After Ballet Vero Beach won permission to stage a George Balanchine ballet last month, Riverside Theatre is presenting “West Side Story,” whose brilliant, often balletic jazz dancing is the Broadway choreography of Jerome Robbins, Balanchine’s assistant artistic director at New York City Ballet.
While Ballet Vero Beach’s company dancers are still in their leg warmers in Nebraska getting ready for the season’s final program in March, their Vero fans can warm up at West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center this weekend, when Miami City Ballet’s third program is performed for the company’s northernmost – and largest – audience.
It includes the U.S. premiere of “Carmen” by Richard Allston. Twyla Tharp’s serene “Sweet Fields” is a premiere for the company; it draws its inspiration from the simplicity of the Shaker lifestyle and its belief in egalitarianism dating back 300 years. It is performed to Shaker hymns in white Norma Komali gowns.
Then, Balanchine’s fast-paced “Allegro Brillante,” danced to Tchaikovsky. Its four couples seem to slip, slide and ricochet off each other like sparkles off a faceted surface. The dance was included the company’s own debut in 1986.
Once an instant TV celebrity, country artist Scotty McCreery has proven he’s got staying power. Four years after winning American Idol, he’s still packing the house in a small-town theater like Fort Pierce’s Sunrise on Saturday night. If you can’t snatch one of the last seats available at press time, don’t worry: McCreery’s still only 21, and wouldn’t appear to be close to switching careers now that he’s nearly full-grown. After all, he found this path well before “Idol” made him a star. In high school, he played the lead in “Bye Bye Birdie.” Feb. 28; $65/$55.
For entertainment of a more cerebral nature, The Emerson Center’s Celebrated Speakers series has Michio Kaku coming in Saturday at 4 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. The son of Japanese immigrants interned in U.S. concentration camps in World War II, Kaku was the kind of kid who did things like build a particle accelerator in his garage for a science project.
He is now one of a handful of science “popularizers” who can be called on to speak with erudition on just about anything science-related in the news. In the last couple of months alone, he has appeared on CBS News about recent earthquake “swarms”; the FAA’s authorization of private-sector ventures on the moon; and the identification of eight planet-like objects outside our solar system each with certain “earth-like” qualities necessary for sustaining human life.
Tickets are $70 and $80. And if you pay the premium for VIP tickets, you can give Kaku a piece of your own mind – he’ll probably say he’s got enough already – at a reception starting at 5:15.
More pleasures of the mind over at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, where staff has been climbing the walls to arrange a new exhibit of sculptural art designed to hang not just from the walls but the ceiling. “Embracing Space and Color: Art On and Off the Wall” comprises mixed media works of unusual materials, many using paint in unconventional ways. The exhibit which opened last weekend runs through the first week in June.
Also at the museum, another in the Distinguished Professor lectures, Ian Berry of Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum offers “Jewel Thieves and Score Arrangers: Contemporary Artists in Context,” a talk about the collaboration between artist and museum to present new art in new ways.
The series is the result of longtime partnerships between select colleges and universities and the museum to share scholarship with alumni, who attend at the museum member rate of $15. Tickets for non-members are $35. March 11, Sweet Briar College sends Kimberly Morse Jones, assistant professor art history, to discuss how the prickly James McNeill Whistler, who stressed tonal harmony in his paintings, got a “needs to improve” in getting along with others, in particular, his critics, one of whom he famously sued.
And a heads-up to any parent and kid who’d like to read a book together then go to hear its author: Mike Lupica, the celebrated sportswriter and best-selling author, has written a novel for young readers who can see past the end of the bat. “The Only Game” is about kids playing ball and working through loss larger than a championship.
The central figure is a small-town Little League star whose brother has died, causing him to quit the team. Then he befriends a softball-playing girl and a boy teased about his weight, and together they figure out a winning strategy. This is the latest in a string of books written for middle school kids by Lupica, who writes for the New York Daily News and appears on ESPN. He speaks next Saturday, March 7, at noon at the Vero Beach Book Center.
