One sign of the growing maturity of the area’s classical music scene is the appearance of recordings by local artists. Up until relatively recently, only the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s six recordings on the Klavier label and the first discs by the Delray String Quartet could lay claim to representing a substantial segment of local art music activity, although there … [Read more...]
Sundays: Please, Kaity, bar the door
By Myles Ludwig Kids allegedly say the darndest things. Apparently, about 20,000 of them, in the case of the loquacious Kaitlyn Hunt. I remember chipmunk-cheeked Art Linkletter and later, the condescending king of Jell-O-land Bill Cosby, manipulating a batch of freckled-faced, Rockwellian 3-to-8- year-olds into a cul de sac of “cuteness” (read humiliation) with their own … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 24-25
Theater: Yes, the pickings are few for theater at this time of year in South Florida, but while the few companies that are operating in the dog days of August opt for feather light fare, Maltz Jupiter Theatre offers Shakespeare’s weighty, downbeat tragedy, Hamlet. But not the usual production, for it is part of the free summer mentorship program where the student cast and … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 9-11
Theater: Director Clive Cholerton has a way with staged readings of musicals, and especially with shows by the great composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, as he demonstrated several times at the Caldwell Theatre and now at Palm Beach Dramaworks with 1970’s Company. This look at the nature of marriage and relationships is said to be the first “concept musical,” full of … [Read more...]
The View from Home 51: An Ang Lee masterpiece, an existential road movie, and a vampire trifecta
The ice storm in The Ice Storm (Criterion, $34.99 Blu-ray, $30.27 DVD) creeps up gradually and almost innocuously on its characters, who seem to pay it little mind as it coats their Connecticut town in dripping stalactites – at least until it takes one of their own in the film’s unforgettable climax. But there are plenty of warning shots, for the lost souls captured in the … [Read more...]
Drew Tucker: Arts Garage’s master of music and education
Drew Tucker may wear more different hats than anyone else involved in the Palm Beach County arts scene. The Boynton Beach resident, who turns 33 on Aug. 21, is director of education and outreach for both his own Tucker Academy for the Arts and the Delray Beach-based Arts Garage. He's also a drummer and percussionist, on everything from mallet instruments like the vibraphone, … [Read more...]
Sundays: The cries and whispers of summer
By Myles Ludwig As we drift inexorably and aimlessly into the dog days of summer and the annual oppression of August begins to weigh upon us, I have to admit I’m glad not to wake up to the sound of the thundering hooves of the apocalypse again. It’s time for a rest. Outrage is behind us; we can barely work up a smirk about Weiner and Spitzer, a hot political pastrami … [Read more...]
The wrong man pursued, in powerful ‘The Hunt’
Lucas, the protagonist of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, is fond of horsing around. In the film’s opening scene, which looks like something out of the Grown-Ups movies, Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) and his coterie of male colleagues gather around a dock and strip down to their undies, placing bets on whether one of their pack will jump naked into the freezing November water of the … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 26-28
Film: James Cromwell, a perpetual supporting player, gets the lead role in an impressive independent film called Still Mine, about a Canadian farmer battling to keep his farm afloat just as his wife of 61 years (Geneviève Bujold) begins drifting into dementia. A capable carpenter, he decides to downsize to a new home he will build himself, but that is how he runs into the brick … [Read more...]
Quintets hit high points in PB Chamber Fest’s Week 3
For all the different varieties of chamber music there can be, strings tend to be heard more often in quartets and winds in quintets. The 22nd edition of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival has no string quartets on its programs this summer, but it came close Sunday at Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre, closing with a string quintet, and opening with two wind quintet miniatures. … [Read more...]