EVENTS & ARTS

Despite its self-deprecating name, Slightly Stoopid proved to be completely engaging during the Southern California band’s performance last summer at Sunset Cove Amphitheater. A hippie vibe of “peace, love and music” rippled

The Wick Theatre’s dynamite season-closing performance of the jukebox rock musical “Million Dollar Quartet” captured the show’s synergy with an almost voyeuristic verisimilitude. Never forgetting that the concept arose

Cash and Elvis Presley—director Zachariah Rosenbaum generated an atmosphere of anything-can-happen looseness, or at least the illusion of it. Amid the wafts of cigarette smoke, the muttered rejoinders and the interstitial bass noodling, the script all but disappeared. And the central cast members, who collectively have played their parts more than 9,500 times, never missed a note, lick, gyration or sneer.

People are still talking about the annual fashion show, and now Celebration of the Arts has moved into must-see programming in Boca. More than an opportunity for Lynn University’s talented performing-arts graduates to showcase their skills at the end of the academic year, the school’s Celebration of the Arts once again dazzled audiences, this time for two sold-out nights at the Wold Performing Arts Center. Opening with an elaborate musical number that started in the aisles of the venue, and ending with a shower of confetti, the production, spearheaded by Lynn Associate Professor Carrie Simpson, managed to exceed expectations once again. Classics from musical theatre and pop and rock music—Sondheim to Joan Jett,“Singin’ in the Rain” to “I Will Survive”—made for the most eclectic Celebration program yet.

through the comfortable outdoor venue, as the eclectic group performed a 20-song romp that conjured the Grateful Dead one minute, Bob Marley the next, and Prince the next; the band even threw in a couple of rap covers. The amphitheater was packed, with the best audience members sprawled out on the lawn with their blankets, relaxing and grooving and dancing with unselfconscious abandon. No drama, no fuss—it was just a great time.

from an off-the-cuff 1956 jam session between four proto-rock legends— Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny

The Boca Raton Museum of Art’s exhibition on “The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop” was a blockbuster to begin with, but it was made all the more special with a surprise December cameo from Ben Mankiewicz, who graced attendees with his presence for a couple of hours at the museum before appearing for a discussion at a fundraiser at The Boca Raton. The scion of Hollywood royalty— he’s the grandson of“Citizen Kane” scribe Herman J. Mankiewicz and the grand-nephew of director Joseph L. Mankiewicz—Ben is also the primetime host on Turner art-house releases: Living Room Theaters at FAU and Regal Shadowood out west. Neither demise was a shocker, but both were debilitating for the apparent minority of moviegoers interested in seeing grown-up fare. With Cinemark Palace picking up only some of the slack, the amount of independent, for- ripples of slavery across generations, and the ability of African-Americans to forge community and identity in spite of institutional racism. The centerpiece of “Passages,” consuming an entire gallery space, was the site-specific “Deep River.”As water rushed on projected screens on three sides of the room, and

In Boca Stage’s superb production of Alessandro Camon’s drama “Time Alone,” in which the isolated stories of an inmate serving a murder charge in solitary confinement and a mother mourning the loss of her son unexpectedly intersect, director Genie Croft and a marvelous twosome discovered new depths of shared compassion, empathy and forgiveness. In Rio Chavarro’s performance, the pain and trauma seemed to reside in the actor’s bones, while Karen Stephens presented a master class in the architecture of grief—a slow-burning blueprint of its nooks and crannies. Yet she still found her character’s sense of humor—evidence that, for all her considerations of suicide, this is someone whose joy for life still exists, albeit deeply buried.

Classic Movies, film buffs’ cable channel of choice.“It was lovely,”he said a couple of weeks later, about his time in Boca.“The hotel is beautiful, and the museum—so impressive. I was blown away by both.”

LOSS

The decline of the American movie theater, initiated by streaming and accelerated by COVID, drove stakes into the hearts of two cinemas in Boca Raton that have long specialized in eign-language and documentary films receiving distribution in Boca Raton promptly plummeted—leaving Miami as the only vibrant destination for adventurous cinema in the tri-county area.

“Whitfield Lovell: Passages” landed at the Boca Raton Museum of Art this past spring with a shattering impact, at once intellectual and immediate. Lovell’s work reckons with America’s original sin, the the sound of a running stream and seabirds placed us in the scene, visitors stepped around and among wooden discs, on which Lovell drew portraits of Black people whose identities have been lost to history.“Deep River” suggests a graveyard in a ghost town, a space still trafficked by these anonymous souls. It was art for the head, the heart and the gut—and it ranked among the museum’s most urgent exhibitions in years.