Art: Community centers are not usually associated with striking art, but a chance encounter with vibrant colors at the Sugar Sand Park Community Center challenges that notion. Currently adorning the center’s walls are imaginative works featuring organic shapes and intriguing textures that bring to life what Farida Morris calls her happiest moments. Every color and composition … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 13-15
Film: Bicycling with Molière is a French film about two actors with large egos — if that is not redundant — rivals who are envious of each other to a fault. Gauthier (Lambert Wilson) is a television star who plays a brain surgeon on a popular French series, while the other has quit the business and moved to a small, remote village. Unsatisfied with his success, the TV actor … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 6-8
Film: Filmed in exquisite, though bleak black-and-white by Polish writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski, Ida is a curious hybrid of Holocaust tale, road trip movie and odd couple drama. The title teenage character is a nun-in-training who is ordered to meet her only living relative, a distant aunt named Wanda, before she can take her vows. So Ida treks to meet Wanda and from her … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 30-June 1
Theater: Broadway plays rarely tour anymore, so even last year’s Tony Award winner, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, became available to regional theaters like GableStage to produce and give their own spin to. Russian playwright Anton Chekhov hovers over the lives of three contemporary siblings — the offspring of lit professors with a penchant for … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 16-18
Theater: The Wick Theatre has been anything but consistent in its debut season, but when it is good, it is very, very good. That describes its final show on the season, the Tony Award-winning Fats Waller revue, Ain’t Misbehavin’. It helps considerably that director-choreographer Ron Hutchins gathered a company of seasoned veterans of the show, then stuck closely to the original … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 9-11
Art: The most recognizable art form the West knows from countries such as Iran and Afghanistan is what is generally still called the Oriental rug, a tapestry rich in symbolism, not just of design but of color, shape and size. An ancient tradition that still is alive today, the contemporary rugs of Afghanistan include motifs from that nation’s tumultuous recent history, … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 2-4
Theater: Daniel Maté, whose song cycle The Longing and the Short of It kicked off the season at The Theatre at Arts Garage, now returns with a long gestating project, The Trouble with Doug, a contemporary, comic take on Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In it, a 27-year-old computer wonk from Brooklyn suddenly transforms into a garden slug, much to the chagrin of his family and … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: April 11-13
Film: OK, it’s not a great weekend for film releases, but if you are still going through withdrawal after the football season, you can get a fictional look at the Cleveland Browns’ front office in Draft Day, opening wide this weekend. Kevin Costner gets his best role in years as the team’s general manager, Sonny Weaver Jr., wheeling and dealing in preparation for the crucial … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: April 4-6
Film: It is not exactly Martin Scorsese and Leo DiCaprio, or even the long-term collaboration between Lawrence Kasdan and Kevin Kline, but emerging filmmaker Drake Doremus has made a second film with his muse, Felicity Jones. He follows up Like Crazy from a few years ago with the more accomplished Breathe In, the tale of an upstate New York family whose lives are disrupted by … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: March 21-23
Theater: Yes, I know you have seen The King and I before, but director-choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge has performed her alchemy again, refreshing the 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein classic musical with stunning new visuals, including the second act ballet as a Thai shadow puppet extravaganza, and a terrific cast of largely Asian performers. As stunning as the design work is … [Read more...]