Art: Work in ceramics by a group of artists who all have connections to the University of Florida opens today at West Palm Beach’s Armory Art Center and runs through Aug. 28. The 13 artists, assembled under the rubric Motley Moxie, shared the same working environment or instructors at UF, but have widely varied approaches to clay. The artists, in alphabetical order, are Pavel Amromin, Renee Audette, Andrew Cho, Lynn Duryea, Magda Gluszek, Yumiko Goto, Holly Hanassian, Tammy Marinuzzi, Conner McKissack, Beau Raymond, Jeremy Randall, Shawn Rommevaux and Alyssa Welch.
The opening reception begins at 6 p.m. today and runs through 8 p.m. Admission is $5, or free for Armory members. The center gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays. Call 832-1776 for more information, or visit www.armoryart.org.
Film: Most special-effects action thrillers ask us to leave our brains at the door and be satisfied watching the computer-generated eye candy. Then there is Inception, the marvel of a thinking person’s puzzle movie that takes some work to keep up with, but pays off in very satisfying ways. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a master extractor, a guy adept at cracking into the dreams of others and stealing their ideas for profit. Now in his last job before he hopes to retire — uh-oh — he is asked to do the opposite, to burrow into a corporate executive’s mind and plant a destructive idea.
The film takes place inside dreams, with a dream’s lack of logic or gravity, and there are levels and layers to these dreams to keep moviegoers further off-balance. Inception is the brain child of director-writer Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight), who moves up even higher in the Hollywood pecking order. – H. Erstein
Theater: The big event this weekend, theatrically speaking, is the debut of Florida Stage’s new home, a drastically reconfigured Rinker Playhouse within West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center. The space has been turned into a thrust stage theater, by placing the action on the floor and surrounding it with seats on three sides. The company may have lost a little of the intimacy it had in Manalapan, but it gains in stage height and depth, which will pay dividends in scenic and lighting possibilities.
The inaugural production is Low Down Dirty Blues, Randal Myler and Dan Wheetman’s revue of the sassy, double entendre-laden blues songs rolled out in an after hours Chicago club. It premiered recently at Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Ill., where the local critics raved about the four-member cast. Florida Stage’s box office phone number remains the same, (561) 585-3433. – H. Erstein
Music: The Palm Beach Opera offers a preview Tuesday night of the coming season with an event at the Harriet Himmel Theater in CityPlace featuring soprano Wendy Jones, mezzo Irene Roberts and baritone Graham Fandrei. The singers, accompanied by pianist Bruce Stasyna, will perform selections from the four operas taking the stage for the 2010-11 season: Verdi’s Nabucco, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Mozart’s Così fan Tutte, and Puccini’s Tosca. The concert is preceded by a mixer at City Cellar and followed by a $125-per-ticket dinner (reservations due today) with the artists at Pistache, the French brasserie on Clematis Street.
Jones was recently seen as a fine Lady Billows in the company’s workshop production of Britten’s Albert Herring, and Roberts, who sang Emilia in Verdi’s Otello and Mercédès in Bizet’s Carmen last season, won second prize in the recent Palm Beach Opera vocal competition with a performance of the aria Nobles seigneurs, salut! from Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. Both are former members of the Young Artists program, and Fandrei, a well-known South Florida baritone, will be singing in Florida Grand Opera’s upcoming production of Cyrano, a new opera (2007) by American composer David DiChiera. The concert, which is sponsored by Kretzer Piano’s Music of the Mind series, begins at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Harriet. Tickets are $10, and proceeds go to benefit the company’s education programs. For tickets or more information, call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org. – G. Stepanich
King Louis XIV had a lofty sense of style, and he drew some of the finest artists in France to his court during his reign, which at 72 years was the longest of all European kings and queens. Last night, Seraphic Fire’s summer concert series continued with the first night of The Court of the Sun King, an evening of music by two of the best-known composers of Louis’ time. Sopranos Kathryn Mueller (a fine soloist in a Bach cantata earlier this year) and Rebecca Durren are joined by Seraphic Fire founder Patrick Dupré Quigley at the keyboard for sacred music by François Couperin and Louis-Nicolas Clérambault. Featured are four motets by Clérambault for the king, the Virgin Mary, Christmas Day and Mardi Gras, and three surviving Leçons de Ténèbre of Couperin.
This is exquisite, absorbing music, and marks another notable concert in what has been an exceptional season and off-season of Baroque music. Tonight’s concert begins at 7:30 p.m. at First United Methodist Church in Coral Gables. Saturday, it can be heard at All Saints Episcopal in Fort Lauderdale beginning at 8 p.m., and at 4 p.m. Sunday the program is presented for the final time at Miami Beach Community Church. Tickets are $30; call 305-285-9060 or visit www.seraphicfire.org. – G. Stepanich