Weekend arts picks: March 20-24

Film: With the Cold War over, governmental spies need to re-direct their efforts and that is what the CIA’s Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts) and MI6’s Ray Koval (Clive Owen) intend to do in Tony Gilroy’s smart and smart-mouthed trust-no-one comedy, Duplicity.

The two occasional lovers move into industrial espionage, spying and counter-spying for two corporate bosses, Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti, who hate each other’s guts. Gilroy (Michael Clayton) provides the necessary double-crosses of the genre, plus the stylishness and split-screens of The Thomas Crown Affair. The results are not profound, but you won’t have to leave your brains at the theater door, either. Opening Friday. — H. Erstein

Theater: A few months before Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein died in early 2006, she premiered a play on Broadway called Third, a densely packed comedy of gender politics, academic politics and political politics, now receiving its area premiere at Vero Beach’s Riverside Theatre in the company’s increasingly interesting Second Stage series.

It concerns a term paper on King Lear, written by a college athlete, that his female professor feels certain he must have plagiarized. Complicating matters further, her home life is a curious parallel to the conflicts in King Lear. Although flawed, Third is proof of how much Wasserstein will be missed from the theater scene. From Saturday, March 21, through Sunday, April 5. Tickets: $30-$34. Call (772) 231-6990 or (800) 445-6745 for reservations. — H. Erstein

Art: Among the many art events this weekend such as the Norton’s photography auction Friday night and the Palm Beach Fine Craft show that runs from Friday through Sunday at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, there are also two smaller events worth noting:

Edna’s Fine Art Gallery will feature the work of Armenian native Nuné Asatryan. Known simply as Nuné, she has her master’s degree in fine art, was the youngest artist in Armenia to be accepted to that country’s Artist’s Union and has exhibited in Europe, North America and Brazil. When she came to the States in 1999, she settled in New York City, but after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 “decided to move to Florida for my mind, body and soul to reconnect and start a new journey of my life with my husband and child.”

As a professional artist for more than 25 years, Nuné works in a variety of media, from painting to mixed media on pape,r to abstract photography and sculpture. Her images have a surrealistic, yet primitive feeling; they are technically refined, yet contemporary in approach. The show’s opening is from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday at Edna’s Fine Art Gallery, 5505 S. Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach. It also marks the grand opening of the gallery, which will feature work by Edna Hibel, Peter Keil, Gabriella Shalev and Floyd Scarmato. For more information, call (561) 202-0831. — K. Deits

Visiting an artist’s studio can be enlightening when you have the opportunity to see his or her workspace, the tools used and the environment’s ambience. From 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, artist Louis Schneiderman is having an Open Studio Show at 3780 Burns Road, Suite 6, in Palm Beach Gardens.

Schneiderman lives to paint and often spends 12 to 14 hours in his studio. “When I paint, I spend the first hour and a half getting rid of ‘mind noise.’ I like painting for long periods of time,” he said.

His current body of work took five months to create and he describes it as contemporary views of iconic images such as a mother and child, cityscapes, and flowers. “I believe there is an elegance in simplicity and economy,” Schneiderman said. “I prefer paintings where the image is suggested and not overdone, where there is room for the imagination to participate in ‘seeing’ the painting. I prefer the sublime to the overt.

“I like to make a delicate image powerful and a powerful image delicate. It’s these two disparate energies that give a painting tension, which is the play between freedom and control,” he said.

Schneiderman, whose work is represented by galleries in Boca Raton, Palm Beach, Naples and Atlanta, has paintings in prominent private and corporate collections, in addition to an extensive commission at the Temple Sinai in Atlanta. For more information about Louis Schneiderman’s work or Open Studio Show, call (561) 313-3077. — K. Deits

Music: The series of concerts at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Delray Beach has become notable for its ambition under director Keith Paulson-Thorp. This weekend, he’s planning a concert with his church’s choir that bears the title Music of War and Peace.

On the widely varied program, in which the choir will be accompanied by the whimsically named Sinfonia del Re, is music of Franz Joseph Haydn (the Agnus Dei from the Mass in Time of War), Marc-Antoine Charpentier (Canticum pro pace), Charles-Marie Widor (Da pacem Domine) and a slightly abridged version of The Armed Man, a mass by the contemporary Welsh composer Karl Jenkins. 3 pm, St. Paul’s. Tickets: $15-$18. Call 278-6003 or visit the Website. –– G. Stepanich

Earlier that same afternoon, the Boca Symphonia welcomes American pianist Lydia Artimiw for music of Mozart (the Concerto No. 21 in C, K. 467, the one that used to be known as the Elvira Madigan concerto).

Conductor Alexander Platt also has scheduled two vigorous symphonies: Beethoven’s First (in C, Op. 21) and the Shostakovich Ninth (in E-flat, Op. 70), whose lightness and cheekiness infuriated Soviet officialdom, which had been expecting Shostakovich to write something massive and profound to mark the end of World War II. 2:30 pm, Roberts Theater, St. Andrew’s School, Boca Raton. Tickets: $42-$53. Call 376-3848, 888-426-5577, or visit www.bocasymphonia.org. — G. Stepanich

Finally, two legendary American pianists play back-to-back concerts Monday and Tuesday at the Kravis Center.

First up is Andre Watts, a familiar sight on the Dreyfoos Hall stage, in a recital of works by Schubert (the B-flat Impromptu, Op. 142, No. 3, and the Wanderer Fantasy), Beethoven (Sonata No. 7 in D, Op. 10, No. 3), Mozart (the Rondos in A minor, K. 511, and D, K. 485), plus two works by Bach transcribed by Watts himself: The chorale prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesus Christ, BWV 639, and the prelude to the Ratswahl Cantata, Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir, BWV 29. Watts takes the stage at 2 pm Monday. Tickets: $25-$75. Call 832-7469 or visit www.kravis.org.

The next day, it’s Richard Goode, a pianist’s pianist whose relatively recent recording of the Beethoven sonata cycle was praised to the skies, but the performance that sticks in my memory of his appearance at the Four Arts a few years back is of a set of Debussy preludes of unmatched clarity and color. On Tuesday night, Goode will play Bach – the French Suite No. 5 (in G, BWV816) and three preludes and fugues from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier – and Chopin: assorted mazurkas, waltzes, nocturnes, the Third Scherzo (in C-sharp minor, Op. 39) and the magnificent Polonaise-Fantasie (in A-flat, Op. 61). 8 p.m, Kravis Center. Tickets: $25-$85. Call 832-7469 or visit www.kravis.org. — G. Stepanich

Dance: Trey McIntyre, the renowned young choreographer who made his name with the Houston Ballet, launched his eponymous Project as a fulltime company last year, and brings it to Palm Beach Community College’s Duncan Theatre in Lake Worth on Friday and Saturday as part of its first-ever national tour of 30 cities.

On the program are three McIntyre-choreographed works: Leatherwing Bat, to music by ’60s folk icons Peter, Paul and Mary; (serious) to music by pioneering American composer Henry Cowell; and A Day in the Life, to songs by the Beatles, including Mother Nature’s Son, Golden Slumbers, In My Life, and nine others. 8 p.m. both shows. Tickets: $29-$35. Call 868-3309 or visit www.pbcc.edu. — G. Stepanich