Bust of an Angel (c. 1304), by Giotto di Bondone.(Courtesy The Reverenda Fabbrica of St. Peter, Vatican City State)
Art: As it did a few years back, the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art is host this weekend to a major show of Catholic artwork, this one called Vatican Splendors: A Journey Through Faith and Art. Fort Lauderdale is one of only three cities nationwide to host the exhibit, which contains about 200 pieces of art and sacred objects from the home of the papacy, and publicists say many of them have never left the Vatican before. Included are pieces by Michelangelo, Giotto and Bernini, along with artwork from the 1st century and various saint relics that have been venerated by centuries of worshippers. It promises to be a popular show, and those who saw the earlier Vatican show are likely to want to see this one as well. The show opens Saturday and runs through April 24. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily except for Thursdays, when the gallery is open until 8 p.m. Tickets are $20 for adults, $17 for seniors and $13 for children, and are available at Ticketmaster, www.vaticansplendors.com, or by phone at 1-877-282-8422.
Paul Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman in Barney’s Version.Film: There are few movies stars more unlikely than nebbishy Paul Giamatti, who was so good in American Splendor and Sideways, but has never been better than he is in Barney’s Version, based on the final novel of Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). Giamatti just won a Golden Globe for best comedy performance of the year, but Barney’s Version is hardly a comedy. He plays a self-centered scalawag who manages to marry three women in quick succession, even meeting and starting to pursue his third wife at his wedding to his second wife. Dustin Hoffman plays Barney’s dad, ever ready to dispense worthless advice. The final reel turns dramatic and dark, when Giamatti particularly impresses. Snubbed by the Oscars for everything but a Best Makeup nomination, this is a film you will not soon forget. At area theaters now. — H. Erstein
Tom Creatore, Renata Eastlick and Matthew Korinkoin Kiss of the Spider Woman.
Theater: West Boca’s Slow Burn Theatre Company dives back into its mission focus of dark, rarely produced musicals with the 1993 John Kander-Fred Ebb Tony Award-winning Kiss of the Spider Woman. This tale (from a novel by Argentina’s Manuel Puig) of two unlikely prison cellmates – a gay window dresser, Molina, and a macho political activist, Valentin – is an unexpected source of a musical, but Molina allows the two of them to escape their squalid conditions, in their minds at least, by reciting the plots of his favorite movies. This allows the songwriters the opportunity for some splashy production numbers, featuring Renata Eastlick, who was such a standout in Slow Burn’s Rocky Horror Show. Opening Friday night and running through Feb. 6. Call (866) 811-4111 for tickets.
Composer Chiaya Hsu.Music: This weekend, Lynn University’s New Music Festival wraps with two concerts by the Lynn Philharmonia, conducted by the eminent composer and educator Gunther Schuller. His music has been featured all week as part of the festival, but the big event this weekend is the world premiere of a piece chosen from Lynn’s call for scores. The winner is Chiaya Hsu, a Taiwan-born composer whose education is all-American: Curtis, Yale and Duke, where she earned her doctorate. The piece, called Mountain Song (Shan Ko), is on the program along with the Brahms Third Symphony (in F, Op. 90), and the Piano Concerto No. 1 (in C minor, Op. 35) of Shostakovich. The soloists in the Shostakovich will be pianist Lisa Leonard, the festival’s founder, and her husband, trumpeter Marc Reese. The concerts are set for 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday at the Wold Center for the Performing Arts on the Lynn campus in Boca Raton. Tickets are $35-$50. Call 237-7705 or visit www.lynn.edu/tickets.
The Fry Street Quartet.On Sunday afternoon, the chamber music series at the Society of the Four Arts continues with an appearance by the Fry Street Quartet, founded in Chicago in 1997 and now in residence at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. The Fry Street has performed the complete Beethoven cycle of all 16 of the master’s quartets, and this program will feature two of them: The very first, the No. 1 in F of the Op. 18 collection, and No. 14 (in C-sharp minor, Op. 131), one of the greatest works for string quartet anyone ever wrote. “The scale of the architecture is vast, and there is a giant arc that umbrellas the piece,” second violinist Rebecca McFaul wrote in an e-mail message. “Inside it, however, the attention to motivic development, harmonic travel, and the intricate weave of the voicing takes constant and vigilant attention from the performers. That makes the dialogue between the parts spark and come to life.” Also on the program is the Barber String Quartet (in B minor, Op. 11), which gives audiences a chance to hear the Adagio for Strings in its original incarnation as the slow movement of this quartet. The concert is set for 3 p.m. Sunday at the society’s Gubelmann Auditorium on Palm Beach. Tickets: $15. Cal 655-7226 or visit www.fourarts.org.