Gabrielle Graham, Alexandria Lugo, Mimi J., Joshua Graham, Jar’Davion Brown and Elijah Word in The Soul of Motor City.Theater: Yes, summer is a slow time for theater in South Florida, but apparently someone forgot to tell Margate’s Stage Door Theatre, which has just extended its long-running Motown revue, The Soul of Motor City, through Aug. 28. Aimed at the Boomer generation, which will recall these three dozen-plus rhythm & blues song hits from the 1960s through 1980s, the evening is wall-to-wall music and nostalgia, sung with full-throated power by an ensemble of first-rank vocalists. Director-choreographer Kevin Black spent years creating shows for cruise ships and that experience is evident here, but when the cast pays tribute to Aretha Franklin, The Jackson 5 and The Supremes, the result is solid gold entertainment. Call 954-344-7765 for tickets.
Sarah Gadon in Indignation.Film: Several of the great Philip Roth’s novels have been adapted to the big screen, and arguably none more effectively than Indignation, helmed by former Focus Features studio head James Schamus, making his feature directing debut. Like other Roth tales, it concerns a coming-of-age Jewish boy making his way in the gentile world. Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman, an actor ready to break through to stardom) leaves his father’s New Jersey butcher shop behind for life at a Midwest college where attendance at chapel is mandatory. Marcus is soon smitten with a blonde WASP goddess (Sarah Gadon), who turns out to be less than emotionally stable. They are the core of the story, but the film is at its best in a couple of confrontation scenes between Marcus and stubborn Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts, whose August: Osage County won him a Pulitzer Prize). At area theaters beginning this weekend.
Composer Eduardo Magallanes.Music: For 25 years, James Brooks-Bruzzese and his Fort Lauderdale-based Symphony of the Americas have been presenting Summerfest, weeks of concerts here in South Florida and Panama (Brooks-Bruzzese is a native Zonian) that add some much-needed orchestral flavor to a hot summer. This Sunday, the orchestra gives the next-to-last performance in the festival with an appearance at Florida Atlantic University’s University Theatre in Boca Raton. On the program is the group’s usual mix of entertaining fare such as concerti by Vivaldi, Manfredini, and Ernst Bloch, as well as pieces by Tartini, Marcello and Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite. Also featured is a new work written for the group by the Mexican composer Eduardo Magallanes, Intensamente Romantico, an arrangement of songs by writers such as Jose Sarabia and Roberto Cantoral. The concert is set for 6 p.m. Sunday; tickets range from $20-$40. Call 800-564-9539 or visit www.fauevents.com.
Water Lilies with Cloud (1992), by Roy Lichtenstein.Art: One of the current digital rages is the Russian app Prisma, which turns your photos into painterly artwork in at least 30 different styles, so that the dumb selfie you took at the Dave Matthews concert last weekend can now be a wry Kandinsky reflection. One of the other artists Prisma apes is Roy Lichtenstein, the Pop icon who turned comic-book fodder into cheeky modernism. It’s not for nothing that the app uses Lichtenstein, and through Aug. 21, you can see his take on Monet’s water lilies along with Mark Fox’s underwater views of the actual lilies in Giverny. It may not be to everybody’s taste, but this big print on stainless steel, which dates from 1992, now looks app-prophetic. The Fox and Lichtenstein exhibits are at the Norton, and there’s no reason not to go: In what is surely the best deal in local arts for many a long year, admission is free until December 2018, when the West Palm museum’s renovations are complete.
