Fourteen people smelling faintly of sunscreen and insect repellent are gathered around Bob Merkel, a naturalist and tour guide with the Deering Estate at Cutler. The group is outside the visitors’ center at the South Miami-Dade park, and Merkel, a cheerful, grandfatherly man, is spinning the area’s history in the…
Jews and China. Aside from some Jews’ propensity toward Chinese food as their ethnic cuisine of choice, it seems like there’s more of a connection than most would suspect. Between the years 1939 and 1945, 30,000 European Jews lived in China. Trying to escape the horrors of World War II,…
The road signs are blurry but the way is clear in the New Theatre’s intimate production of How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama that’s wrapped up in automobile metaphors. Set in rural Maryland and unfolding over three decades, the play tells the story of a…
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! The repressed Irish-Catholic schoolgirl that Molly Shannon plays on Saturday Night Live is certainly not everyone’s cup of glee. But there’s no denying the tug she exerts on anyone whose past is littered with the dry husks of Latin verbs and memories of nuns swinging big…
Am I a traitor to my gender because I didn’t find this unabashed film about female sexuality erotic, brave, or even — can I say it — interesting? The ironically titled Romance, directed by the audacious French filmmaker Catherine Breillat (36 Fillette), has become something of a cause célèbre wherever…
The British-made Bedrooms and Hallways has all the makings of a break-out hit, even with straight audiences. The second feature from director Rose Troche, this comedy of gay male manners is radically different from her 1993 no-budget debut film about New York lesbian bohemia, Go Fish. And Troche more than…
Take pity on poor Sebastian (Adrian Grenier). As your typical teenager in a small town in upstate New York, circa 1983, he’s already got enough problems: His divorced parents have both remarried, his sister is leaving for college, and life seems meaningless. To top it all off, his stepfather, Hank…
Lily Tomlin, actress, comedienne, and the mouth that launched a million monologues in the 1980s, is coming back for more. In her solo piece, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, the actress famously allowed a dozen or so characters to inhabit her body, including Agnus Angst,…
To many unknowing Americans, the word carnival conjures notions of a county fair replete with risky rides, smelly farm animals, and enough cotton candy and corn dogs to upset stomachs for weeks. In South America, the Caribbean, the West Indies, and even some spots in North America (New Orleans, New…
Any actor will admit that the audience can become a character in a live performance, in part because of the chemistry that wafts back and forth across the proverbial fourth wall. That’s never more true than with improv comedy, in which actors are force-fed random lines, situations, and emotions, often…
Just what Americans need, another holiday. As if Earth Day, Secretary’s Day, and Grandparents’ Day weren’t enough. Add to the list Design and Architecture Day, coming at us Friday, October 1. This one is different, though. You won’t have to send flowers, buy candy, spring for lunch, or plant a…
Everyone will be looking skyward at the Kendall-Tamiami Airport this weekend, as the crowd is transported back 60 years. Some of the very same airplanes that exchanged gunfire and dropped bombs on Europe and Asia during World War II will be kissing the clouds and swooping down over the runways…
On to the central character of this film, director Christopher Nolan has grafted his own obsessions. His film noir, the black-and-white 16mm Following, deals with a tortured young man’s uncontrollable addiction to following people around the streets of London. Indeed the entire movie is in itself obsessive. Supported by an…
There is something fairy-talelike, but also deeply human, about Twin Falls Idaho, a gentle, beautifully realized tale of love and intimacy that marks the feature-film debut of Mark Polish and Michael Polish. Identical twin brothers, Mark Polish wrote the script, Michael Polish directed it, and both brothers star. It is…
This work is winning audience awards at festivals all over the world, and it’s easy to see why. Although it’s not much more than an exuberant home movie, Roko Belic’s film Genghis Blues perfectly captures his subject’s motley, epic journey to the almost mythical republic of Tuva. Blind blues musician,…
In his hilarious stage memoir, Charles Nelson Reilly talks about his days as a Broadway understudy, his death-obsessed uncle, and his memories of Ruth Draper, “the best actor who ever lived.” But the story that captures the comedy-spiked bathos at the heart of the show is the anecdote he tells…
Late August, Early September takes an intensely up-close look at its characters. French director Olivier Assayas broke through to American audiences two years ago with Irma Vep, his clever homage to and vehicle for the great Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung, whom he subsequently married. His new drama is much…
Ten-year-old Fraser Pettigrew leads an idyllic existence. He lives on a bucolic estate in Scotland with five siblings, four dogs, his gentle mother, Moira (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), eccentric inventor father, Edward (Colin Firth), and indomitable grandmother, Gamma Macintosh (Rosemary Harris). For Fraser (Robert Norman, making his professional acting debut), life…
Grownups, take heart. Even if you misspent your summer at the movies pigging out on reheated space adventure, slob humor, and stubborn, old ballplayers who won’t hang up their spikes, all is not lost. A powerful and intelligent film called American Beauty has volumes to say about the way people…
Choreographer and dancer Neri Torres wants you to enjoy a rumba. But she also wants Miami audiences to remember that the blood-stirring music and dance developed not in ballrooms and Hollywood films, where it eventually turned up, but in Cuba’s black barrios, originating among the almost one million Africans brought…
“No land on Earth possesses more wonder than Egypt.” Thus claims the character portrayed by actor Omar Sharif in the IMAX movie Mysteries of Egypt, coproduced with National Geographic, and opening Friday, September 24, at the combination IMAX/IMAX 3-D theater in South Miami’s Shops at Sunset Place. Whether outfitted in…
James McLure’s one-act Pvt. Wars made a neat splash back in 1979 when it appeared at the celebrated New Playwrights Festival at the Actors Theatre in Louisville. But between that time and now the work has run aground, having hit many of the metaphorical icebergs that are apt to sink…
