Once again, the big screen becomes the backdrop of another of Space Coast Symphony Orchestra’s film score concerts.
The time, the music comes from sci-fi classics in a concert conductor Aaron Collins bills as Out of This World: Part Deux. (Part Un was earlier this fall and was a smash success with the audience.)
Sunday afternoon at the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center, selections from the scores of “Alien 3” and “Cocoon” join the well-known themes from “Star Wars,” “E.T.,” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” performed by Collins’ assemblage of regional professional musicians. As images from the movies flash on a screen behind the orchestra, it becomes an interesting exercise to note how emotions rise and fall through music. It also makes you realize how great film scores have narratives as clear as those on the screen.
Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door. College students with IDs and anyone 18 and under are admitted free. And Space Coast prides itself on its “symphony for everyone” program, which provides for sliding-scale or free tickets to those in need. Call 855-252-7276, or go to www.spacecoastsymphony.org.
And if you’re a film buff, sci-fi or otherwise, you likely already know about the long-running film studies classes at the Vero Beach Museum of Art (not to be confused with the Asbury Short Film Concert coming up in February). The annual film studies begin in fall, with each themed series offering five films to Tuesday afternoon and evening audiences in the museum’s Leonhardt auditorium. A brief talk beforehand sets up the film, and a discussion period follows.
Two series already took place this fall, with newcomer Dianne Thelen as instructor, one on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s work and the other on character actors.
Beginning in January, series founder and coordinator Warren Obluck takes over with a series called Survivors: Love and Obsession in the Art World. But these are not movies you can just jump up and go to – it takes some planning: January’s series is sold out at both the afternoon and evening showings. Consider instead February’s Trends in International Cinema: Life Styles. Or March’s Learning the Hard Way: Romance and Reality in Recent French Cinema, a likely sell-out, featuring two trilogies that are among France’s “most recent and most irresistible” according to Obluck’s description. The first, Cedrick Klapisch’s “Globalization” trilogy released in 2002, 2008 and 2013; and the second, part of actor/director Daniel Auteuil’s effort to recreate the oeuvre of the great director Marcel Pagnol. Obluck is showing “Marius” and “Fanny,” two of Pagnol’s Marseilles trilogy about a young working-class couple’s life-altering decisions, and the love those choices stymie. The third in the Marseille trilogy remake has yet to be released.
Tuition for each five-film series is $70, $50 for museum members. Call 772-231-0707 for information or go to the museum’s website, www.verobeachmuseum.org. There, you’ll also see that museum has a collection of 3,000 classic, foreign and art house films on DVD available to museum members who pay an extra $25 a year.
The first Friday of the year means downtown Vero’s sidewalks will get a workout at the monthly gallery stroll. Gallery 14 is having a “last call” reception for the Our Beautiful Waters exhibition, a juried show with 20 percent of sales benefitting the Environmental Learning Center. The show, which opened in early December, received submissions from as far away as Maine and New Jersey, though most works are from regional artists. This is the second show to benefit ELC. The benefits started in 2010 as Our Beautiful Oceans and benefitted Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute as well as ORCA, the Ocean Research and Conservation Association. Last year, it changed the name to include the troubled Indian River Lagoon.
“The winners this year were quite diverse,” says Dorothy Napp Shindel, an owner/artist at Gallery 14. Winners included a Hobe Sound artist who submitted a print done from an actual fish; and a Lake Worth artist’s underwater photography. In addition to the awards from a panel of judges, ELC chose to honor barrier island resident Margaret Goembel’s “Rowing Down the River.” The assemblage comprises “rusty elements, bottles and sorted debris – just want the ELC hopes to eradicate,” Shindel notes.
Meanwhile, exhibitions are ending soon at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, if you haven’t had a chance to drop in. This is the last weekend for the Carol Brown Goldberg exhibit and for the much-talked about kinetic sculpture exhibit. Also, the Indian River Photo Club’s annual juried show ends Jan. 4 in the education wing gallery space.
And it’s the last weekend to catch the student cast in “You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown” at Riverside Children’s Theatre. Shows are at 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Call 231-6990 for information.
Saturday night, the folks at Sebastian Inlet State Park have organized another in their Night Sounds concert series on the Sebastian Inlet that take place on weekends closest to a full moon, starting at 7 p.m. This time, the reggae, funk, and new rock band, 23 Treez is playing music appropriate to the starry sea-side setting. Two Melbourne Beach brothers, Aaron and Adam Azar, with Adam, a singer/songwriter who plays solo gigs locally, is on vocals and lead; Aaron plays bass with Mike Longman on drums. Park entrance fees apply. Call 321-984-4852 for information.
And next weekend at the Lyric Theatre in Stuart, television actor Peter Story plays in the one-man show, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,” based on John Gray’s best-selling book. The show toured Europe after opening in Paris in 2008, then came to the U.S. last year. The Lyric, built in 1926 in downtown Stuart, just underwent a renovation with new carpet, new seats – with cup-holders (take note, Riverside) a ceiling paint job, a new sound system and a professional bar. The $3 million upgrade includes a 9-foot concert grand – sure to please manager John Loesser, a Vero island resident and son of the great Broadway composer, Frank Loesser. Call 772-287-2827 or go to www.lyrictheatre.com.
