Art: This is the last weekend to catch Object of Devotion: Medieval English Alabaster Sculpture From the Victoria and Albert Museum, showing through Sunday at the Society of the Four Arts.
This national touring collection of 60 alabaster panels and sculpture from the 15th and 16th centuries is the work of anonymous artisans who created devotional pieces for aristocrats and commoners alike, crafting them out of the plentiful alabaster found in the Midlands. These are beautiful, striking works that were doomed to go out of favor with the Reformation of the 1530s. King Henry VIII’s rejection of the pope also saw the destruction of monasteries, churches and religious art, and the exhibit at the O’Keeffe Gallery includes some examples of defaced alabaster.
It’s not often that such a quiet, meditative, intimate show makes it to our area galleries, and if you’re in a contemplative mood, and want to reflect as well on the exceptional artistic talent evident here from craftspeople whose names have been lost to history, this is the show to see. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. today and Saturday, and from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $5. Call 655-2776 or visit www.fourarts.org.
Film: Decidedly not a date night film is Blue Valentine, a portrait of a marriage gone bad that is raw, dark and downbeat. Still, it contains two superb, award-worthy performances by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, a couple of the best young actors working today. They play Dean and Cindy, both products of combative home lives, who meet by accident, marry and have a young daughter, but rarely experience happiness. The film jumps around in time, intercutting their fleeting early bliss with the vitriol of the end of their relationship. Opening in area theaters today. – H. Erstein
Theater: Sure, it is easy to be cynical about The Sound of Music, the final collaboration of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, which is so often rendered with an overdose of sugar and sunshine. Still, this tale of the creation of the von Trapp Family Singers is under the shadow of the rise of the Third Reich, and director-choreographer Marc Robin reaches for the dramatic underpinnings in the first-rate production that just opened at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre. Catherine Walker heads a 30-member cast — the largest ever on the Maltz stage — playing spunky Maria Rainer, who becomes the governess to seven love-starved youngsters and eventually melts the heart of their grump father. Michael Schweikardt fills the stage with numerous eye-popping sets. Through Jan. 30. Call (561) 575-2223.
Music: “It might be his greatest piece,” says Dolora Zajick, and as one of the world’s best Verdian mezzos, she knows what she’s talking about. The Messa da Requiem that Giuseppe Verdi composed in 1874 in honor of the writer Alessandro Manzoni is one of the towering works of Romantic music, period, and this Sunday, the Palm Beach Opera presents a performance of this colossal piece, with Zajick as the mezzo in the solo quartet. Bruno Aprea will lead the Palm Beach Opera Orchestra and its chorus, augmented by the Master Chorale of South Florida, the Masterworks Chorus of the Palm Beaches, the Delray Beach Chorale and the Ralph Sharon Singers, for a singing body of some 150 people.
Zajick will be joined by soprano Angela Meade, tenor Carl Tanner (who sang the tragic Moor in last season’s Otello) and bass Morris Robinson. This promises to be a stellar reading of this terrific piece, and it’s ideally suited as a Palm Beach Opera presentation. The concert begins at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Kravis Center. Tickets range from $20 to $125. Call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org.
The classical music of Haiti is nothing if not little-known, but Keith Paulson-Thorp of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Delray Beach has put together a program of music Haitian composers past and present for a benefit concert Sunday for the Caribbean nation that still is struggling to recover from the earthquake that struck it a year ago this week.
On the program are pieces by Ludovic Lamothe, Werner Jaegerhuber and Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-George, who is represented by a string quartet. Also featured are pieces by Americans Louis Moreau Gottschalk and William Grant Still, plus contemporary pieces by Daniel Bernard Roumain, Sydney Guillaume, Aurora Francois, Julio Racine, and Luc Beauliere.
The concert begins at 3 p.m. at St. Paul’s. Admission is free, but a collection will be taken for earthquake relief. Call 278-6003 or visit www.stpaulsdelray.org.