If you thought the holidays had you going out a lot, wait until you see the cultural cadeaux studding the coming calendar. It seems Vero’s top arts organizations are all rolling out the season in a wave, with Vero Beach Opera’s “Il Tabarro” this Sunday; Riverside’s “Crazy for You” opening Tuesday, Wednesday’s concert of Atlantic Classical Orchestra, and Ballet Vero Beach’s season opener next Sunday.
Riverside’s choice of “Crazy for You,” the 1992 version of George and Ira Gershwin’s 1930 hit “Girl Crazy” speaks to Vero’s insatiable appetite for love stories set to great show tunes. The Tony-award winning musical, with a plot resembling “Girl Crazy” but using songs from other Gershwin shows as well, broke Broadway musicals out of what the New York Times dubbed “the ‘Cats’ decade,” taking the form back from the British.
The plot is classic: rich boy from a banking family is dying to get into show biz, fails at a Follies audition and heads out to a gold-mining town in Nevada where he is supposed to do his family’s bidding and foreclose on a run-down theater. He promptly falls in love with the theater owner’s daughter and decides to save the place by staging a show himself. The daughter finds out he’s the bankers’ son, then, well, it gets complicated. All but the happy ending.
“Crazy for You” opens Tuesday and runs through Feb. 1. Call Riverside at 231-6990.
In the “Il Tabarro,” the set isn’t a saloon, it’s the shores of the Seine in PARIS. The hard-drinking working men aren’t cowboys, they’re stevedores, and one falls in love with the barge owner’s wife. A few mixed signals in the night, and, lo, there is not a happy ending.
There is nevertheless plenty to revel in, at least for the audience: The Cuban-born baritone, Nelson Rodriguez, returns to the VBO stage; the former principal soloist with the Cuban National Opera, he performed in VBO’s “Pagliacci” as well as in “Cavalleria Rusticana.” Rodriguez stars alongside dramatic soprano Susan Neves, also well-known here. Until recently she owned a condo on the south barrier island, and is good buddies with soprano Deborah Voigt, another Vero regular. Neves is known for her leading Verdi roles – she has sung 14, including Abigaille in a Met production of “Nabucco,” and most recently with Florida Grand Opera at Miami’s Arscht Center. Neves sang at a VBO fundraiser last year.
Also performing is Viktor Antipenko, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, and third prize winner in 2013’s Marcello Giordani Foundation competition in Vero. And Mélanie Moussay of Strasbourg, France, plays Giorgetta.
The stage director for the opera is Russell Franks, who directs the Opera Theatre department at Stetson University. VBO recently named Franks as its resident director. A year ago, Franks directed “Cavalleria Rusticana” in Vero. In 2011 he directed “The Marriage of Figaro” here.
The opera will be conducted by VBO’s new full-time music director, Bruce Stasyna. A veteran of VBO’s productions, he is now here for the long haul, and a score for the opera. He will be conducting the Brevard Symphony Orchestra.
And when you’ve checked out the man at the podium, look closely at the audience: Marcello Giordani is expected to attend. He let VBO know last Sunday he’s planning to fly in for the performance and will be at the sold-out VBO dinner at Grand Harbor that evening. On the menu: Italian.
“Il Tabarro” is staged at the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center this Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m. for one performance only. Tickets, from $30 to $100, can be purchased online at verobeachopera.org, or by calling the performing arts center box office at 569-6993.
At nearly the same hour on Sunday, an excellent annual concert of organ music takes place at Community Church. The Songsun Lee Memorial Concert is named for the brilliant young graduate of Oberlin Conservatory hired to play Community’s then-newly installed Lively-Fulcher pipe organ. Songsun was killed in a car accident just months after her arrival in Vero. Her professor at Oberlin, James David Christie, has seen to it that either he or one of his students has come to play in her honor every year since.
This year, it’s Alcee Chriss III, now in his fifth year at the acclaimed conservatory and pursuing degrees in organ performance and historical performance. He just won first prize and the audience prize at the Miami International Organ Competition. The free concert is this Sunday at 4 p.m.
This is Atlantic Classical Orchestra’s first official season as a tri-county presence, with matinee concerts in Palm Beach Gardens’ Eissey Campus Theatre along with an evening concert in Vero and both matinee and evening concerts at Stuart’s Lyric Theatre.
For that, artistic director and conductor Stewart Robinson along with ACO’s new president and CEO Alan Hopper are bringing in the young Ukrainian-born pianist, Stanislav Khristenko. He’ll perform in a program of master works, as ACO is billing it, including the overture to Mozart’s opera, “The Marriage of Figaro”; the Hungarian composer and scholar of folk music Zoltán Kodály’s “Dances from Galanta,” composed in 1933; Mahler’s famously poignant “Adagietto from Symphony No.5”; and Brahms’ “Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major.”
Trained at the Cleveland Institute and the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Khristenko won first prize at the 2013 Cleveland International Piano Competition. That win, at 29, launched his career into a new level of intensity that included giving concerts, making recordings and most importantly for us, learning repertoire.
Vero’s concert begins at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, with a pre-concert talk by Maestro Robertson at 6:40 p.m. The rest of the season’s Vero concerts are on Thursdays. Chamber music concerts are on Sunday afternoons at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. The first, a concert of French music for flute, viola and harp, is Jan. 18 at 3 p.m. For the full schedule of evenings and ticket information, go to www.atlanticclassicalrochestra.com or call 772-460-0850.
And with all this sensory pleasure, save some endorphins to release next weekend, when Ballet Vero Beach presents “At Sixes and Sevens,” with the choreography of George Balanchine, Peter Anastos, and the company’s artistic director Adam Schnell, set on dancers from Ballet Nebraska.
Anastos’ “Go for Barocco,” set to Bach, is part of the stock repertory of the drag ballet company, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. It actually spoofs the modernized style of Balanchine’s ballets. By contrast, the real-deal Balanchine’s classically-inspired “Valse Fantaisie” is a vetting of sorts for the young company (more on that elsewhere in this section.) Schnell’s “Finch Concerto,” is a premiere set to music by Scottish harpist Catrin Finch. Performances are Friday, Jan. 16 at 8 p.m. and Saturday, Jan. 17 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m at the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center. Tickets are from $10 to $50. Go to balletverobeach.org. or call 772-905-2651.