Theater: Ten years ago, West Palm Beach’s Actor’s Workshop & Repertory Company had a critical hit with a teen drama by Mark St. Germain (Freud’s Last Session). Called Out of Gas on Lover’s Leap, it concerned two newly graduated high schoolers — one the daughter of a fading rock star, the other the son of an ambitious, conservative U.S. senator. They go together to a promontory … [Read more...]
Sundays: Entering the Age of Age
By Myles Ludwig Need a new set of knees, a barely used stent to widen that two-lane blacktop to your heart into a six-lane turnpike complete with HOV lane, a turbo-charger for your conservative Golden Companion, or hot Pride Pursuit XL4 ATR scooter? How about a front wheel for your’99 Chevy Walker? Handgrips with neon plastic steamers for your high-speed Rollator or a new … [Read more...]
The View From Home 48: A great French comic’s film legacy
Unavailable for more than four decades thanks to legal disputes and film stock degradation – take your pick – the five feature films and three shorts from French auteur Pierre Étaix have finally been digitally restored and released on home video, and they’re absolutely irresistible (Criterion, $43.83 Blu-ray, $36.83 DVD). A clown both before and after his surprisingly limited … [Read more...]
The Tony nominations: Who’s afraid of being snubbed?
This season’s Tony Award nominations were announced Tuesday morning, and the teeth-gnashing and head-scratching has begun. Because there are so many fewer eligible productions than there are, say, films vying for Oscar recognition, the snubs and surprise inclusions are much more remarkable. Typically, when stars from other media make the financial sacrifice of starring on … [Read more...]
Sundays: The few, the proud, the Brooklynized
By Myles Ludwig A couple of weeks ago, T, the special magazine-like issue of The New York Times published an article about a growing trend they called the “globalization of Brooklyn” or “Brooklynization.” Theoretically, there could be a Brooklynized neighborhood in Beijing. The word, “Brooklynization,” reminds me of the corruption of the word “factoid,” invented by Norman … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: April 26-28
Theater: OK, procrastinators, this is the final weekend to catch the first-rate Palm Beach Dramaworks production of Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King, the great absurdist playwright’s comic meditation on death. In it, the king of a shabby, rundown realm learns that he has only 90 minutes left to live ― not coincidentally the lengths of this one-act play ― so he takes stock of his … [Read more...]
Postcard from New York No. 6: ‘The Nance’
If Wednesday was a dessert day where all I had to do was watch two splashy musicals, Thursday I had to do actual work. I ran around the city doing four different interviews about shows coming to the Kravis Center next season. First it was downtown to talk to Hal Luftig, producer of the Evita revival that is on the Kravis on Broadway schedule next year, then back up to the … [Read more...]
Sundays: Sidelining the old narrators
By Myles Ludwig The Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath is a McLuhanesque moment: the medium has indeed finally become the message. This is in no way meant to trivialize the events and the horror and the victims and the PTSD that the citizens of Boston and perhaps all of America will need to find a way to recover from. This story had many of the characteristics of … [Read more...]
Postcard from New York, No. 1: ‘The Trip to Bountiful’
I arrived in New York Saturday morning for an eight-day visit, during which I will see 10 or 11 plays and musicals, the most promising productions on Broadway and off, as the season winds to a close. Less than six hours after I took off from West Palm Beach, I was in a fourth row center seat at the Sondheim Theatre for one of the final previews of Horton Foote’s The Trip to … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: April 19-21
Art: A stunning series of space shuttle photos by photographer Mark Widick opens Saturday at the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County’s Lawrence A. Saunders Foundation Gallery in Lake Worth. The exhibition runs through May 18. The International Panoramic Photographic Society, Digital Imaging Association, and Google Earth have each published Widick’s photography. His … [Read more...]