Film: You can choose this weekend between two Marie Antoinettes, one historical and the other contemporary. Benoît Jacquot’s Farewell, My Queen is period-authentic, depicting Marie’s endgame from the storming of the Bastille to her date with the guillotine. It is an impressive film, but if you are looking for something more contemporary, see The Queen of Versailles, the tale of Jackie Siegel, the zaftig trophy wife of the founder and CEO of Westgate Resorts, the world’s largest timeshare company. He is building for her a replica of Versailles in Orlando, a 90,000-square-foot home, the largest house in America. Chances are director Lauren Greenfeld initially intended this to be a documentary of conspicuous consumption, but then the crash of 2008 hits, the Siegels’ fortune collapses and their new home crumbles with it. This is a devastating look at how one of the 1-percenters lives and copes with money woes. Both films open this weekend at the Living Room Theaters in Boca Raton and elsewhere around the county.
Theater: It’s the final weekend for Palm Beach Dramaworks’ pitch-perfect production of the Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt long-running confection, The Fantasticks. I usually yearn for some novel directorial concept layered onto a show that I have seen over and over, but in this case director J. Barry Lewis understands that simplicity is the key to this tale of young love and the loss of innocence. He has found a couple of callow newcomers with fine singing voices in Jacob Heimer and Jennifer Molly Bell, and they are backed by some fun second bananas ― Barry Tarallo, Cliff Goulet, Dennis Creaghan and Tangi Colombel. But the most interesting performance comes from Cliff Burgess as The Mute, for whom there are no words. Continuing through Sunday on Clematis Street in West Palm Beach. Call (561) 514-4042 for tickets.
Art: As a medium, photography is both enlightening and brutal, in that if you really want to know what things looked like, a photograph will tell you, even if it’s been touched up. The Norton Museum’s current photo exhibition of pop music photography – Clubs, Joints and Honky Tonks features pictures from hard-luck juke joints all over the South in the early 1970s by Henry Horenstein, Lynn Goldsmith’s shots of the Rolling Stones in the late 1970s, Elliott Landy’s iconic Woodstock photos, and DJ Moby’s marvelous shots of the audiences he was playing to over the past couple years. And don’t miss the 17-minute video by Jeff Krulik and John Heyn in the heart of this small exhibit, Heavy Metal Parking Lot, which chronicles the audience in a suburban Washington, D.C., parking lot before a Judas Priest show in 1986. Reportedly, it was required viewing on the Nirvana tour buses in the early 1990s, and it’s not hard to see why. At the Norton Museum of Art through Sept. 30. Call 832-5196 for more information or visit www.norton.org.