Theater: Slow Burn Theatre goes less edgy for the summertime, with more popular fare to mark its final production in West Boca before moving its operations permanently to the Broward Center. Aiming at the entire family, the company serves up Little Shop of Horrors, the Howard Ashman-Alan Menken musical about a nerdy florist, his self-esteem-challenged girlfriend and an alien plant which demands human sacrifices. The show is set in the early 1960s — the period of the original Roger Corman low-budget movie — with a doo-wop and hand-jiving female chorus. Mike Westrich and Amy Miller Brennan — fresh from Slow Burn’s Rent — impress as the central couple, trying to appease the voracious plant, played by an increasingly larger series of puppets. Continuing in West Boca through June 28. Call 866-811-4111 for tickets.
Film: With tongue decidedly in cheek, writer-director Anne Fontaine deconstructs and satirizes Flaubert’s classic French novel, Madame Bovary, re-imagining its randy main character in a contemporary setting. Emma Bovary becomes Gemma Bovery, a British housewife who moves with her husband to northern France, where she soon becomes bored and begins an affair with a young law student. Her indiscretions are observed by a former academic turned baker, who narrates as he lusts after Gemma (played by the luscious Gemma Arterton). The more familiar you are with the Flaubert, the more of Fontaine’s humor comes through, but the film still amuses without its literary references and parallels. Opening at area theaters this weekend.
Music: Down at the tiny Little Theater on the campus of the small SoBe Institute of the Arts in Miami Beach, composer Carson Kievman, who founded SoBe, presents the second weekend, starting tonight, of his new opera, Intelligent Systems. It’s been 35 years in the making, originally composed in the early 1980s for Germany’s Donaueschingen Festival, but shelved back then and only brought back this year. It’s a tale of a parallel universe in which a planet very much like ours is destroyed by natural and then manmade catastrophes, only to end after the chaos in the birth of a new species. With a cast of fine young singers, a 13-piece orchestra and sharp digital projections by Alain Lores, Kievman provides a powerfully imaginative score to realize his otherworldly vision. Shows are tonight and Saturday at 8, and at 7:30 p.m. Sunday; the theater holds only 40 seats, and reviews so far have been good, so there aren’t many places left. But if you want to see some very unusual contemporary opera, this just might be the place. Tickets are $25, $15 for students and seniors. Call 305-674-9220 or visit sobearts.org.