Conductor Aaron Collins has picked some mostly familiar and entirely beautiful music for his all-Russian concert with the Space Coast Symphony Orchestra this weekend. Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dances,” Rachmaninoff’s “Isle of the Dead” and Stravinsky’s ballet “Petrushka,” will be performed at 3 p.m. at Vero’s Community Church.
The concert marks the first Masterworks concert of the group’s seventh season. And, with luck, sunny skies are ahead for the orchestra: Orlando TV meteorologist Marina Jurica has hired the group for the debut of her new light opera company.
Jurica, who does the weekend weather for WFTV (Channel 9), earned a degree in music at UCLA, and worked in TV news in L.A. covering the Yugoslav wars (her family is Croatian) before going back to school for a master’s degree in meteorology. But she never gave up singing, taking opera roles with the Orlando Philharmonic and in a number of musicals.
With her love of both operas and musicals, operettas are close to her heart. In founding Orlando Light Opera, she claims to have created one of the few operetta companies in the world today. Even more remarkable is that she’s starting in a city that has struggled mightily to keep opera a part of its cultural offerings.
Billed as a summer festival is the company’s first work, “The Student Prince,” a classic of the genre. Performances take place at the Annie Russell Theatre at Rollins College in Winter Park next Thursday July 28 through Sunday July 31.
Last week’s profile of Richard Crowell, Riverside Theatre’s new production manager, mentions his long association with Lou Tyrrell, a major figure in theater in Palm Beach County, and in all of South Florida, for that matter. Tyrrell’s Florida Stage closed in 2011, but he has since started Theatre Lab, a resident company on the campus of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.
This summer, Vero residents don’t have to drive all the way to Boca to see new plays in development, Tyrrell’s signature effort. The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm is staging Theatre Lab’s readings of one-act plays and musicals at its Thursday night Art After Dark events. The series starts this Thursday (July 21) with a staged reading of a new musical “13 Things about Ed Carpolotti,” with book, lyrics and music by Barry Kleinbort, based on a monologue from the Jeffrey Hatcher play, “Three Viewings.” The reading features a multiple Carbonell Award-winning actress, Laura Turnbull, who has appeared on Broadway and on national tours; and Caryl Fantel, a veteran Palm Beach pianist and music director who has performed off-Broadway and at Carnegie Hall.
