Theater: John Logan’s 2010 Tony Award-winning play Red is going to be produced a great deal this season, and not just because it needs only two actors and one set. This brawny script about abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko, wrestling with a commission to create a series of murals for New York’s famed power lunch Four Seasons Restaurant and also wrestling with his personal demons, speaks eloquently about the art of making art, back in 1958 when the play takes place and today. Coral Gables’ GableStage is the first to bring the play to South Florida — the Maltz Jupiter Theatre will be second in February — in a production featuring Carbonell award winner Gregg Weiner as Rothko and Ryan Didato as his new assistant. Opening Saturday and playing through Dec. 4. Tickets are $35-$50, available by calling (305) 445-1119.
Film: There are really two different sides to Antonio Banderas. His commercial side makes movies like the animated Puss ’N’ Boots, the number-one feature at the box office last week. But, ah, the other side is dedicated to art films, and specifically the compelling, kinky films of Pedro Almodovar, the director who gave Banderas his start in Spain many years ago. He returns to the Almodovar rep company with the twisty The Skin I Love In, a mind trip — as most of Almodovar’s works are — about a plastic surgeon who experiments with a new artificial skin that he hopes to use on a woman he has abducted, in order to turn her into a replica of his dead wife. That is just the beginning of the plot though, in a film that has echoes of Hitchcock yet is unlike anything you have ever seen. Opening this weekend at the Cinemark Boynton Beach 14.
Music: In addition to Sunday night’s Hilary Hahn recital (previewed elsewhere on this page), there are several other classical music events enlivening the weekend.
On Saturday night, cellist Ian Maksin, a familiar face from his work with the Delray String Quartet and the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, opens a five-city Florida tour with a stop at Delray Beach’s Arts Garage. The Russian-born cellist will present a program of music by J.S. Bach (the Cello Suite No. 3 in C, BWV 1009), the Cello Suite of the Catalan cellist and composer Gaspar Cassado, and the Soviet composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, represented here by his Sonata No. 1 (Op. 72). Also on the program is the Three Pieces of Ilya Levinson, a Chicago-based composer who wrote the work for Maksin, now a Chicago resident, and Maksin’s own Meditation on Themes by Sting, which links the British rocker’s Fragile and Fields of Gold together.
Maksin also will play guitar and sing Russian songs at this “cello experience,” a concert he describes as experimental, but which will bring Maksin’s big, vivid sound back to South Florida. After Delray, Maksin travels to Vero Beach (Nov. 6), Fort Myers (Nov. 9), Fort Lauderdale (Nov. 12) and Stuart (Nov. 13). Tickets for his appearance at the Arts Garage are $20; the concert gathering begins at 6 p.m. Call 450-6357 for more information.
Earlier that afternoon, another Russian-born musician, pianist Eduard Kunz, plays the first of two free recitals for the Chopin Foundation. Kunz, 31, who lives in Britain, was named one of 10 great pianists of tomorrow by the BBC Music Magazine, and was a huge audience favorite earlier this year at the Tchaikovsky competition, which dismissed him in the second round, much to the consternation of critic Tom Service of The Guardian. Saturday afternoon at the Broward County Main Library, you can hear what all the fuss was about as Kunz plays music by Chopin (seven pieces including the lovely A minor Mazurka from the Op. 17 collection), Liszt (Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12) and Paderewski (the Minuet, Op. 14, No. 1, and the Nocturne, Op. 16, No. 4). He repeats the program Sunday afternoon at the Granada Presbyterian Church in Coral Gables. Both concerts begin at 3 p.m. For more information, call 305-868-0624 or visit www.chopin.org.
Meanwhile, it’s the second concert of the season for the Lynn Philharmonia, which chooses as rock-solid a canonical concert as you could imagine, with two of the most popular Beethoven symphonies played back to back. The concert, directed by Albert George-Schram, opens with the Symphony No. 6 (in F, Pastoral, Op. 68), with its beautiful bucolic sounds of the country, including babbling brooks and a sudden thunderstorm.
On the second half, it’s the Fifth Symphony (in C minor, Op. 67), whose opening bars are among the most familiar pieces of music in the whole of Western culture. But its overfamiliarity tends to obscure what a remarkably bold, groundbreaking work it is, like no other piece before or since. It never fails to thrill, and the improved Lynn Philharmonia stands fair to do these great works right. The concerts are set for 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday at the Wold Performing Arts Center. Tickets: $35-$50. Call 237-9000.
Elsewhere, Mizner Park in Boca Raton is the scene of two concerts this weekend, beginning tonight with the 1980s heartthrob Rick Springfield, whose 1981 smash Jessie’s Girl was pretty much inescapable that year (and proved that a line like “but the point is probably moot” was no bar to big success). Springfield has had an active television career as well, starring on the popular General Hospital soap. Joining Springfield at Mizner Park on Saturday night is his soap co-star Jack Wagner, who doubles as a singer, and had a monster hit in 1985 with All I Need. Concertgoers looking to relive their youths can check out Springfield and Wagner tonight at 8 at the Mizner Park Amphiteater. Tickets are available through www.livenation.com, or by calling 800-745-3000.
The very next day, the park hosts a return of the Think Pink Rocks concert, a fundraiser for breast cancer research and treatment. This is the fourth such event, and its lineup is mostly hip-hop, with Ray J, Flo Rida, Melanie Fiona, and Shontelle, plus a set from recent American Idol semifinalist Brett Loewenstern. The concert begins at 7 p.m. at the Mizner Park Amphitheater; tickets are available by calling 544-8600 or buying them at the door.
Art: On Wednesday, the Palm Beach Photographic Centre in downtown West Palm Beach opens two exhibits devoted to local photographers.
One of them, Album, features work by Alex Dreyfoos, Jean Matthews, Chris Leidy, Barbara Macklowe, Jim Abernethy, Tommy Morrison and Barron Collier II. The work includes deep-sea images from diving expeditions, garden plants, and travel images from India and Cuba. Many of the photographers represented have worked with the center for decades, and organizers say an overriding theme of the exhibit is conservation.
The second show, Flowers and Gardens, features images from the book Palm Beach’s Hidden Gardens, by Robert Glenn Ketchum and Raymond Gehman. The photos were taken in the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens as well as the private gardens of Palm Beach residents including Bob Eigelberger, Betsy Matthews and William and Jean Matthews. Gehman and Ketchum are leading nature photographers and conservationists, and the combined effect of the two exhibits will likely lead you to wonder whether there isn’t something you can do with the fauna in your own backyard. The opening reception for the exhibits is set for 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Photographic Centre. For more information, call 561-253-2600.