By Myles Ludwig I happened to be thinking about semiotics this week — what signs mean, stand for, whether they’re iconic or indexical or just plain cigars — when the new Rolling Stone magazine cover slams into the bandwidth with the angry splat of a Siberian meteor. This must be some kind of cosmic synchronicity, I thought. Here I am trying to get my mind around a rather … [Read more...]
Rustic Brahms and engaging American Romanticism in chamber fest’s Week 1
Johannes Brahms had a healthy respect for the music of the past, and probably would have made a formidable professional musicologist had he chosen to go that route. Even in his earlier works there is an engagement with older forms that would bear fruit throughout his compositional career, until his very last work, a series of 11 austerely beautiful organ chorale preludes based … [Read more...]
Our Ultimate Sondheim Quiz returns
All too rarely do area theaters tackle the musicals of Broadway’s pre-eminent composer-lyricist, Stephen Sondheim. But this summer Florida Atlantic University is producing the revue Side by Side by Sondheim as well as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in its 2013 Festival Rep (now through July 21.) In addition, Palm Beach Dramaworks has selected Sondheim’s … [Read more...]
The View From Home 50: An Asian crime saga, Hitchock redux, and a baffling Czech epic
For an Asian crime thriller, a continental genre rich with tough guys who know their way around firearms, it’s refreshing to watch a hero who is chaste, square and can’t throw a punch, let alone handle a gun. This is the case with Young-Jak (Kang-woo Kim), the errand-boy and unwitting protagonist of The Taste of Money (IFC, $22.48 DVD), the latest cult film from South Korea’s … [Read more...]
‘The Unwinding’: Tearing down the house that FDR built
In his ambitious new book, George Packer describes the rise of “organized money” in business and politics and the collapse, or unwinding, of “the Roosevelt Republic that had reined for almost half a century.” Packer’s nimble prose moves the story along, although the book suffers from disorganization and an odd mixture of short profiles of several celebrities and longer … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 28-30
Theater: A summer tradition in South Palm Beach County is Florida Atlantic University’s Festival Rep, a series of productions in rotating repertory featuring current and recent students of the department of theater and dance, plus a few working professional mentors. This season the emphasis is on the works of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim through two of his shows — the … [Read more...]
‘Wedding Singer’ pleasant, but lightweight
Once you make your reputation with edgy, unconventional musicals like Bat Boy, Assassins and Side Show, it is hard to switch gears, go mainstream and be completely satisfying. That is the challenge facing the adventuresome Slow Burn Theatre Company, which feels obligated to pull back from the offbeat during the summer, when its available audience pool is smaller. So it has … [Read more...]
Sundays: The spectacle of justice
By Myles Ludwig Justice. Now here is a concept as thin and as slippery as a fine slice of sashimi and as complex as a celebrity fragrance profile. Philosophers have been arguing about it since Socrates and Plato, parsing into as many cultural and ethical Apps as iTunes can stock and it’s still not really clear what it is or how it works. Except as some kind of culture-bound … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 14-16
Art: An exhibit titled County Contemporary: All Media Juried Show, composed of 44 works by 36 Palm Beach County artists using a wide range of media, is on display beginning today at the main gallery of the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County in Lake Worth. Mark Richard Leach, the executive director of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., … [Read more...]
History and art meet on Clematis Street
A splash of public art has recently appeared in unexpected places in downtown West Palm Beach’s Clematis Street District. Thanks to support from the Downtown Development Authority and the Historical Society of Palm Beach County, six formerly graffiti-laden metal electric utility boxes have received an art makeover as part of the city’s Art in Public Places initiative. The six … [Read more...]