Music: The Palm Beach Opera opens its 49th season tonight with Nabucco, the opera that made Giuseppe Verdi’s career back in 1842. It’s the first mounting of this opera by the company in 25 years, and they’ve secured a host of singers with experience at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Mark Rucker and Sebastian Catana trade places as Nabucco himself, and Paoletta Marrocu and Csilla Boross switch off as Abigaille. The Ukrainian bass Dmitri Belosselskiy is Zaccaria, tenor Adam Diegel is Ismaele and soprano Laura Vlasak Nolan is Fenena. But devotees of this fine opera will be listening in particular to the chorus, which is so critical to the story, and not just for Va, pensiero, either. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. tonight and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday and Monday, at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. Call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org.
A few years ago, the young Venezuelan pianist Vanessa Perez came to Boca Raton for a recital at the Steinway Gallery and showed herself to be a musician well worth watching. She returns tonight to the same venue, this time with music by Chopin (12 of the Preludes and the Scherzo No. 2), Albeniz (selections from Iberia) and the hair-raisingly difficult Ferruccio Busoni arrangement of J.S. Bach’s Chaconne in D minor (BWV 1004), originally for solo violin. Perez takes the stage at 7 p.m. tonight at the Steinway Gallery. Tickets are $25 at the door; call 929-6633 for more information.
Art: On Sunday, the Norton Museum of Art opens a show of images from the Golden Age of Tinseltown called Made in Hollywood: Photographs from the Kobal Foundation. It’s a show of 94 photos of stars such as Buster Keaton, James Cagney and Jean Harlow, among many others, taken by photographers such as Leo Fuchs, Clarence Bull and Robert Coburn.
There are many more images of Hollywood stars and semi-stars available today, not to mention reams of salacious video, but having these classic images alone is somehow more satisfying, more mysterious, and more tantalizingly inaccessible. The exhibit opens Sunday and runs through March 6. Call 832-5196 or visit www.norton.org.
Film: When last seen, he was pinned to a huge rock in 127 Hours, but James Franco demonstrates his versatility by assuming the mantle of boundary-pushing poet of the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg, in Howl. The film is named for Ginsberg’s epic poem, accused of being obscene, and the trial at which he defends his First Amendment rights forms the center of the movie. For a low-budget independent film, the cast is impressive. Jon Hamm and David Strathairn plays the opposing attorneys, with Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker and Treat Williams as expert witnesses. Howl is a time capsule whose language feels quaint by today’s standards, but the issue of constitutional rights reverberates to today. At Emerging Cinemas in Lake Worth and Lake Park. – H. Erstein
Theater: This is the last weekend left to see Vices: A Love Story, the entrancing dance musical that the Caldwell Theatre constructed and premiered a year and a half ago as Clive Cholerton was taking the reins as artistic director. It returns now, tweaked and polished and, no, our earlier enjoyment of the show was not an illusion. Carbonell Award winner Holly Shunkey returns as the lead dancer, now partnered by Albert Blaise Cattafi as the sexy couple who got to bed on first meeting, then get to know each other by sharing their obsessions and excesses. The whole, compact show is clever, but nothing tops the acrobatic choreography by A.C. Ciulla. Continuing at the Caldwell Theatre through Sunday. Call (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432 for tickets. – H. Erstein