No one expects Riverside Theatre’s Allen Cornell to step out onto the apron and bellow “Hello, suckers!” to the audience for “Chicago,” the musical that opened this week in Vero. No, the “suckers” line is reserved for Velma, the leggy, ballsy showgirl on trial for double murder, and she’s referring to all those who fell hard for the stories of a 1920s phenomenon: the celebrity slayette.
Not that the show won’t slay, in show biz parlance. Riverside Theatre hires only professional actors, directors and designers, many with Broadway and top regional theater backgrounds. It then mounts the show at its stellar barrier island facility. It is known for producing big musicals like this one; everybody’s already seen it but they want to see again, then they walk dazed and grinning into the lobby afterwards swearing the Vero version was better than Broadway’s. Who isn’t a sucker for a great song-and-dance number? “Chicago” is replete with them, delivered in the jazz-era bump-and-grind that made the show’s writer and choreographer Bob Fosse famous.
Days before the curtain rose on opening night Tuesday, Cornell pulled the trigger and added two more performances, so hot were ticket sales – and all that jazz. “Chicago” runs through Jan. 22.
Velma and Roxie may be a tough act to follow, but Elphaba and Glinda will do their best when the national tour of “Wicked” opens its run next week in Orlando.
More than 40 million people have seen the show “Wicked.” Despite the almost universal bad reviews that followed its opening in 2003, it’s become a veritable stage institution. And the $3 billion in ticket sales – much of it from repeat viewers – went a long way toward assuaging those sore feelings inflicted by the critics. Now, the show is back on tour opening Jan. 11 at Dr. Phillips Center and running through Jan. 29. The record-busting musical tells the tale of two girls from Oz, one born with emerald green skin, who grow up to become the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch. It’s the modern dichotomy of popular girls and “different” girls.
The Vero Beach Theatre Guild knows its audience loves British farce, so they’re serving up another one next week. “Cash on Delivery,” directed by Art Pingree, is about a man who has lost his job but doesn’t tell his wife, and instead takes every government hand-out he can find, inventing plenty of dependents along the way.
When social workers come to call, the mad scramble begins. The play opens next Thursday and runs through Jan. 22.
The Opera Orlando production of “Don Pasquale” comes to Vero Beach this Sunday through Vero Beach Opera, staged at 3 p.m. at Vero Beach High School’s Performing Arts Center.
And if that’s not enough opera for one week, you can see the legendary Plácido Domingo sing the baritone title role in Verdi’s “Nabucco,” conducted by James Levine and simulcast at the Majestic 11 Theatre. Levine and Domingo, both in their 70s, have worked together in more than 360 performances at the Met over the past 45 years. The Saturday simulcast is sold out (in two theaters no less) but there’s a repeat Tuesday night at 7 p.m.
Next Wednesday, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra opens its season with newly appointed artistic director David Amado taking the podium to conduct Smetana’s “Overture for the Bartered Bride,” Tchaikovsky’s “Piano Concerto in B-flat minor” performed by Vyacheslav Gryaznov, and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5 in C Minor.” Amado, who studied at Juilliard and Indiana University, officially joined the orchestra last July after six years with the St. Louis Orchestra and dozens of engagements with major orchestras. Gryaznov, the 34-year-old pianist whom reviewers have described as “brilliant” and “stunning,” is also a composer and professor of piano at the Moscow Conservatory.
Wednesday’s concert is at St. Edward’s School on Vero’s south barrier island.
The Indian River Symphonic Association brings the Prague Philharmonic to Vero Beach’s Community Church next Thursday. The Jan. 12 concert opens the 2017 season, which includes the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, and Germany’s Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, as well as three performances of the Brevard Symphony Orchestra.
The First Friday gallery stroll in Vero includes an impressive show of prominent Cuban artists at Raw Space at Edgewood gallery on Old Dixie. And on 14th Avenue, cowboy poet and painter Sean Sexton has a show of his three-dimensional works in clay at Flametree Clay Gallery, now under new ownership. Sexton will be giving a poetry reading there later this month.
