Forget all the holiday hobnobbing. The only finery you need for the Sebastian Fine Art and Music Festival is footwear to stroll in and kick off when you want to dance.
That’s likely to happen Saturday afternoon in Riverview Park when the howling, scowling Betty Fox brings her alternately warbling and wrenchingly raw blues over from the Tampa Bay area. Fox and her band just played Orlando’s House of Blues over Christmas, and you may have caught her at Stuart’s Terra Fermata or Delray’s Arts Garage. She is definitely worth the trek down to the river, playing from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday, a second blues diva, Portland, Ore.’s Duffy Bishop, is playing, having crossed the continent for a number of Florida dates of late including Terra Fermata Friday night and the following Friday, Jan. 29, The Bamboo Room in Lake Worth, where she’ll be opening for Ana Popovich. Bishop plays in Sebastian from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.
An equally fierce singer with a far softer sound, folk and indie rocker Ani DiFranco plays Melbourne’s King Center Tuesday. Her 1995 album “Not a Pretty Girl,” with the title song plus the hits “Worthy” and “32 Flavors,” became an anthem for new feminism, urging women to go easy on their sisters, and men to not feel so threatened. Her record company and foundation both bear the name Righteous Babe, which pretty much says it all.
Raised in Buffalo, N.Y., daughter of two MIT graduates, DiFranco was busking with her guitar teacher at the age of 9. At 15, she left home and was in college a year later. She formed her record label at 18, and two years later, after taking poetry classes at the New School, released her first album.
In 2009, she sang at Madison Square Garden for Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday celebration. The same year she received the Woodie Guthrie Award for her social activism.
Over the past few years, I’ve been writing about legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma in conjunction with Vero’s extraordinary summer camp for fiddle music. The Mike Block String Camp is the brainchild of one of Ma’s associates, Mike Block, also a cellist and a member of Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble.
Now Yo-Yo Ma himself is coming to the neighborhood, appearing at West Palm’s Kravis Center Friday (Jan. 15).
The concert will be undiluted Ma: He performs alone throughout a wide-ranging program including J.S. Bach’s “Suite No. 1 in G Major for unaccompanied cello”; Mark O’Connor’s “Appalachia Waltz”; a piece from the renowned film score composer Zhao Jiping; and Turkish composer Adnan Saygun’s “Partita for Solo Cello.”
Eighteen of Ma’s 90 albums have won Grammy awards, most recently “The Goat Rodeo Sessions” with “newgrass” greats Edgar Meyer, Stuart Duncan and Chris Thile. (Watch the blissful cut “Attaboy” on Youtube.) Among Ma’s pile of prizes, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
And Saturday night, a very different act, though an equally diverse talent, arrives at Kravis: Kristin Chenoweth, the classically trained soprano who sang gospel growing up in Broken Arrow, Okla. After winning a Tony for her role in the 1999 revival of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” she was cast as Glinda in the huge hit “Wicked.” Chenoweth has also had roles in TV’s “Glee” and “West Wing,” and in 2012 was badly injured when a piece of lighting equipment fell on her on the set of “The Good Wife.” She was still in physical therapy last year.
With so many theater options close to home (“A Chorus Line” at Riverside, reviewed in this issue; “Social Security” at the Theatre Guild through Sunday; and “Smokey Joe’s Café” at Melbourne’s Henegar center, which opens Friday and runs through the end of the month), it may be the wrong weekend to toss one more in the mix. But on the chance you’re running to the Gardens Mall with holiday returns, Jupiter’s Maltz Theatre is staging “The Will Rogers Follies,” the musical about the life and times of the famous humorist who often headlined the Ziegfeld Follies.
Originally directed by Tommy Tune, the Maltz production stars Matt Loehr in the lead role; he won the southeast Florida-based Carbonell awards in three other Maltz musicals including “The Music Man” and “Crazy for You.” He’s joined by veterans of those two shows, choreographer Shea Sullivan (choreographer and producer of the recent off-Broadway show “Pageant the Musical”) and director Mark Martino, a veteran of The Cape Playhouse and North Shore Music Theatre who has directed many Maltz productions including last season’s “Les Misérables.”
The Maltz, which uses union and non-union professional actors, casts its shows in New York and Orlando as well as in Jupiter. About half its actors are Florida-based.