Big, as in Mrs.

The end of Sex and the City left fans of the TV phenomenon without their weekly revelations about city women’s feminine mystique. No more jokes involving pubic hair, female farts, or romps with sexy yoga instructors. We caught Candace Bushnell, author of the book that started it all, in a…

Flower Power

FRI 3/5 For some people, guarding orchid-growing secrets is tantamount to the Department of Defense protecting information about nuclear warheads. They steal, they lie, they hire spies. You wouldn’t believe it. In case you haven’t read the book The Orchid Thief or seen the film Adaptation, you should know that…

Animal Time

THU 3/4 The common denominator unifying creatures is the passing of time. After all, the same sun rises and sets in its daily cycle for all of us. Right? Wrong. Some creatures live in their own bubbles of time. For instance the Aldabra tortoise, named for its native Aldabra Atoll…

TV Dinner

MON 3/8 Your days of screaming obscenities at the television screen are over. Don’t get too excited: Hardball, Chris Matthews’s annoying MSNBC gab fest, hasn’t been canceled — yet! The silver-haired pundit continues to offer up in-depth political analysis with weighty guests such as comedian Bill Maher. But if you…

Shouting It Down

SAT 3/6 Miami filmmaker Juan Carlos Zaldivar laments the dearth of countercultural icons in a world rife with war, corporate greed, and disease. He bemoans the growing apathy in cities and the eerie quiet that comes with assimilation. Once-radical heroes such as John Waters, he observes, maintain a comfort in…

The Dark Side of Jolson

On the face of it, Jolson and Company, the latest biographical musical presented by the Coconut Grove Playhouse, should be dead on arrival. Its subject, Al Jolson, became a star before World War I, died more than a half-century ago, and hardly registers in the contemporary Zeitgeist. He was reputed…

Current Shows

Blind Date: The New Theatre presents another world premiere with Mario Diament’s Blind Date. Diament is the Miami-based, Argentine-born author of The Book of Ruth and Smithereens. As the title suggests, the play explores encounters between strangers, sighted and blind. Directed by Rafael de Acha. March 6 through April 4…

Current Shows

By the Woods: This show takes us to a humorously dark side of nature. Pepe Mar’s Totem brings taboo to the realm of innocence via stuffed toys, butterflies, trinkets, and Blue Puffy Head. More akin to Strindberg’s gloom, Norwegian painter Frank Brunner’s misty works portray nature, light, and artifice. Chris…

This Week’s Day by Day Picks

Thursday 3/4 Skate rats and nouveau punks will be getting their fiercest attitude together as Linkin Park, the rocking clash of old-school hip-hop and hard-driving rock and roll, brings its Meteora tour to town. The altmetal quintet packs a loud and energetic wallop despite the fact that its members are…

Arte Americano

Ars longa, vita brevis, goes the old Roman saying, and it remains true today. While decades and centuries come and go, art endures. The tumult of prerevolutionary Russia is by now a dim memory, but Chekhov’s plays remain to recall the era. So it is with the plays of Jon…

Current Shows

Chekhov in Repertory: Actors engage in a battle of egos as they struggle through an ill-fated production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters; presented in rotating repertory with The Cherry Orchard. Through February 28. University of Miami Ring Theatre, 1312 Miller Dr., Coral Gables. 305-284-3355. The Drawer Boy: Watching Florida Stage’s…

Art’s Big New Home

Miami Art Central, known as MAC, is a project shaped and funded by Ella Fontanals Cisneros, the Venezuelan philanthropist who last year purchased a two-story building at 5960 Red Rd. and asked architect Alessandro Fiorentino to remodel it. MAC now stands as a handsome arthouse with two levels of exhibition…

Current Shows

(Making Up) Carolyn: Ever daydreamed of what Jacques Derrida would do with a Home Depot gift certificate? Then survey this site-specific installation by Shane Aslan Selzer. The sculptor poetically invigorates sundry building materials while deconstructing the history of the Carolyn Apartments, now teetering on the brink of extinction before the…

Suffer Unto Mel

This Jew has spent several hours in the past week reading all four Gospels, as well as various supplementary (and often inflammatory) texts, upon which Mel Gibson based his The Passion of the Christ. I’ve read the interpretations of scholars, the apologias of popes, and the damnations of zealots. I’ve…

Sizzle? Fizzle

This is not a good movie. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is, in fact, a bad movie. The script bleeds one cliché after another, the female lead can’t fire up the heat necessary for her role, and the plot resolves nearly every conflict it introduces within minutes. Worse, even as the…

Le Freaks

God is coming. Put away your prayer books and slip on your boogie shoes because he’s gonna scoop you up with a chunky bass line, heavenly vocals, and phat-phat glam. In case you didn’t know, God is Nile Rodgers, the prolific producer of disco megahits and the man responsible for…

Velvet Goldmine

There’s an apocryphal tale, or “urban legend” as such fables are now known, that New York’s Waldorf Astoria prepared a red velvet cake for some diners back in the Thirties or Forties — and then presented a $100 charge for the dessert. Back then $100 was big bucks, but even…

Goodbye Hello

We barely had time to scream our tits off. We bitched when we heard that the Cactus Bar and Grill, Miami’s longest-running gay bar and home to Biscayne Boulevard rough trade, was closing. We lamented the passing of glam and grift, once hallmarks of the gay underworld and fodder for…

Bout Face

SUN 2/29 At last, a wrestling outfit that knows that fighting is all about the mask. Along with a range of over-the-top identities, many of the fighters who participate in Lucha Xtreme Wrestling possess some of the most compelling costumes in the sport. The Mark of the Mask tour, which…

Movie Madness

FRI 2/27 In Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film Network, Peter Finch plays a washed-up television anchorman who begins to lose his sanity. When in a rage he encourages his audience on live television to stick their heads out their windows and shout at the top of their lungs “I’m mad as…

Second Act

FRI 2/27 Now that Sex and the City is off the air, actor/dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov is screwed. He has to find something else to do besides playing a moody artist who beds Sarah Jessica Parker’s character Carrie Bradshaw and whisks her away to Paris. Well, it seems the 55-year-old Russian…

This Week’s Day by Day Picks

Thursday 2/26 Don’t count on hearing gripping stories about the Titanic or the Andrea Doria or even the S.S. Minnow from Gilligan’s Island when you pay a visit to the Historical Museum of Southern Florida’s (101 W. Flagler St.) latest exhibition, “Shipwrecks and Rescues: 1550-2000.” The disasters and heroic events…