The latest edition of the Miami Light Project’s signature commissioning program designed to nurture Miami-based artists, Here & Now 2005, is also its first co-production with the incipient Miami Performing Arts Center. Unveiled last week and continuing with a second program through Monday, March 28, at the Light Box, this…
Let the lady gloat. Ellen Wedner, director of the 2005 Miami Jewish Film Festival, has a point when she boasts of this year’s “wonderful festival filled with a huge diversity of film topics.” She’s not kidding. With pictures from Israel, Argentina, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, Uganda, Luxembourg, Italy, the Netherlands,…
A formidable trio of principals makes the Actors’ Playhouse Aida a fabulously entertaining evening of theater. For those who already love the show, here is a chance to experience the Elton John-Tim Rice score persuasively, passionately sung and acted by Desmon N. Walker, Christopher A. Kent, and Melanie Penn –…
The Diaries, a mess of a play now being presented at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, begins with the suggestion of something much better. A young American scholar is about to give a talk on campus on the subject of his Nazi grandfather’s diaries, a controversial document that may…
Good news. The Promethean Theatre is a young company to watch, and its debut production of Orange Flower Water is as exciting as it is promising. Directed by Margaret M. Ledford with a keen eye for detail, the local premiere of Craig Wright’s intense domestic drama treks through familiar territory…
It might have worked. Mad Cat Theatre Company’s new production of Sam Shepard’s Action, a one-act play passing for a full evening of theater, has a lot going on: screaming and chair-throwing, fish-filleting onstage, what looks like a Pollo Tropical chicken passing for a Christmas meal, lots of drooly finger-licking,…
The buzz is golden, the word is out, and this festival is going to be big. The opening night screening of Andy Garcia’s Modigliani at Gusman sold out so fast a second showing was added at the Regal Cinema in South Beach for the following afternoon. And so it goes…
You know there’s trouble brewing when you get this bit of conversation between husband and wife: “How was your day?” “I wish you wouldn’t talk to me like that.” This snippy exchange in The Retreat from Moscow acts as prologue to the pathetic end of Edward and Alice’s marriage, a…
It’s a trial all right. Now on stage at the New Theatre, Shirley Lauro’s Clarence Darrow’s Last Trial takes a long time to bring to life the minor last chapter of a major life in law. The play actually had a snazzy buzz before its world premiere in Coral Gables…
The minor works of a genius are often more rewarding than the best that lesser mortals can bring. In the case of Paul Bunyan, the unclassifiable musical entertainment that had its South Florida premiere Saturday night at the Miami-Dade Auditorium, the rewards are actually double: This is the work of…
There’s a lot to be said for this thing that just opened at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, but here’s the essence: Crush the Infamous Thing: The Adventures of the Hollywood Four is the season’s funniest comedy and the best cure for postelection, preholiday blues. Don’t miss it. The screwball setup…
Take a holiday classic loved by all, add a few star turns and more than a whiff of camp, don your gay apparel and get set to make some memories: That is the aim of It’s a Fabulous Life!, David Sexton and Albert Evans’s loose and merry musical adaptation of…
The best show in town happens to be an opera. Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is just the first offering of the Florida Grand Opera’s 2004-2005 season, a varied feast that promises other mega hits such as Lucia di Lammermoor and The Magic Flute, as well as a tasty rare treat in…
Charles Busch’s 1984 camp classic Vampire Lesbians of Sodom began life as a cabaret act and famously went on to become one of off-Broadway’s longest-running hits. Though much of the play’s initial success had to do with the glamour and chutzpah of Busch himself — a nice Jewish boy with…
Miami Light Project launched its sixteenth season Saturday night at the Gusman Center for the Arts downtown, with Laurie Anderson’s The End of the Moon. The season continues November 11 with Haiti’s Beethova Obas, and soars all over town with such diverse offerings as the local debut of Japan’s Rinko-Gun…
You’ve heard about Irish Alzheimer’s? That’s when you forget everything but the grudges. And that’s the kind of cute, deep-down affectionate humor at the heart of Late Nite Catechism. The one-nun show, starring Kathleen Stefano, has turned the Encore Room at the Coconut Grove Playhouse into a parochial school classroom,…
The presidential election is near, and the Florida Room folks have a lot on their minds. Nuclear proliferation, for starters, as well as the Iraq War. Also the memory of butterfly ballots and hanging chads, electronic voting machines, Al Jazeera and Fox News, political cartoons and cartoonish politicians, Will Ferrell…
To hear him tell it, there is little out of the ordinary about the time Ralph met Rona, about his annoying but seemingly harmless pushiness, about the girl’s eventual return of his insistent “Hello, hello, hello.” Soon we learn, however, that Rona is but ten years old, that Ralph is…
A lot can be said about luna del pingüino, but above all, there is this: It works. Constantly surprising, interactive, and gently transgressive, bursting with smiles even at its most unsettling, ready to face today’s serious moral challenges but readier still to entertain, it is a one-man show but also…
The real Moms Mabley was a trip. The woman recalled in Jackie “Moms” Mabley Live at the Shores Theater deserves our respect, and her old routines can still get more than a laugh or two. But not even Latrice Bruno’s delicious impersonation can gloss over how little the late T…
Nicky Silver is one twisted playwright, and his Raised in Captivity is too much. Now on stage at PS 742 in the heart of Little Havana, the deadly serious, seriously funny black comedy begins at a funeral: After years of not seeing each other, Sebastian and his twin, Bernadette, meet…
