The second-ever winter series of the long-running Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival opens this week for a set of three programs over three months that will include a world premiere, a further exploration of two off-the-beaten path composers, and the appearance of a masterwork the festival is tackling for the first time in its two-decade history. Launched last year, the PBCMF … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: ‘Book of Mormon,’ ‘Radio City Christmas Spectacular’
They call them musical comedies, but you can count on a couple of hands the stage shows that are truly, laugh-out-loud funny. Certainly on that short list is The Book of Mormon, fueled by humor that is irreverent and profane, sprung directly from the fertile brains of South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone. These two wags are rookies when it comes to writing stage musicals, … [Read more...]
‘Menopause’ writer takes on drama of relationships
As playwright Robert Anderson once put it about writing for the theater, “You cannot make a living, but you can make a killing.” It seems unlikely that he ever met Jeanie Linders, who penned the international phenomenon Menopause the Musical, but he inadvertently described her mega-success with the “girls-night-out” revue about the female life passage of middle age. The show, … [Read more...]
A strong debut from a promising writer
Ayana Mathis was stunned when Oprah Winfrey called recently to say that she had selected Mathis’s debut work of fiction, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, as her next book club selection. Mathis’s well-crafted first novel tells the story of Hattie Shepherd, a teenager who leaves Georgia in 1923 and heads north to Philadelphia in search of a better life. Hattie and her lazy, … [Read more...]
Writer recounts her mission to the homeless
Danielle Steel is one of today’s best-known fiction authors, having written 85 novels that have sold more than 590 million copies. But hardly anyone knew that for more than a decade Steel and a small band of supporters were quietly and anonymously giving sleeping bags and winter jackets to homeless people in San Francisco. The program began after Steel’s 19-year-old son … [Read more...]
‘Life of Pi’ a ravishing visual achievement
I could have watched the opening montage of Life of Pi for a full three hours and walked away satisfied. Not just satisfied but cleansed, reinvigorated and positively transported, to a paradisical time and place that probably never existed. Shot in 3-D, the movie opens with images of a tropical zoo, where verdant foliage flanks scores of exotic animals as they traipse across … [Read more...]
Writer’s memoir of husband’s stroke meticulous, moving
When a blood clot lodges in the brain, patients may lose their ability to speak or write, a devastating setback for anyone, but particularly so for an author. Husband-and-wife authors Diane Ackerman and Paul West had devoted their lives to words until that awful day in 2003 when West suffered a stroke that left him devoid of language, an outcome known as aphasia. One Hundred … [Read more...]