Art: The Norton Museum of Art is currently showing a major exhibit of works by one of the most highly regarded British artists of our day, Jenny Saville. She’s best known for her work featuring female nudes, but many of her works are drawn from her studies of plastic surgery, generating pictures whose painterly strokes remind the viewer of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. The Norton’s show features 28 canvases from 1992 through the present, and is the first exhibit in the museum’s new Recognition of Art by Women (RAW) series. The show runs through March 4. Call 832-5196 or visit www.norton.org.
Opera: The Palm Beach Opera gets its first show of the season off to a popular start tonight with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, which was the second most frequently staged opera in the States last season (Puccini’s La Boheme was first). Ron Daniels directs this production, which stars the Italian soprano Maria Luigia Borsi as Cio-Cio San tonight and Sunday afternoon, paired with tenor James Valenti as Pinkerton. On Saturday night, Canadian soprano Michele Capalbo sings with Puerto Rican tenor Rafael Davila. Irene Roberts, a former Young Artists member, sings Suzuki. Expect the tears to flow as Butterfly realizes the truth about the cad she married. Curtain is 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday, at the Kravis Center. Call 833-7888 for tickets or more information.
Film: There are many ways to extend the life of beloved characters. While Robert Downey, Jr. continues to stomp on the grave of Arthur Conan Doyle by turning Sherlock Holmes into an action hero, consider instead the more cerebral way Spanish director Mateo Gil gives additional life to the Old West’s Butch Cassidy. In his film Blackthorn, playing at Boca Raton’s Living Room Theaters this week, it seems Butch survived that Bolivian shootout and is now a lion in winter, an old, white bearded man played by craggy Sam Shepard, eager to return to the United States to live out his final days. To do so, he teams up with a local robber (Eduardo Noreiga) for, yes, one last heist. The plot may not bristle with originality, but the characters and performances carry the day.
Theater: What, you still have not been to Palm Beach Dramaworks’ new, gorgeously renovated theater at Clematis and Narcissus in downtown West Palm Beach? This is your final weekend to catch their rightfully acclaimed production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, a look at the dark side of the American Dream, soon after the end of World War II. For as layers of lies are stripped away from airplane parts plant owner Joe Keller — played with emotional gusto by Kenneth Tigar — we learn how his eagerness to provide for his family may have led him to cut corners and ship defective goods overseas. J. Barry Lewis directs with an awareness of the impact of mounting tension. Continuing through Sunday. Call (561) 514-4042.
Music: This weekend at St. Paul’s, the Camerata del Re ensemble celebrates the Christmas season with a look at the music of the American colonies. In addition to pieces from New England and the Carolinas, there will be Christmas music from California, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala and South America (Paraguay, Brazil, Peru and Bolivia). It’s part of the church’s annual Festival of Lessons and Carols, but it also provides a fresh, inventive way to look at the season, and to remind us of the wealth of arts activity going on centuries ago when so few people outside it were paying any attention. For the procession, the Camerata will perform the Peruvian Juan Perez de Bocanegra’s Hanacpachap Cussicuinin, a hymn from 1631 in the Quecha language of the Incas, and the first piece of harmonized choral music to be published in the New World. The service begins at 3 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free. Call 278-6003 or visit www.stpaulsdelray.org.