It’s the dance homecoming of the year, except Jimmy Gamonet de los Heros didn’t really have to go anywhere. “I love Miami,” says Gamonet. “I’ve been very fortunate to be able to work in New York, Europe, and Latin America, but this is where I want to build a company.”…
It’s all about a nickel. American Buffalo, the 1975 play that made David Mamet a star and might well remain the American playwright’s best work, is a simple tale of a heist gone wrong. Three losers in a Chicago junk shop conspire to steal a buffalo nickel that is potentially…
If you choose to vanish, we’re told early on in Madagascar, you probably won’t be found. Nine out of ten people who disappear most likely prefer to remain lost. What happens then? The answers are not easy, but they can be surprising, as is J.T. Rogers’s Madagascar. This delicate, ineffably…
No, it’s not the big one. But the Summer Mini-Fest presented by the Miami Jewish Film Festival does offer a welcome respite from the blockbuster madness that rules at your local multiplex. True, this time around there is nothing here on the level of previous festival discoveries such as Walk…
The recent off-Broadway hit Matt & Ben, written by Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers, is having its Florida premiere in a Mad Cat Theatre production at the Light Box Studio, directed by Paul Tei. It’s cute. The plot is a simple fantasy about talent, male bonding, and fame, based on…
The good news here is Guillermo Reyes is a major voice in Hispanic and gay theater, and his 1994 comedy Men on the Verge of a His-Panic Breakdown is nothing short of brilliant. The really bad news, however, is that the amateur show of the same name that EDGE/Theatre is…
Rafael de Acha’s production of The Merchant of Venice is not perfect, but it also cannot be dismissed. It boasts gripping and often extraordinary performances by Steve Gladstone, Annemaria Rajala, Euriamis Losada, Nicholas Richberg, and Stephen S. Neal, as well as spectacularly lovely costumes by Estela Vrancovich and singularly touching…
William Shakespeare needs no justification. And the Shakespeare Project 2005, an ambitious summer-long festival now onstage at New Theatre, holds the immense promise of some of the most exciting drama the world has known. Romeo and Juliet, which will be followed by The Merchant of Venice in July and Macbeth…
It’s been a great season for movie lovers in South Florida, with a string of major festivals more than making up in both quantity and quality for the multiplexing of America. There have been major discoveries all over, not just in the vast Miami International Film Festival but also at…
Miami, where a short drive can transport you from Little Havana to Little Buenos Aires and beyond, is the ideal spot in which to celebrate the vast and thrilling human quilt that is Hispanic culture. And some of the happiest celebrations are happening right here and now during the XX…
Jules Feiffer’s memory play about Brooklyn in the Fifties resounds as a cautionary tale for the United States in the 21st Century. Now at GableStage in a terrific production directed by Joseph Adler, A Bad Friend is ambitious and intimate, a provocative series of family snapshots that evokes the history…
Few new plays are this important and this beautiful, and fewer still are done this well. Jonathan Lichtenstein’s The Pull of Negative Gravity won the top prize for new writing at the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and is now premiering for American audiences simultaneously off-Broadway in New York and at…
Scratch and Burn really shouldn’t work, but it does. Teo Castellanos’s gripping and immensely entertaining dance-theater work staged at the Byron Carlyle over the weekend is overwhelming. Its intentions are epic and its execution exhilarating yet disarmingly naive. The result is a sweet success. Miami Light Project commissioned Scratch as…
It’s not perfect and it needs work, but there’s a lot to enjoy in Nefertiti: A Musical Romance. Billed as a new musical, but an entire generation in the making, this production bears a history as fascinating as the ancient Egyptian love story it traces. The creation of Nefertiti has…
Derek Jarman’s Blue may be that weird and wonderful filmmaker’s weirdest and most wonderful film. Striking imagery informs all of his movies, from Sebastiane right through the queer classic Edward II, but Blue is literally about 80 minutes of nothing but a blue screen, with the bells and whispers of…
It is both quite a coup and a kooky touch to have landed Bea Arthur as the gala diva of ceremonies of the Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. The Tony-winning, Emmy-hoarding, age-defying human rights activist and entertainment dynamo will perform a short version of her acclaimed one-woman show, And…
Back for a seventh year, the Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival kicks off an early hot summer with ten days of movies, parties, and pride. Indies and majors from here and from abroad come together April 22 when Craig Lucas’s highly anticipated The Dying Gaul opens the festival as…
Kyle, a likable young man with a slightly geeky aura, sits alone at the edge of the stage and talks disarmingly to the audience. He is an astronomer, so he talks about the stars. He loves poetry too. Most of all, though, he loves Zoe — his first high school…
Latin in the truest and broadest sense of that beauteous word, the Miami Latin Film Festival brings us movies not only from Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, and Costa Rica but also from France and Italy as well as, of course, Spain. This year’s edition, which opens Thursday (April 14)…
Without a lot of fanfare but before an immensely appreciative crowd, the most exciting orchestra in town was born last weekend at the Byron Carlyle Theater in Miami Beach. Livio Tragtenberg’s Nervous City Orchestra, an only-in-Miami version of the Brazilian composer’s 2004 Neuropolis, was a premiere, a celebration of the…
Going from strength to strength in the Light Box Studio, Here & Now 2005 radiates the unmistakable glow of success. Fast on the heels of new works by Octavio Campos and Joanne Barrett came two new pieces unveiled last week: a winning tap-dance fantasy with a hip-hop edge called What?!?…
It can’t possibly be their fault, so don’t blame the stars. In fact give Lucie Arnaz and Elizabeth Ashley two points for doing everything humanly possible to try making Ann and Debbie work. All their glamour, presence, acting and overacting, terrific timing, gorgeous legs and distinctive voices, together with wishing,…
