Art: The Pérez Art Museum in Miami has scored a triumph by landing the first major U.S. retrospective of the work of Beatriz Milhazes, a Brazilian artist whose big, colorful abstract paintings brim with a riot of colors that nevertheless cohere with a pleasant, joyous effect. Jardim Botânico (her studio adjoins a botanical garden) covers the last 25 years of the Rio-based … [Read more...]
Music, science link arms for Max Planck lecture series in Jupiter
If you were to list the names of prominent scientists who also were interested in music, you’d be at it for some time. Along with the more or less well-known examples of chemist-composer Alexander Borodin, physician-organist Albert Schweitzer and physicist-violinist Albert Einstein, you could find any number of physicians, chemists, botanists, surgeons, astronomers and the … [Read more...]
Sundays: It’s always Media Time somewhere
By Myles Ludwig Consider time. Time, as in “Hey kids, what time is it?” If you are part of my generation, you most certainly know the answer to that question. It was lodged in our collective frontal lobes. Why, its Howdy Doody time, of course: 5:30 p.m. on Monday-Friday everywhere in our East Coast world. Glowing twilight, descending darkness, time to dismount and park our … [Read more...]
Community theater: ‘You Can’t Take It With You’ creaky but still funny at Delray Playhouse
By Dale King The venerable George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart comedy You Can’t Take It With You holds a pretty important place in the annals of film and television. The three-act play from the late 1930s was “the first-of-its-kind situation comedy,” said Randolph DelLago, the play’s director and artistic boss at the Delray Beach Playhouse, where Can’t Take It is now playing. That … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 20-22
Music: It’s the last weekend before Christmas, and if you haven’t had enough of the usual seasonal ear-tide, here’s your chance for a little bit more semi-sacred Gemütlichkeit before it’s on to the homefront. Tonight, Seraphic Fire comes to St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton for its annual reading of Messiah, George Frideric Handel’s hit from 1742 that is as much a … [Read more...]
Sundays: You can’t hide your prying eyes (and ears)
By Myles Ludwig I’d like to thank the CIA for paying part of my telephone bill this year. Unfortunately, that subsidy has come at a cost of the increasing deflation of what the Supreme Court decided in 1967 as one’s reasonable expectation of privacy according to the Fourth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution. No wonder Nixon was worried. He apparently forgot he was taping … [Read more...]
2013-14 arts preview: The season in books
Except perhaps for New York City, that capital of world literary culture, South Florida is blessed with an unexcelled literary calendar, starting more or less the moment you read this, and continuing deep into next spring. Three signature book events celebrate landmark anniversaries this season. Miami Book Fair, marking its 30th year, is among the oldest, while the Palm Beach … [Read more...]
Hula show at Duncan: Good for you, but needs rethinking
First, get rid of any preconceived notions that you might have of Hawaiian dance and the hula. You won’t see any of that in this performance by Halau Hula Ka No’eau. You will see a more historic and anthropological hula, one that was highly influenced by the missionaries and American and European culture. The women are covered from neck to ankle in granny-like Victorian … [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...]
‘Catch Me’ too weak to deserve good cast, sharp staging
The concept musical was an invention of the 1970s, typified by Chicago, which couched a tale of murders in Cook County as a series of vaudeville turns. When it works, the results are dazzling. When it doesn’t, you have a dull misfire like Catch Me If You Can, currently on view at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. Based on the 2002 Steven Spielberg flick starring Leonardo … [Read more...]