Art: The Norton Museum turns to the world of glassmaking this week, having opened three studio glass programs Wednesday. The centerpiece is an installation called One and Others, created by the Wisconsin-based artist Beth Lipman. It’s a large piece that evokes Old Master still lifes from the museum’s collections, and is on view in its European galleries.
The museum also is hosting the Hot Glass Roadshow, a touring glass studio operated by the Corning Museum of Glass. It’s a 28-foot trailer parked outside in the east courtyard the West Palm Beach museum in which glassblowers from Corning present eight public programs a day, six days a week, through March 25. (there’s an additional $3 fee to see the roadshow.)
Also, the museum has added to the festivities by offering an exhibit of glass works from its collection, which of course includes pieces by Dale Chihuly, perhaps the best-known of all glass artists working today. Other artists include William Morris and Toots Zynsky.
Admission to the museum is $12; hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday; and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Call 832-5196 or visit www.norton.org.
Dance: Dorothy Gunther Pugh founded a ballet company in her native Memphis some 25 years ago, and the 23-member troupe is now among the nation’s most highly regarded. The ballet comes to the Duncan Theatre tonight and tomorrow for a four-dance program that includes Being Here With Other People (McMahon/Beethoven), Curtain of Green (Adam/Glass), S’Epanouir (Comfort/Whalum), and In Dreams, Trey McIntyre’s paean to six songs by Roy Orbison. This is a young, athletic company, and it’s won fans all across the nation, helping Memphis become recognized in the national common wisdom for more than Beale Street and barbecue.
The company performs at 8 tonight and 8 p.m. Saturday. Tickets: $37. Call 868-3309 or visit www.duncantheatre.org.
Film: Actor Michael Fassbender is everywhere this weekend, appearing in three new films, Shame, Haywire and, the best of the three, A Dangerous Method, the match-up of psychoanalysis pioneer Carl Jung (Fassbender) and his mentor. Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). They clash over the most effective way or cure the mentally unstable and have a tug-of-war over a comely, but crazy patient (Keira Knightley) who eventually becomes Jung’s lover and then his treatment colleague. The screenplay is by Christopher Hampton, based on his own stage play, and while the script is dense with therapy jargon, the dialogue is fascinating and involving. In area theaters.
Theater: Yes, the title Urinetown kept away enough theatergoers to sink this Tony Award-winning musical’s national tour, but that hardly stops West Boca’s Slow Burn Theatre Co., which jumps head first into this tongue-in-cheek show about a water shortage and a greedy corporation head who amasses a monopoly on public toilets, then charges obscenely for their use. Fortunately, there is a crusading young hero who rouses the downtrodden — read that as “Occupy Wall Street,” even though the show dates back to 2001 — to rebel and pee for free. The score has a Brecht-Weill tone to many numbers and the production numbers, choreographed by the company’s co-artistic director Patrick Fitzwater, are send-ups of other, more popular musicals. Opens this evening and runs through Jan. 29. Tickets available by calling 1 (866) 811-4111.
Music: A bitter strike of six months put the fate of one of the country’s best orchestras, the Detroit Symphony, temporarily in limbo until it was resolved last April.
The group’s principal cellist, Robert deMaine, is happy everyone’s back at work. “I’m glad the symphony survived mostly intact,” he said. “I hope it emerges stronger eventually, because Detroit deserves a world-class symphony orchestra.” DeMaine, 42, who gave a memorable two-concert survey of the complete Beethoven works for cello and piano at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boca Raton a couple seasons back, reunites this Sunday afternoon with his partner in that series, pianist Heather Coltman.
Coltman, head of the music department at Florida Atlantic University and interim dean of its College of Arts and Letters, will accompany deMaine in the Sonata No. 1 (in E minor, Op. 38) of Brahms, the Fantasy Pieces (Op. 73) of Schumann, and the second of J.S. Bach’s three sonatas for viola da gamba (in D, BWV 1028), here played on the cello. DeMaine also will play five of his own solo Etudes-Caprices, from a set of 12 he composed in 1999.
“I compose a lot, just because I enjoy doing it. And if I deem something worthy of playing in a concert, I’ll do it,” he said.
DeMaine’s recording projects include a disc for Naxos in May of the Cello Concerto by filmdom’s John Williams, which will be recorded with the DSO and conductor Leonard Slatkin. “[Williams] has revised the concerto for this particular event,” deMaine said. “He’s actually made the solo part considerably more difficult.” The recital is set for 3 p.m. Sunday at the University Theatre on the campus of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Suggested donation is $10 at the door. Call 297-3853 for more information.
The stars will be out in force tonight and Sunday afternoon to celebrate Palm Beach Opera’s 50th anniversary. Renowned baritone Sherrill Milnes, who just turned 77, will be the host for the program, which features Denyce Graves-Montgomery, Ruth Ann Swenson, Lauren McNeese, Brandon Jovanovich, Sarah Joy Miller, Attala Ayan and Daniel Sutin.
The bill of fare features selections right out of the Big Book of Favorite Operas: La Traviata, Aida, La Boheme, Carmen and Die Fledermaus, and will be accompanied by Bruno Aprea and the Palm Beach Opera Orchestra.
Milnes, a Palm Harbor resident who was an artistic adviser at Opera Tampa for four years with his wife, soprano Maria Zouves, said tough times are especially hard on artistic organizations. Over the past month, Boston Lyric Opera and San Antonio Opera have closed down, and New York’s City Opera is in the middle of difficult union negotiations that have forced the company to cut performances.
“Whenever there’s a recession, they get hit hard. They all get clobbered,” he said.
But Milnes, who founded an opera-training program called VoiceExperience in 2000, says the art form itself may be doing better in the United States. “I think there is renewed interest in opera. We Americans are slowly getting over our cultural inferiority complex,” he said.
The gala concerts are set for 7 tonight and 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets start at $20. Call 832-7469, 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org.