Dance: The holidays are upon us, and that means so is The Nutcracker. When the Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky finished the score for the ballet in 1891, it was as part of a double-bill with his one-act opera, Iolanta. Tchaikovsky didn’t much like what he’d written, but Tsar Alexander III, who came to a dress rehearsal for the first performance in December 1892, loved it, … [Read more...]
Art features: Olympics pictures, ‘New Art’ at FAU
By Lucy Lazarony Sports photographer Adam Stoltman has been covering the dazzling highs and lows of Olympic competitions since 1980. “The Olympics are just this explosion of energy and passion and athletic power and grace in all directions at once,” Stoltman says. Olympix 2012, an exhibition of Stoltman’s photos from the London Olympics, is on display at the Palm Beach … [Read more...]
Until the end, mother, son bonded over books
Mary Anne Schwalbe and her son Will shared a longtime passion for books. She had been a dean at Harvard and Radcliffe and he was editor-in-chief of a major New York book publisher. When Mary Anne was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2007, the two decided to read books together in what he later dubbed “The End of Your Life Book Club.” Will Schwalbe describes his growing … [Read more...]
The triumph – and failure – of ‘Cloud Atlas’
There is at least one masterpiece in the bulky, multistoried, socio-political-philosophical edifice known as Cloud Atlas. It’s a narrative set in “neo-Seoul” in the year 2044. In a visionary futurescape somewhere between Blade Runner and The Fifth Element, the world is divided between humans and synthetic, cloned “fabricants,” though the relationship is just another variation … [Read more...]
The View From Home 42: Recent releases on Blu-ray and DVD
The View From Home may have seemingly taken a couple of months off, but our intrepid cineaste never stopped watching movies. Here are some highlights (and a couple of lowlights) to hit Blu-ray and DVD shelves in September and October. For almost 10 years, 1977’s The Devil, Probably (Olive, $22.46) has been on my personal short-list of Holy Grail films never released on DVD, … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Oct. 20-21
The documentary Side by Side, which opened Friday and runs through this week at the Lake Worth Playhouse, is as inside-baseball as movies get. An unlikely passion project for narrator Keanu Reeves, this studious doc features Reeves interviewing countless directors, cinematographers, producers, editors and actors about the inexorable transition from 35mm celluloid to hi-def … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: ‘Sylvia,’ ‘Madman,’ and ‘Wife’
Playwright A.R. Gurney turned 65 the year he wrote the canine comedy Sylvia, so it is completely understandable that he had male menopause on his mind. Taking a break from his usual pre-occupation with the cultural peculiarities of WASPs, he gives us a peculiar romance ― between a guy mired in the crisis of midlife and a stray mixed-breed mutt. Now on view at the Boca Raton … [Read more...]
Composer Waxman to get world premiere at Lynn
Time was when Donald Waxman was proud of his pen-and-ink hand, because the notes he wrote out for his manuscript scores were legible and performers found them easy to read. That all changed a few years ago at the hands of a student who dragged the composer into the digital notation era. “He said, ‘Mr. Waxman, I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to teach you how to use … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Sept. 1-2
Theater: Making an impressive debut is the new Island City Stage, which has arrived at Fort Lauderdale’s Empire Stage with the smart and twisty new play, The Twentieth Century Way by nimble wordsmith Tom Jacobson. The play is based on an actual incident from Long Beach, Calif., circa 1914, when out-of-work actors were employed in an elaborate sting operation to entrap local … [Read more...]
Rocker Duarte showcases exuberance, diversity at Bamboo Room
Guitarist and vocalist Chris Duarte hails from Texas, the home state of guitar heroes like Freddie King, Albert Collins, Johnny Winter, Jimmie Vaughan, and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. Yet that’s where the comparisons to those blues-based icons blur. Duarte’s influences extend further, encompassing both jazz/fusion and metal. Which likens his incendiary playing style more toward … [Read more...]