Theater: West Boca’s Slow Burn Theatre Company, which is dedicated to edgy, offbeat musical theater, also knows how to have fun. And the 3-year-old troupe credits much of its popularity to last October’s tongue-in-cheek production of The Rocky Horror Show, the send-up of B-grade horror movies. So to open its season and help us ease into a Halloween mood, it is bringing Rocky, now through Oct. 29. And yes, Saturday nights the cast performs back-to-back shows, at 8 p.m. and midnight, when the raunch level increases. Co-founder Patrick Fitzwater again directs and choreographs, promising some surprises for returning audience members. At West Boca Community High School, 12811 West Glades Road, Boca Raton. Tickets: $35. Call: (866) 811-4111.
Film: Give yourself points if you knew that the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (original last name Rabinowitz) created the character of Tevye the dairyman, whose struggles with tradition became the basis for the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof. Now comes documentarian Joseph Dorman with the film Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Dark, a fascinating literary biography of the man known as “the Jewish Mark Twain,” whose writings plumbed the depths of Eastern European Jewish identity with a seriousness leavened by humor. Dorman manages the challenge of making such a story visual with vintage photographs and film footage, and he weaves in frequent passages from Aleichem’s work that is bound to lead viewers to seek out the source material. Opening today at FAU’s Living Room Theatres and Regal Shadowood in Boca Raton, as well as Movies of Lake Worth and Movies of Delray.
Art: The humble crayon has been the introduction to the world of art for countless people for hundreds of years, and this weekend marks the closing of an exhibit devoted to two artists, father and son, who have built substantial careers on making art entirely by using Crayolas. Coloring Outside the Lines, which ends Sunday at the Cornell Museum of Art and American Culture at Old School Square in Delray Beach, features about 50 works by Don Marco and his son Jeffrey Robert. Marco has a penchant for Western themes, while Robert is enamored of Hawaii, and both are fond of celebrity portraits. Chances are you’ll think again about pulling out the Binney and Smith boxes and seeing what you can do once you get home from seeing these works. Also closing Sunday is 48 Contemporary Quilts, a show featuring three collections of contemporary quilts. Open 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. today and Saturday, 1 to 4:30 p.m. Sundays. Tickets: $10, $6 for seniors. Call 243-7922 for more information.
Music: Tomorrow marks the 200th anniversary of the birth in Hungary of Franz Liszt, one of the most important of all Romantic musicians. Liszt achieved rock-star status in his own day for his tremendous pianism, and indeed, he invented the piano recital. He wrote a gargantuan amount of music, acres of it neglected today, mostly on the basis of its perceived unevenness. But he was a bold harmonic innovator who late music was decades ahead of its time, and his work deserves much more attention. This weekend, Liszt is on the fingers of Jerome Lowenthal, one of the finest American pianists of the older generation, and Misha Dacic, the Serbian-born pianist who has made a solid career for himself here in South Florida.
Lowenthal’s all-Liszt recital occurs on Saturday night as part of Festival Miami, held at Gusman Hall on the campus of the University of Miami in Coral Gables. He’ll play the Sonata in B minor, of course, and several pieces from the Annees de Pelerinage, including Les jeux d’eau aux Villa D’Este, Venezia e Napoli, and the Petrarch Sonnet No. 104. Tickets for the 8 p.m. concert range from $20-$40. Call 305-284-4940.
On Sunday, Dacic returns to the Piano Lovers Series in Boca Raton with an all-Liszt program that includes the Dante Sonata and a piano version of the organ work Fantasy and Fugue on the Name B-A-C-H, plus three lesser-known pieces: the Triomphe de Funebre de Tasse, the Grosses Konzsertsolo, and the Dumka from the 1848 collection Glanes de Woronince, based on Polish themes. Dacic has a fiery keyboard style that should serve this music well. The concert begins at 5 p.m. at the Steinway Gallery in Boca Raton; tickets are $25, $20 in advance. Call 929-6633 or visit www.pianolovers.org for more information.
Listeners of the jazz-pop persuasion might want to head out to Lake Worth’s Bamboo Room on Saturday night for the hard-to-categorize Spam Allstars. Guitarist Andrew Yeomanson, billing himself as DJ Le Spam, leads this hard-charging collection of outstanding instrumentalists in music that blends Latin, funk and hip-hop styles into a funky if undefinable brew. The Allstars take the stage at 9 p.m. Saturday; tickets are $18. Call 585-2583 for more information.