are eager to point out, as they enjoyed today's bright, sunny, 65-degree spring day. I naturally celebrated the great weather by burrowing indoors to take in two shows. In the afternoon, it was Act One, James Lapine's epic adaptation of writer-director Moss Hart's 1959 autobiography of escape from the … [Read more...]
‘The Trouble With Doug’: Musical reimagines Kafka, with whimsy
Nearly eight years ago, a couple of NYU musical theater students began working on a show that was loosely inspired by Franz Kafka’s nihilist social satire, Metamorphosis. In development at theaters from New York to Palo Alto to London ever since, The Trouble With Doug begins performances this evening at the Theatre at Arts Garage in Delray Beach. It has been a long road for … [Read more...]
‘Le Week-End’: Nick and Meg aux enfers
Le Week-End, the scabrous new dramedy from Notting Hill’s Roger Michell, is sort of like a feature-length extrapolation of the Morrissey song “Everyday Is Like Sunday,” to which a Brit like Michell is undoubtedly familiar. In the sadcore hit from 1988, Moz is on a beachside holiday, but he’s miserable, of course — praying for Armageddon to decimate the coastal town where “every … [Read more...]
The View From Home 59: Hawking’s history, a gruesome morality tale, coming of age in the South, and more
A Brief History of Time: For years, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time has been sitting on my shelf, its spine ashamedly uncracked, waiting for the hypothetical day when I have hours of time on my hands and the irrepressible desire to read sentences six times before possibly comprehending them. Forgive me if I’d gallop a bit quicker toward completing an 84-minute movie … [Read more...]
Mahler’s Second at Lynn makes powerful impact
Something of a musical milestone took place the other day at Lynn University when the school’s conservatory orchestra, accompanied by two soloists and the Master Chorale of South Florida, gave two performances of Gustav Mahler’s gigantic Resurrection Symphony (No. 2 in C minor). These performances had actually been planned for the 2012-13 season, but Lynn’s hosting of one of … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: April 4-6
Film: It is not exactly Martin Scorsese and Leo DiCaprio, or even the long-term collaboration between Lawrence Kasdan and Kevin Kline, but emerging filmmaker Drake Doremus has made a second film with his muse, Felicity Jones. He follows up Like Crazy from a few years ago with the more accomplished Breathe In, the tale of an upstate New York family whose lives are disrupted by … [Read more...]
For Palm Beach Film Festival, 19th time may be the charm
To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Reports of the death of the Palm Beach International Film Festival have been greatly exaggerated.” Dismissing the naysayers who will tell you that the 19-year-old celebration of movies from around the globe is on the verge of folding, longtime PBIFF president and chief executive officer Randi Emerman insists, “You have to be a believer. Because of … [Read more...]