Theater: If, like me, you were floored by Maureen Anderman in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ A Delicate Balance, you will not need much coaxing to see her in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Doubt: A Parable, John Patrick Shanley’s clash of wills between a suspicious nun and an affable priest (Jim Ballard) who she is convinced behaved inappropriately with a 12-year-old male student. And this … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks, Feb. 1-3
Art: High fashion is on display at the Boca Museum of Art with Impact: 50 Years of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. The exhibition, which was spearheaded by Diane von Furstenberg, is the first museum exhibition to celebrate the artistry of American fashion designers on the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Almost 600 designers have been members of the council … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Jan. 12-13, 2013
Music: Pianists and lovers of Bach are in a high state of excitement over Sunday afternoon’s concert at the Arsht Center’s Knight Concert Hall featuring the great American pianist Simone Dinnerstein in a complete, uninterrupted performance of the Goldberg Variations. This is the work – a tremendously impressive display of compositional ingenuity ― that helped make Dinnerstein’s … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Jan. 5-6, 2013
Film: Surely one of the best films of 2012 and a shoo-in for Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress is Zero Dark Thirty, the tense, suspenseful, well-researched and somewhat conjectural tale of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It comes from filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow ― the only woman to win an Oscar for feature direction ― and screenwriter Mark … [Read more...]
Weekend picks: Dec. 22-24
Theater: Finally, some good news. The Kravis Center and the stagehands’ union have come to an agreement which will allow the remainder of the three-week run of Jersey Boys to proceed, after four performances had been canceled. The long-running Tony-winning musical biography tells the surprisingly involving story of the rise to fame of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 14-16
Art: Here’s something unusual and rather precious, which if you think about it is an ideal sort of something for the Christmas season. Britain-based artists Davy and Kristin McGuire spent four months in 2009 creating what can only be described as a multimedia pop-up book. The Icebook tells the story of a princess who lures a boy into the forest so he can warm her heart of ice; … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 7-9
Film: There are so many major award-worthy movies playing now that a better-than-average film with a strong ensemble cast of box office names gets relegated to our digital art houses. I refer to A Late Quartet, a first feature from documentary maker Yaron Zilberman about an internationally known string quartet facing a threat to its survival when one of the group is diagnosed … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 1-2
Art: The American version of Impressionism is perhaps best-known in the work of painters such as Mary Cassatt and Childe Hassam, but there is a rich tradition that comes from eastern Pennsylvania, and today the Society of the Four Arts opens an exhibition that brings that tradition to a wider audience. Painting the Beautiful contains more than 60 paintings from the James A. … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 23-25
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...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 10-11
Film: Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner first collaborated in 2005 on Munich, and now they work together again on an even more successful look back, this time on Lincoln, a chronicle of the final months of our 16th president. It is a word-heavy history lesson, but a fascinating one, as Honest Abe juggles the endgame of the Civil War with pushing through a constitutional … [Read more...]