Noel Coward would become one of Great Britain’s wittiest, most successful high-style playwrights, known for such enduring comedies of manners as Private Lives, Present Laughter and Design for Living. In 1925, though, at the age of 25, he wrote the less well-known, lesser Easy Virtue, a dark-toned tale of an American divorcee who marries into a well-heeled British family, most … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 9-10
Film: I have rarely recommended a horror film, but Ari Aster’s directing debut, Hereditary, is so creepy good, with a stunning central performance by Toni Collette, that it exceeds the genre. She plays a woman disturbed by the recent death of her mother, whose genes have apparently infected the family and set in motion a series of tragedies. When her stoner son reluctantly … [Read more...]
FAU’s student troupe tosses off a breezy ‘Rivals’
By Dale King Those sometimes antic, but always creative student actors at Florida Atlantic University have come up with some truly entertaining shows the past couple of years. Many, including the current production, take audiences back to the days of late 18th-century England, when manners really mattered and gentlemen wooed ladies with charm, grace and occasional … [Read more...]
FAU Festival Rep’s ‘Sense’ and ‘Woods’ entertain and nourish
The best theater pieces involve characters who want something very badly. Perhaps that is what links Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical, Into the Woods, which are the cornerstones of this year’s Festival Rep on Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton campus. In the former, two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, yearn for … [Read more...]
Happily ever after? FAU’s ‘Into the Woods’ takes on the question
In the often lightweight genre of musicals, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim has tended towards the grim, in shows about a homicidal barber, presidential assassins and America’s opening and despoiling of Japan. Then there is his Grimm musical, Into the Woods, written with his Sunday in the Park with George collaborator James Lapine. Its first act, which interweaves several … [Read more...]