See Floating Cat, a 2011 work of Washi Paper and wire by Kyoko Hazama, at the Morikami Museum. Photo provided
By Greg Stepanich
Palm Beach Dramaworks, which opened its summer series of musicals presented in concert form in June with Kander and Ebb’s Zorba!, this month tackles Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella. It’s the story of a May-December mail-order romance between an older Italian immigrant Napa Valley grape farmer named Tony —played by William Michals — and a much younger waitress named Rosabella — played by Jessica Hershberg.
This is one of those scores that inspires die-hard devotion from theater fans, in part because of lovely things like Somebody, Somewhere and catchy numbers such as Big D and Standing on the Corner, which was a pop hit after the show’s premiere in 1956. A revival in April in New York’s City Center Encores series won raves from critics, and the notion that Loesser’s score is much like an opera was much mooted about.
“It’s often been compared to opera, and has been labeled as opera by some,” said William Hayes, Dramaworks’ producing artistic director. “It’s extremely challenging music, and this is another case in which we can demonstrate that we have a lot of supreme local talent that is up to the task.”
Those performers include Jim Ballard, as the handsome but restless Joe, Laura Hodos as Rosabella’s sassy friend Cleo, Jeni Hacker as Tony’s sister, Marie, and Shane Tanner as Cleo’s love interest, Herman. New York-based actors Michals and Hershberg, will take the lead roles.
“William has one of the best, if not the best, baritone voices I have ever heard in my career,” said Hayes, who added that Michals’ performance last year as Don Quixote in the Dramaworks concert version of The Man of La Mancha sold out. Hershberg, currently understudying Ella in the Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, was an instant choice for the role.
“When we saw her, we said, ‘She’s the one,’” Hayes said. “She was able to get some time off to do this project, and she was so excited about the opportunity to sing this material.”
Most Happy Fella’s story of an older man and younger woman who both have endured disappointments in love offers a more grown-up take on life than a standard boy-meets-girl story, which adds to its appeal. And doing it in concert form allows the audience to concentrate on the words and music, and in some ways that provides for a richer experience, Hayes said.
“Often, these concerts pack a bigger punch than a full production, because you’re just zoning in on the story and not getting lost in the spectacle,” he said. The singers will be accompanied by two pianos, along with video projections.
Hayes said that Dramaworks’ shift to concert versions of musicals from the stage productions they had previously mounted in the summer has not only been a money-saver, it also has brought in a different audience. Polls of audience members showed that 50 percent to 60 percent of the concert musical attendees had not been to Dramaworks before, he said, which led him to realize that “this is a concert crowd, this is not necessarily a theater crowd,” he said. “People want music. Yes, we’re telling a story; yes, we’re reading the scripts, but this is attracting a broader audience.”
Clive Cholerton directs The Most Happy Fella, which previews July 17 and runs for 12 performances through July 28. Other cast members include Stephanie White, Abby Perkins, Ken Clement, Oscar Cheda, Bill Adams, Roland Rusinek and Anthony Zoeller. Tickets are $40; call 514-4042, or visit www.palmbeachdramaworks.org.
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The lure of paper: The mysterious force of arts news that brings two of the same kinds of events together in separate places at the same time is active again this month in two visual art exhibits devoted to paper, or more specifically, the artworks that can be created from it.
In one of these events, the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in west Delray Beach is hosting a remarkable small exhibit (From a Quiet Place) featuring the work of the contemporary Japanese artist Kyoko Hazama. She has taken a kind of traditional paper called washi and made delightful little scenes out of it, mostly featuring a Japanese girl in the company of extraordinary animals in routine-but-bizarre situations.
In one, titled Room, the girl lounges on a green chair in a room filled otherwise with three musk oxen. In another, Bathroom, she sits naked in front of a bathtub, next to a wooden crane’s nest complete with crane, while a beaver in the tub munches her hair. In still another, Kickstand, she does a takeoff on a 13th-century Japanese drawing of animals frolicking Wind in the Willows-style; here, frogs and kangaroos sit amid piles of cellphone detritus.
It comes as quite a contrast to the other exhibit next door, which is an impressive collection of very old samurai gear, including 12th-century katanas and 17th-century suits of armor.
Hazama’s work makes its mark not only through its whimsy and quirkiness, but in the artist’s exceptional attention to detail. The Hazama and samurai exhibits run through Aug. 31 at the Morikami; call 561-495-0233. Tickets are $14.
Back in Delray Beach proper, the Delray Beach Center for the Arts offers From Ordinary to Extraordinary: Paper as Art through Aug. 24 at the lovely, cool Cornell Museum. The show, curated by Melanie Johansen, features 75 works by 16 artists, including local standouts such as Bruce Helander and David Orr Wright.
The non local artists in the show include Houston’s Cara Barer, who makes beautiful sculptures from old books and then takes photographs of them, and Cuban-born Alex Queral, who crafts arresting portraits of people by carving their faces out of a phone book. Admission to the Cornell is just $5. Call 243-7922 for more information.
Both the Morikami and Cornell exhibits are the kinds of shows that will have you thinking about how a good artist can make compelling work out of just about anything.
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The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival returns this month, with concerts at three venues. Look for an additional season this fall. Photo by Rocky Helderman
Chamber festival returns: Although the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival has been a staple hereabouts for more than two decades, it’s actually an expanded organization these days because of its winter-season concerts.
Beginning last year with performances at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Lake Worth and the Wold Performing Arts Center at Lynn University in Boca Raton, the group will continue this year with another series of winter concerts at St. Andrew’s, Lynn’s smaller Amarnick-Goldstein Concert Hall, and a third venue: the Lighthouse ArtCenter in Tequesta.
Michael Forte, clarinetist and co-founder of the festival, said he took part in a workshop version of Ben Moore’s opera Enemies, which in its final form will have its world premiere next February at Palm Beach Opera, at Lighthouse and thought it would “be a great place to do chamber music.”
Officials there agreed, and concerts there will be part of the winter series beginning in September, restoring the north county to the festival’s usual outreach.
“All of our Eissey audience was sort of left out in the cold for our fall series,” said flutist and festival co-founder Karen Dixon. (The third co-founder is bassoonist Michael Ellert.)
“Some of our Eissey audience even drove down to St. Andrew’s,” Forte added during a chatty lunch last month at a West Palm Beach eatery. “So this will make it a little easier for them, and it’s part of our mission statement to reach all of Palm Beach County.”
But programs are still in process for those concerts, and this month, it’s the summer ones that occupy our attention. Beginning July 3, a day before the holiday, the festival opens its 23rd season with its usual four weekends of chamber music, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday except for the first week (the Fourth falls on a Friday). As ever, the concerts are in three different parts of the county:
Friday nights are at Persson Hall on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University; Saturday nights, the group plays at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Both Friday and Saturday night concerts begin at 7:30 p.m. Sunday’s concerts are at the Crest Theatre at the Delray Beach Center for the Arts, and begin at 2 p.m.
And as always, the players have chosen excellent but underperformed music for most of the concerts, which will run through July 27. The first concert features music by two British composers, Malcolm Arnold (Trio for Flute, Viola and Bassoon) and Herbert Howells (Rhapsodic Quintet for clarinet and string quartet), and closes with the Septet No. 2 (in C, Op. 114) of Johann Nepomuk Hummel, a contemporary of Beethoven whose Trumpet Concerto is still standard repertoire. Hummel’s septet, subtitled Military, is scored for flute, clarinet, trumpet, violin, cello, bass and piano.
The Oboe Quartet (in F, K. 370) of Mozart and the Sextet (in C, Op. 37) of Ernst von Dohnanyi are showcased on the second series (July 11-13) of concerts, which also feature music by British composer and conductor Eugene Goossens (Suite for Flute, Violin and Harp) and France’s Alexis Roland-Manuel (Suite in the Spanish Style for oboe, bassoon, trumpet and piano.) A large early 19th-century French work, Georges Onslow’s Nonet (in A minor, Op. 77) closes the third program (July 18-20), which also contains Schubert’s Quartettsatz (in D minor, D. 703), French flutist and composer Paul Taffanel’s Wind Quintet, and a trio sonata for trumpet, violin and piano by the contemporary American composer James Stephenson.
The final concerts (July 25-27) open with Villa-Lobos’ Fantaisie-Concertante for clarinet, bassoon and piano, followed by a quintet for flute, harp and string trio by Jean Françaix, and Manuel de Falla’s well-known, much-arranged Suite of Old Spanish Songs, heard here for trumpet and piano. The season closes with the String Quartet No. 3 (in D, Op. 44, No. 1) of Felix Mendelssohn.
In short, a lot of unfamiliar-but-worthy music there. “But there’s nothing crazy this year, nothing too out of bounds,” Forte said.
“We like to say that we’ve trained our audiences, because they know to trust us at this point,” Dixon said. Forte adds: “They buy the series because they know there’s going to be something they like, even if it’s something they never heard before.”
And it will be performed by a cadre of veteran musicians who come back year after year to perform in the series. A couple of musicians who have been away from the festival, such as hornist Ellen Tomasiewicz, will be back this summer, a fact that pleases Dixon and Forte, who are looking forward to playing with old colleagues again.
While another recording to add to its catalog of six is for now an unlikely event (Kickstarter, anyone?), the festival looks certain to continue steadily into the future. After all, 2016 will mark the 25th summer, a perfect chance to mark it with something special such as a world premiere of a new work.
“I do think about it once in a while,” Forte said. “But we haven’t talked about it yet.”
Tickets are $25 apiece, or $85 for the four-concert series. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org to buy tickets or get more information.
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