Film: When Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, he never imagined it would become the inspiration for a high school comedy such as Easy A, but screenwriter Bert V. Royal plants his tongue firmly in cheek and comes up with a wise, wise-assed morality tale set at Ojai (Calif.) High, about a misfit named Olive who lies about losing her virginity and gets swept up in a … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 20-22
Film: Tilda Swinton broke into the wider consciousness back in 1992 with her star turn as Orlando, the androgynous hero/heroine of Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending novel of a Tudor-era Zelig who begins as a debonair male court poet in 1588 and ends up in 1928 as a married woman. In Sally Potter’s lovely-to-look-at film, Quentin Crisp makes a marvelous Queen Elizabeth I, … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 30-Aug. 5
Dance: Julie Kent, long a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre, takes the title role tonight and through the weekend in Giselle, with the Boca Ballet Theatre at Florida Atlantic University’s University Theatre. Kent, one of the best-known ballerinas of her generation, partners with another ABT standout, Marcelo Gomes, for these three performances of the beloved … [Read more...]
Stage Door’s ‘Chaperone’ delivers the daffy goods
Broward Stage Door Theatre has a tendency to overreach with its musicals, biting off a beloved, not-quite elaborate show and not quite delivering on the pleasures we once enjoyed with it. Now, however, it is presenting a modest little show, the intermission-less The Drowsy Chaperone, a multiple Tony Award winner from 2006 that is bound to be new to most of its audience, and … [Read more...]
Bulletin from Broadway No. 1: ‘Red,’ ‘Promises, Promises’
Oh, the sacrifices I make for you, my readers. I am currently in New York City, enduring a week of theater, to fill you in on the season here, either as a guide for your future visits to Broadway or to whet your appetites for potential touring editions to South Florida. Or, OK, just because I craved an immersion into good theater for my own sake. So I will be seeing 10 shows … [Read more...]
A very Tony day with Chita and Faith
For fans of Tony Award-winning musical theater stars, Palm Beach County was a great place to be Tuesday. At 2 p.m., at the Kravis Center, I caught the tireless Chita Rivera and her one-woman concert, My Broadway. That evening, still on a high from her performance, I headed to the Colony Hotel’s Royal Room and saw Faith Prince’s tour de force cabaret act, which she is recording … [Read more...]
Playwright Laufer thrilled with reponse to ‘Sirens’
She has had three of her plays premiere at Florida Stage and one of them -- the apocalyptic comedy, End Days -- had an off-Broadway run last spring. But with her latest work, Sirens, showcased at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky., last month, Deborah Zoe Laufer landed on the radar of the nation’s regional non-profit theaters and commercial … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Feb. 12-16
Art: Next week, Upon a Time, an exhibition featuring collaboration between ceramic sculptor Brian Somerville and painter Sibel Kocabasi, opens on the Eissey Campus of Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Kocabasi, a Turkish-born artist who received the Hector Ubertalli Award in 2006 and exhibits widely, creates paintings that “reflect the ultimate potential for … [Read more...]
With Oscar nominations, Academy goes the populist route
The first results of the Academy Awards’ grand experiment to cheapen -- uh, I mean widen -- the Best Picture nominations were announced this morning, and predictably, there were a couple of films that made the cut that would not have come close in past years. Let’s just call it the Blind Side Effect, named for the sentimental white-family-aids-the-illiterate-black-athlete … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Jan. 22-28
Art: For the past 36 years, John McCoy has been teaching visual arts and art history to students at Florida Atlantic University. Many of his students now have successful art careers, and some of them have come together to celebrate McCoy's ceramics work in a retrospective exhibition. The list of exhibitors for John McCoy and Friends reads like a Who’s Who of South Florida … [Read more...]