Theater: Broadway plays rarely tour anymore, so even last year’s Tony Award winner, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, became available to regional theaters like GableStage to produce and give their own spin to. Russian playwright Anton Chekhov hovers over the lives of three contemporary siblings — the offspring of lit professors with a penchant for community theater. Vanya and Sonia are middle-aged loners (unconventionally cast Laura Turnbull and Avi Hoffman) and their sister Masha (Margarita Cuego) is a celebrated movie star who has been supporting them, but now arrives with her boy toy Spike (Domenic Servidio) in tow, announcing plans to sell off the family manse. There’s also the housekeeper, Cassandra (Jade Wheeler), who foretells the future, and a dewy-eyed ingenue neighbor named Nina (Hayley Bruce) who yearns to be on the stage. Durang knows his Chekhov, and knows when to diverge from it. At the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables through Sunday, June 15. $40 – $55. (305) 445-1119.
Film: Foreign film fans probably know the trilogy of writer-director Cédric Klapisch, who began a loosely connected series in 2002 with L’Auberge Espagnole and followed it up three years later with Russian Doll. Now the third shoe has dropped, with the return of novelist Xavier (the very appealing Romain Duris), who turns 40 and finds that life is not getting any easier or more linear for him. Living in France with his wife and two kids, his status quo is abruptly disturbed when his British wife (Kelly Reilly) announces she is leaving him, taking the children and moving to New York. So he soon follows, taking a seedy apartment in Chinatown as well as a Chinese wife to snag a green card. Then a former lover (Audrey Tautou) shows up, stays temporarily in his tiny flat, where she reignites romantic sparks. It is a light comedy, fueled by a French view of American culture. Opening this weekend at the Living Room Theaters in Boca Raton.
Music: Fans of chamber music, and of string quartets in particular, are well-served in South Florida by several fine homegrown foursomes. The Amernet String Quartet, which in residence at Florida International University, is featured Sunday afternoon in Marina Radiushina’s Mainly Mozart Festival, now running through June 22 in Coral Gables. Sunday’s performance includes three relative rarities by major composers: Anton Webern’s pre-serial Langsamer Satz, Antonin Dvořák’s Quartet No. 9 (in D minor, Op. 34), and a great, little-known string trio by Mozart: His Divertimento in E-flat (K. 563). This is precisely the kind of nourishing, exciting program that is catnip to chamber fans, and with the excellence of the Amernet, this should be an ideal way to welcome in the month of June. The concert, at the Biltmore Hotel’s Danielson Gallery, begins at 4 p.m. Tickets are just $20. Call 786-556-1715 or visit www.mainlymozart.com.
Art: Readers of a certain age will remember the great comic John Belushi doing his impression of a samurai deli owner slicing sandwiches with his sword on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s, but the actual samurai, hymned in movies such as Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (the director came from a samurai family), were a formidable elite class of warrior that lived according to an extraordinary code of honor and discipline. On Tuesday, the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in western Delray Beach opens an exhibit of artifacts from the samurai class, including weapons, paintings and prints, and suits of armor. The samurai class is no more (they were abolished after the Meiji Restoration of 1868), but their fealty to the Way of the Warrior lives on in martial arts and in a general way to elite military groups today. The exhibit runs through Aug. 31 along with an exhibit of delicate paper sculptures by the contemporary Japanese artist Kyoko Hazama. Call 561-495-0233 or visit www.morikami.org for details.