While the country gears up for the holiday season with Black Friday next weekend, Vero gets the jump on the red and the green when 5,000 people tour the decorated Christmas trees up for auction at Riverside Children’s Theatre.
But unlike Black Friday, there’s nothing hectic about the Festival of Trees, now in its 17th year.
“There’s never been a wait,” says RCT’s executive director Linda Downey. “There’s just a steady stream all day.”
There’s no headliner here, no out-of-town acts, not even any artwork other than the craft of Christmas decorations. The only goal, apart from raising money, is to “get you in the holiday spirit,” says Downey.
The huge annual event, simple as it sounds, is the lone fundraiser for Riverside Children’s Theatre, a defining institution in Vero and one that is worth every penny spent on tinsels and trinkets and themed trees. And spend they do: with a sold-out cocktail party, a sold-out breakfast with Santa, a gift shop, and an ongoing silent auction for gingerbread houses, wreaths and trees, RCT has netted over $100,000 in each of the past two years.
This year’s theme is “A Storybook Forest,” and the RCT On the Go actors will be recreating on stage “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and “Polar Express,” two classic holiday children’s books. Vero’s own Leslie McGuirk will be reading “Ho, Ho, Ho, Tucker,” one of her series of nationally-acclaimed children’s books about Tucker the dog. And volunteers as well as RCT’s kid actors will be reading and recreating too.
There’s also a great toy train.
While visitors listen to choirs from various churches, community groups and schools, they can have a sandwich at a pop-up café set up by Chelsea’s on Cardinal. Auction items include a storybook-themed playhouse donated by Arthur Rutenberg Homes of IRC, valued at $10,000.
The Showcase, as the tour is called, runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $8 for adults, $3 for children.
To get on the waiting list for the cocktail party and breakfast, call 231-6990.
Those same churches that lent their choirs to Festival of Trees seem to make musical performances multiply like Jesus did the fishes (good thing, since local government funds virtually nothing cultural anymore. Oh well.)
Sunday, First Presbyterian Church hosts its first free concert of the season with the Trinity Trio. The group, which bills itself as chamber music with a Latin flare, performs in the Miami area, but features a Vero resident: Cuban-born classical guitarist and teacher Miguel Bonachea, who has soloed frequently at Christ-by-the-Sea Methodist Church and now teaches at the recently formed Primo School of Performing Arts, based at First Presbyterian.
In his career, Bonachea has played throughout South America and Europe. Last year, he played for soprano Deborah Voigt here at a party thrown by Vero Beach Opera.
Bonachea moved to Vero from Miami, where he lived when he first came to the U.S. from Cali, Colombia, in 2010. There, as well as in Cuba, he taught guitar at the university level. He is equally interested in serious contemporary works for guitar, and continues to introduce new works at his concerts.
The trio includes Karrie Griffiths, a flutist trained at Temple University and with principals of the Dallas Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra; she is founder of Music in Miami and created the chamber music series Three Sundays in July.
Vero audiences may have seen her play in the annual August concerts of Symphony of the Americas. She has also played with the orchestras of the Miami City Ballet and Florida Grand Opera.
And Viera Borisova, who plays viola, came to Miami in the mid-1990s via Spain, but was trained in Russia, doing post-doctoral work at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory of Music in Moscow, and staying on to teach. She also played with the Russian National Symphony Orchestra and the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra, a prominent orchestra based in the Canary Islands.
The free concert is at 3 p.m. First Presbyterian is at the intersection of Royal Palm and Indian River boulevards.
Sunday night, there’s more music on tap at Community Church, when the Brevard Symphony Orchestra presents a program of Romanian music and a Romanian violinist in its first half; and two great works of Russian ballet music in the second half.
The violin soloist is Daniel Szasz, concertmaster for the Alabama Symphony where Brevard Symphony’s conductor, Christopher Confessore, is resident conductor. He will perform in two of the three Romanian works, one of them a world premiere arrangement.
Born in Transylvania, Szasz has been very active in promoting ties between Romanian and American musicians, sponsoring a summer musical there that unites the two. He is also deeply involved in Music4Romania, a non-profit organization that supports Romanian orphanages while promoting Romanian music and culture in the U.S.
The third Romanian work of the evening is Ivanovici’s “Anniversary Waltz,” better known here as “Waves of the Danube.”
The Russian works are selections from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” and the suite from Stravinsky’s 1919 masterpiece, “The Firebird.”
The orchestra, which is based at Melbourne’s King Center, considers Vero its second home after playing for years with the IRSA concert series, of which this is part.
The concert is Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $50. Call 772-778-1070.
Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” is broadcast live from the Metropolitan Opera at the Majestic Theatre at 12:55 p.m. Saturday, with a repeat on Tuesday at 6 p.m. Directed by Michele Mariotti, and starring Isabel Leonard as Rosina again (she starred in the Bartlett Sher version at the Met two years ago). Lawrence Brownlee is her lover and Christopher Maltman sings the role of the ever-resourceful barber.
Tickets to the opera are $25 for the Saturday Met simulcast; $20 for the repeat on Tuesday at 6 p.m.
And on Sunday, the Majestic broadcasts the 2012 Bolshoi Ballet performance of “The Pharaoh’s Daughter.” This very much updated version by the French choreographer Pierre LaCotte in 2000, takes its themes from the original 19th century choreography of Marius Petipa.
It was Petipa’s first full ballet, staged in 1862 in St. Petersburg with a cast of 400 dancers in a four-hour production. Now, with a cast one-fourth that size and the music cut by one-fourth, the original’s elaborate plot concerns a British archaeologist whose opium-fueled dreams transport him to ancient Egypt. The audience happily follows, with key roles danced by the company’s prima ballerina, Svetlana Zakharova, as well as Nina Kaptsova, and Ruslan Skvortsov.
Tickets are $20 for all the Majestic’s Bolshoi broadcasts, several of which are live simulcasts from the current season. Check the website for more at www.cwtheatre.com.
