Music: Here’s a good sign that summers are more active than ever in South Florida. On Saturday night, no less a musical eminence than Deborah Voigt will kick off the second annual Miami Summer Music Festival, singing with the MSMF Orchestra led by festival founder Michael Rossi at Barry University’s Shepard Broad Performing Arts Center. Voigt will sing music by Richard Strauss … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 26-28
Music: Dean Peterson, a fine operatic bass with world-class credits (Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, etc.) whose work is familiar to South Florida audiences — most recently as Bluebeard in Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle for his new Opera Fusion company — is the subject of a fundraiser this Sunday at First Presbyterian Church in … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 19-21
Theater: Twenty years ago, Miami’s City Theatre began an annual festival of one-act plays, roughly 10 minutes in length. Over time, Summer Shorts has grown into one of the region’s most anticipated stage institutions. This year’s edition seems purposely downsized – only nine plays, performed by a versatile cast of six – but for once there is not a clunker in the bunch, either … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 12-14
Theater: Slow Burn Theatre goes less edgy for the summertime, with more popular fare to mark its final production in West Boca before moving its operations permanently to the Broward Center. Aiming at the entire family, the company serves up Little Shop of Horrors, the Howard Ashman-Alan Menken musical about a nerdy florist, his self-esteem-challenged girlfriend and an alien … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 29-31
Film: Pass on the apocalyptic nonsense of San Andreas and head instead to a muted French film, In the Name of My Daughter, about a triangular tug-of-war in Nice. Catherine Deneuve plays the manager and part owner of a tony casino, Guillaume Canet is her lawyer and business advisor Maurice and Adèle Haenel is Agnes, her daughter, who returns home from Africa, fresh from a … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 23-24
Film: For those obsessing over growing old, Swedish director Felix Herngren serves up a puckish comedy, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, starring a renowned comic actor from his country, Robert Gustafsson, as a man who makes his escape from his nursing home just as he approaches his century mark. He does indeed slip out a window and relives his … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 15-17
Theater: Opening this weekend at Palm Beach Dramaworks is Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, a play with music depicting a solo club act by jazz and blues legend Billie Holiday at a rundown Philadelphia lounge, just months before her death in 1959. Hooked on heroin, she is coaxed through a dozen of her iconic musical numbers by her longtime pianist. Tracey Conyer Lee, who had … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 8-10
Theater: Douglas Carter Beane’s sly comedy on the intersection of show business, the art of negotiation and sexual orientation, The Little Dog Laughed, is receiving a savvy and sexy production by Island City Stage at Empire Stage in Fort Lauderdale, through May 17. This is due largely to Chris Crawford as a sexually confused television star trying to make the leap to the movies … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 2-3
Music: It’s been a remarkably un-rainy SunFest down on the waterfront in West Palm Beach, and as the five-day music extravaganza winds down this weekend, the word has been good about the quality of the musicmaking. Still to come tonight are breakout bands such as Hozier and Dreamers, with the Pixies, Fall Out Boy, and for the old boomers in the crowd, Boston. Check out the … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: April 10-12
Books: For some reason, Palm Beach County has never had a books festival all its own, despite examples to the south in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Key West, but that changes Saturday. At the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, the one-day festival will include talks from a number of prominent writers and a little bit of celebrity juice. Actor Alan Cumming, whose searing … [Read more...]