Weekend arts picks: March 5-9

Art: The Palm Beach Fine Craft Show opened today at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach for a three-day run that features artists from 28 states offering museum-quality art objects, couture art-to-wear, and handcrafted furniture. Clothing designers are also attending the show, which runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. today and Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $15, $13 for seniors; 12 people or more, $10; under age 12, free. Call 366-6000 for tickets or more information. –– Staff reports

Dancing Teapots, by Stephan Cox.

The autobiographical etchings, screen-prints and mixed media works by homegrown artist Sarah Nastri are on exhibit in a solo show titled Broken Landscapes, which runs through April 6 at the Eissey Campus Theatre of Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Nastri, who has lived in the northern part of the county since she was a toddler, studied at Palm Beach State College and in Los Angeles, and then completed her bachelor of fine arts in printmaking from the University of Central Florida.

A monotype from Sarah Nastri’s Broken Landscapes.

“My art has always been a personal experience. I feel a close relationship to my pieces as they develop,” she said. “Family is a strong inspiration and consistent theme throughout my developing work. I combine landscape and architecture to portray surreal spaces. The use of imagery from new and old family photographs is incorporated through the use of various media to create balanced compositions.”

In her prints, she combines images of landscapes, architecture and photographs to create surreal spaces. By overlapping the images and using different colors, she creates texture in the flat surfaces of her prints. The theater’s lobby gallery is open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and at all performances. The Eissey Campus Theatre is located at 11051 Campus Drive in Palm Beach Gardens. For more information, call (561) 207-5905. – K. Deits

Music/Books: The Festival of the Arts Boca for 2010 gets under way at 7 p.m. tonight with the Future Stars competition featuring talented middle and high school students, but the real fireworks begin tomorrow night when one of the world’s reigning divas, soprano Renée Fleming, joins the Russian National Orchestra for a concert of arias. Fleming will include not just the kinds of pieces she’s well-known for – there is a set of Richard Strauss songs, for instance – but verismo pieces from one-hit-wonder Italian composers (Leoncavallo, Mascagni, Giordano) whose work is well worth a second look. She’ll also sing Richard Rodgers (The Sound of Music and You’ll Never Walk Alone) and the Letter Scene from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. The festival, centered primarily at the Count de Hoernle Amphitheater in Boca Raton’s Mizner Park, lasts through the 13^th and also features literary standouts such as Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard Goodwin, Noel Riley Fitch and David Brooks. The theme of the festival is From Russia With Love, and includes performances of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky (with the film), the Rachmaninov Third Concerto (played by teen wunderkind Conrad Tao) and ballet stars Irina Dvorovrenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky. The RNO ends the festival March 13 with the 1812 Overture of Tchaikovsky.

Kiri te Kanawa.

Fleming’s appearance Saturday comes just days before New Zealand’s Dame Kiri te Kanawa comes to Fort Lauderdale on Tuesday night for a recital at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. Te Kanawa has scheduled art songs by Franz Liszt, Reynaldo Hahn, Gabriel Faure and Claude Debussy, arias by Handel and Vivaldi, and folksongs from England and France, including four of the Songs of the Auvergne by Joseph Canteloube. She also plans songs by Argentine composers Carlos Guastavino and Alberto Ginastera. Pianist Brian Zeger accompanies. 8 p.m. Tuesday. Tickets: $35-$115. Call 954-462-0222 or visit www.browardcenter.org.

Also this weekend: Palm Beach Opera’s One Opera in One Hour series continues at 9 p.m. tonight with an abridged version of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. The performance at the Harriet Himmel Theater in CityPlace features the company’s Young Artists singers. Admission is free. Call 833-7888 for more information. – G. Stepanich

Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor in The Ghost Writer.

Film: Director Roman Polanski is under house arrest in Switzerland, unable to set foot in the United States, yet he has just made a first-rate thriller, The Ghost Writer, set largely on Martha’s Vineyard. Pierce Brosnan plays a former British prime minister, unmistakably patterned after Tony Blair, and Ewan McGregor is the eager-beaver title character, working on the politician’s memoirs, after an earlier ghost writer washed ashore dead. The McGregor character is soon in over his head, sorting out the accumulated lies in this taut film that harkens back to the heyday of Alfred Hitchcock. Like me, you may have issues with some of the plot points, but overall this is a smart, involving flick, worth your attention. Opening today at area theaters. – H. Erstein

E.J. Zimmerman and Christopher DeProphetis in Miss Saigon.

Theater: Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables seemed to have taken on too big a challenge when it produced the musical Les Miserables last season, but it was a crowd-pleasing hit that has raked in 12 Carbonell Award nominations. As an encore, it goes out on a similar limb beginning this weekend with its own production of Miss Saigon, the musical update of Madama Butterfly set in Vietnam during and after the United States ends its occupation of the nation. Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg provide an epic, Asian-tinged score, the show is loaded with emotion and romance, and then there is the matter of that helicopter. The cast includes many actors who are veterans of the show from national tours and Broadway. Call (305) 444-9293 for tickets. – H. Erstein