Music: Here’s a good sign that summers are more active than ever in South Florida. On Saturday night, no less a musical eminence than Deborah Voigt will kick off the second annual Miami Summer Music Festival, singing with the MSMF Orchestra led by festival founder Michael Rossi at Barry University’s Shepard Broad Performing Arts Center. Voigt will sing music by Richard Strauss (Zueignung) and Wagner (Dich, teure Halle and Du bist der Lenz), as well as three Broadway tunes (Porter, Loewe and Kern) and two songs by Ben Moore, whose opera Enemies: A Love Story had its world premiere at Palm Beach Opera last year. The orchestra of talented students will follow Voigt with the Fifth Symphony of Gustav Mahler. On Sunday, Voigt will run a master class for MSMF vocal students and sign copies of her memoir, Call Me Debbie. The festival is the brainchild of Rossi, a Washington, D.C.-based conductor who wants to create a Music Academy of the West-style summer music festival for young musicians in Miami, his wife’s hometown. This year’s festival runs through Aug. 2 at Barry and other places in the Miami metro area. Featured are four operas, orchestral concerts, piano recitals and much more. It’s a feast of music in the heart of the summer, and it may really be the start of something big. The concert starts at 7:30 Saturday; the master class, also at Barry’s Broad Center, starts at 5 p.m. Sunday. Tickets start at $15. Call 1-800-838-3006 or visit www.miamisummermusicfestival.com.
Theater: Most Broadway musicals these days are based on movies, but that was relatively rare in 1973, when Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler adapted Ingmar Bergman’s mordant comedy of the follies of love, Smiles of a Summer Night, into the Tony Award-winning A Little Night Music. Palm Beach Dramaworks presents the show in concert form, featuring William Michals (of previous Man of La Mancha and Most Happy Fella concerts) as a lawyer with a roving eye, Kim Cozort Kay as a veteran actress who was his former lover and Joy Franz (of the show’s original production) as wise, wily Madame Armfeldt. The score – which includes the ubiquitous “Send in the Clowns” – is lush and romantic and somewhat bittersweet. Hal Prince, the show’s original director, may have put it best, describing the show as “whipped cream with knives.” Through Sunday, July 19. Call (561) 514-4042 for tickets.
Film: It is an all-too-familiar story, the meteoric rise and sudden crash and burn of young, talented singer-songwriter who could not handle the intrusive attention that comes with fame. In the case of Amy Winehouse, a soulful jazz-pop vocalist from working-class England, she paid with her life, dying in 2011 of alcohol-related heart failure at the age of 27. Documentarian Asif Kapadia chronicles her life and times in Amy, a compilation of her music career and personal life as seen in home movies, concert footage and interviews with her family and friends. A likely Oscar nominee next year in the documentary feature category, it opens this weekend in area theaters.