Imagine you’re watching an early play by an obscure playwright — say, a farce with a plot that’s difficult to take seriously. Perhaps it contains a case of mistaken identity, at least one sharp-tongued female character, and some confusion about the proper nature of marriage. Say the conflicts are resolved,…
“If you don’t have a sense of humor, get off the stage!” So declares performance poet Taylor Mali in the movie SlamNation, opening this Thursday at the Alliance Cinema. The charismatic Mali is one of many memorable stars of the film, which generally chronicles the fierce competition between the colorful…
A philosopher/scholar named Jelaluddin Rumi has a chance encounter with an itinerant dervish named Shams of Tabriz. They form an abiding friendship, a profound bond that transcends their meeting in a thirteenth-century Turkish marketplace and extends to the world at the end of the millennium. How do we know this?…
thursday january 21 You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate klezmer music. The bleating, high-energy sound that was once the province of Eastern European Jews is now being embraced by a variety of listeners. Witness the popularity of bands such as the Klezmatics, the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars, and…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two — in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers, and other such nonsense — and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this…
The cold-hearted among us have watched Camille die tragically on the late show and have seen Brian Piccolo run his last yard through the cancer ward often enough to understand the hazards of Hollywood “disease” movies: false sentiment, synthetic emotion, and tears for tears’ sake. It is with wariness, then,…
Genius can be a terrible, destructive gift. Jacqueline du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who enraptured audiences in the Sixties and Seventies with her musical passion and intensity, lived a life of great renown and acclaim, but also one of harrowing loneliness and emotional turmoil. Her story is movingly told…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” sings Kris Kristofferson in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’s The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this twentieth-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
Add the late Tallulah Bankhead to the list of middle-age women throwing themselves into the national political fray this year. The celebrated actress, as currently portrayed in the American premiere of Tallulah by movie star Kathleen Turner, has even less bona fide political experience than either Liddy Dole or Hillary…
With the countdown to the millennium under way, those looking for a place to ponder the ebb of the Twentieth Century would do well to visit the Rubell Family Collection, where a new exhibition by some of the most important modern and contemporary artists is on display. For its congruence…
thursday january 14 Once an arena for lively debate (and the occasional amusing verbal slugfest), America’s oldest liberal political periodical, the Nation, has been suffering from a clipped left wing the past few years. At fault: catering to the mainstream in a push for profits. And what to do if…
Six stages, more than 50 performers, and a fiercely competitive songwriting contest. Yes, there’s a bit more to the South Florida Folk Festival than a bunch of aging hippies sitting around the campfire in their sandals, strumming “Kum Ba Ya” on their guitars. Now in its eighth year, the two-day…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, his adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 best seller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters carrying an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
Because it revealed the coke-snorting, ego-fueled corruption of Hollywood in the early 1980s with such acid wit, David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly became a huge audience hit when it burst on to Broadway in 1984. Here was the inside stuff from the Left Coast, gotten up in a frenetic new language…
“First of all, when you’ve got a gun,” Stephen Sondheim points out in his musical Assassins, “everybody pays attention.” That’s for sure, as audience members experiencing the third-act explosion in a classic drama such as Chekhov’s Three Sisters can attest. But what happens when you have two guns? What if…
She’s the Medea of all stage mothers, the most frightening diva of the American musical theater. That would be Mama Rose, of course, the stardom-fixated monster at the center of Gypsy. Since 1959 audiences have clung to her poisonous apron strings, happily singing along. Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, and Tyne…
thursday january 7 Just what we need: another immensely bloated art event featuring more canvases and more sculpture than anyone has wall or floor space for. Really, how many Ertes can one person own? Find out when miles of art go on display today through Tuesday at Art Miami ’99…
If all South Florida arts festivals, large and small, came together to elect a king, Art Deco Weekend would be a leading candidate. The Miami Design Preservation League’s weeklong tribute to the life and art of the Twenties and Thirties enjoys an attractive setting on Miami Beach’s Ocean Drive, an…
“Sometimes you go into the studio and it works well. The first seven times it didn’t work,” says mixed-media artist Annie Wharton about the eventually successful project she made from cement, wood, pigments, and photo transfers for the exhibition, The Art of Work, the Work of Art, which goes on…
The great attorneys of our time — Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks — must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hit man, and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil…
The relentless charm of Kirk Jones’s Waking Ned Devine lies in its embrace of two lovable Irish geezers who manage to work beautiful mischief on the world, in the raw beauty of their sun-splashed coastal village, and in the general notion that Ireland is the land of poetic conversations, enduring…
