By Greg Stepanich

Beginning with this coming season, the Boca Raton Museum of Art will mark its 10th anniversary at its lovely building in Mizner Park.

It moved there in January 2001 after having been in a small space on Palmetto Park Road since 1950, now home to the museum’s art school. The opening major exhibit was a fascinating look at the late career of Pablo Picasso, a body of work that critics such as Simon Schama dismiss as a lamentable falling-off after Guernica in 1937.

But that show suggested otherwise, with beautiful drawings of bullfights and erotic scenes, colorful linocuts and bold ceramic work, among many other things. It was an auspicious and canny debut, and it raised the profile of the museum at a single stroke.

You’ll have to hurry to see what’s there now, because the museum is closing for renovations Aug. 9, and will reopen Oct. 12 with three exhibits featuring work by Valerio Adami, Robert Cottingham and a look at European Modernism in graphic art called “Romanticism to Modernism: Graphic Masterpieces From Piranesi to Picasso.”

On view now is the 59th Annual All-Florida Juried Exhibition and Competition, featuring 92 works by 81 artists from around the state, and the biennial Boca Museum Artists’ Guild exhibition. Both shows present a good opportunity to see the breadth of artistic talent in this area and this state, and they also make a nice way to sum up the museum’s first 10 years in its current home. Call 392-9500 or visit www.bocamuseum.org for more information; tickets are $8 for adults, $6 for seniors, and $4 for students.

Theater: If the true test of a work of American theater is its durability in professional and amateur productions everywhere, then D.L. Coburn’s 1976 two-person play, The Gin Game, long ago passed with excellent marks. Originally starring Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, it’s the story of two seniors in an elder home who meet over gin rummy, have long conversations about their lives, and end up trying to humiliate each other.

Palm Beach Dramaworks is mounting the show this month in a production featuring two veteran area actors, Barbara Bradshaw and Peter Haig. Coburn’s play, which won the Pulitzer Prize, offers rich roles for its two actors (it won Tandy the 1978 Tony for best actress) in a story that’s usually considered a dark comedy, but that Coburn has said is really about two people who are unable to learn from their mistakes.

J. Barry Lewis directs The Gin Game, and the show runs through Aug. 15 at Dramaworks’ home at 322 Banyan Blvd. in West Palm Beach. Tickets are $42-$44. Call (561) 514-4042 or visit www.palmbeachdramaworks.org for more information.

Meanwhile, over at the Rinker Playhouse, Florida Stage has settled into its new Kravis Center home with a production of Low Down Dirty Blues, a four-person revue by Randal Myler and Dan Wheetman of mostly ribald blues songs and minimal dialogue set during the after-hours in a club on Chicago’s South Side.

The members of the cast — Felicia P. Fields, Mississippi Charles Bevel, Gregory Porter and Sandra Reaves-Phillips — sing 22 classic blues songs, such as Muddy Waters’ immortal Got My Mojo Workin’ and Eubie Blake and Andy Razaf’s My Handyman, a hilariously filthy exercise in double entendre made famous in the late 1920s by Ethel Waters (He threads my needle/Creams my wheat/Heats my heater/Chops my meat).

Low Down Dirty Blues runs through Sept. 5 at the Rinker, which is inside West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center. Tickets are $47-$50. Call 800-514-3837 or visit www.floridastage.org.

Music: The Lilith Fair, the all-woman alt-rock music festival begun in 1996 by Canadian songwriter Sarah McLachlan, was to have played the Cruzan Amphitheatre this month (Aug. 10), but organizers canceled it along with nine other shows, citing the terrible economy.

But you can still get your Lilith fix this month if necessary by heading to the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale on Aug. 25 for a concert by Natalie Merchant, who has just released her first album of new material in seven years, Leave Your Sleep. For me, a little of Natalie goes a long way, but she represents an original, uncompromising voice, one of the few popular artists with a consistent message of social critique and engagement. Tickets are $35-$60; call 954-462-0222 or visit www.browardcenter.org.

And the Cruzan recovers from its Lilith snub with the Rockstar Mayhem Festival, with Korn and Rob Zombie (Aug. 11), country megastar Brad Paisley (with Hootie and the Blowfish lead singer Darius Rucker, on Aug. 14), mellow rocker Jack Johnson (Aug. 26), and Creed (Aug. 31). All those shows are available through Live Nation.

Over in Delray Beach, it’s another visit to the world of Baroque music, this time from Spain. Keith Paulson-Thorp’s Camerata del Re, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church’s resident Baroque ensemble, offers music on Sunday, Aug. 22, by a group of fine composers whose work is little-known to audiences today: Juan Astorga, José Herrando, Francesc Manalt, and the Pla brothers, José and Joan Baptista. Also included is a quintet for flute and strings by Luigi Boccherini, an Italian who lived for decades in Spain under the patronage of the Infante Luis Antonio, archbishop of Toledo.

The concert begins at 4 p.m. Tickets are $15-$18. Call 278-6003 or visit www.stpaulsdelray.org.


Greg Stepanich is the editor/founder of the Palm Beach ArtsPaper available online at www.pbartspaper.com

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