Symphonic Scares

Cast your mind back to a moment in your childhood -- you were hiding behind your living room couch watching a Disney movie; it was scaring you shitless. Disney movies didn’t usually have that effect, but this was Fantasia, with its satanic denouement: a giant demon descending from a mountaintop and summoning hideous ghosties from a town’s graveyard. The demons swooped, danced, and even jiggled their animated boobies (nipples included) at the camera like Ghouls Gone Wild. Do you remember this? What scared you? Was it the spectral boobage? Or was it the accompanying music, Mussorgsky’s darkly majestic “Night On Bald Mountain”? For most of us, it was the latter—and that’s good, because tonight that haunting ballad will be played alongside Camille Saint-Saen’s “Danse Macabre,” as well as spooky orchestral numbers from the films Harry Potter, The Phantom of the Opera, and Spiderman, by the Symphony of the Americas. Held at the Parker Playhouse (707 NE Eighth St., Fort Lauderdale), the show will be preceded by face-painting and a costume competition for kids; the most frighteningly dressed will be sent up to conduct a song before the 60-piece orchestra. Tickets cost $14. Call 954-462-0222, or visit www.parkerplayhouse.com.
Sun., Oct. 28, 2007