If nothing else, Naked Boys Singing! lives up to the hype of its title. The cast members are naked, they are male, and they sing. In fact they sing rather well. That’s a good thing, since the revue, already a hit at the Celebration Theatre in Los Angeles (another production…
Runaway Bride, the long-anticipated reunion of Pretty Woman-stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, isn’t a sequel, but it feels like one. In everything there is a distinct sense of predestination, of events occurring according to some irresistible force of the inevitable. This makes life especially easy for Garry Marshall, the…
For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the well-known actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse — or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High…
Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting (from Shirley Jackson’s novel) has long been considered one of the milestones of the horror film. After 36 years, DreamWorks has bankrolled a new version under the direction of Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister) — an idea that should sound unpromising, even to…
Some performers search for signs of intelligent life. Others search for their own gray matter. When celebrated New York monologist-crank-lesbian-comedian Reno makes her first South Florida appearance as part of the Miami Light Project’s Come Out Laughing series, she’ll bring the results of her latest exploration in the show Reno…
Call Tamalyn Dallal the Rodney Dangerfield of dance. Dallal, a shapely attractive woman, doesn’t resemble the portly comedian in any way, but she and Dangerfield have one thing in common: Both are rather vocal about not getting any respect. Dallal is a belly dancer. Although the ancient dance’s roots stem…
The fascinating part of Twilight at Monticello: An Evening with Thomas Jefferson is not the hour-and-45-minute monologue that serves as the main attraction but rather the short question-and-answer period that follows in which actor-creator J.D. Sutton answers questions about the show’s subject. He does this first in character as the…
Finally Miami gets a proper gay and lesbian film fest, running through Sunday at the Colony and Alliance theaters. The celluloid marathon kicks off with a gala and the latest from Rose Troche, Bedrooms and Hallways, and ends with another gala and the star-studded trick. In between Miami will be…
Roughly halfway through Edge of Seventeen (July 22 at 9:30 p.m. at the Colony Theater, 1040 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach), the hero of this romantic comedy-drama, a very likable kid named Eric (Chris Stafford), is confronted by his mother (Stephanie McVay) in the living room of their home. “Are you…
In the world of maps Emilio Cueto is sort of the modern-day version of a sixteenth-century conquistador. Only he’s not reclaiming the New World for Spain, he’s taking over the blueprints once used to colonize Cuba, the pearl of the Greater Antilles. Twenty-five years ago, a friend of Cueto gave…
Until recently images of contemporary Cuba were in short supply on this side of the straits. Cuba was mostly a place imagined, created in the mind’s eye by memories, secondhand descriptions, or mere supposition. This mystique, along with eased travel restrictions and the sheer visual wealth of the island and…
What’s a nice socialist playwright like Naomi Wallace doing in Coral Gables? Getting a crackerjack production of her play at the New Theatre, that’s what. Wallace’s 1996-97 Obie-winning play One Flea Spare, is about class struggle, bubonic plague, and biting poetry, hardly the usual ingredients of polite Sunday matinees or…
“I’ve always wanted to do a shoe show,” says Barbara Young, Miami-Dade Public Library System’s art services director, who admits to having something of a shoe fetish. A longtime fan of Andy Warhol’s spirited advertising sketches of shoes, Young was curious to see what local artists would make of the…
thursday july 15 Get ready to bare your midriff and shake your hips when local belly dance sensation Tamalyn Dallal slithers in to Books & Books (296 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables) tonight at 8:00. Dallal, who runs Miami Beach’s Mideastern Dance Exchange, won’t be teaching a master class. She’ll be…
For all its claims of sophistication and open-mindedness, Miami continues to be, in many ways, about as cosmopolitan as Podunk. “We were inspired by the fact that other places have been doing this for a long time,” says Robert Rosenberg, a noted filmmaker and director of the first annual Miami…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the ’90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Three…
Eyes Wide Shut, the final motion picture from the late, great Stanley Kubrick, is easily the most anticipated adult film of the year. It’s The Phantom Menace for grownups. Any film by the notoriously painstaking auteur would have achieved this status. Kubrick made only thirteen features in his 46-year career,…
Tommy, Hansen, Duncan, Dot, Carrie, Graham, Lily, Alice. Sounds like the latest list of fashionable names for kids. But actually those monikers identify just a fraction of the more than 150 different types of Florida mangoes. Fragrant, juicy, exotic, even “sexy,” according to chef Robbin Haas, the tropical fruit (whose…
In flamenco dancing there’s what you see onstage, and then there’s what happens after the show. Flamenco choreographer Ilisa Rosal says that following performances, dancers enjoy hanging out. But they don’t go to a quiet pub somewhere to cool off over refreshments. They go to a club, where they can…
It’s about time we had a talk. Yeah, you know, that talk. The one about how uncomfortable and strange it is to be a young human male, how raging and unforgiving the hormones, how fragile the ego, how mysterious the female form. You see, well, how do I say this?…
This is the third year the Consul General of France is putting on a film festival showcasing movies each coproduced by France and a Spanish-speaking nation. This time around the festival features eight films, two of which co-originate from Mexico, one from Argentina, and two from Spain — all in…
Do you feel snug and secure in your cozy suburban life? Are you happy with your picture-perfect home, your carefully manicured lawn, your kids and their soccer games, and your barbecues? Do you feel safe? Well, the creators of Arlington Road, the ponderous new thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Tim…
