Watching Florida Stage’s new production of The Drawer Boy is a bit like observing a bumblebee in flight. Based on the evidence, it shouldn’t fly, but there it goes. Michael Healey’s 1999 script is riddled with implausibilities and secondhand ideas. Nevertheless it offers some gentle humor and soul, and both…
Beauty of the Father: There is much to savor and even more to contemplate in Nilo Cruz’s new play, now receiving a visually compelling world premiere at the New Theatre. The production offers several pleasures, first and foremost of which is Cruz’s poetic, luxuriant language. Listening to Beauty is like…
When considering the work created by male artists, tag lines or descriptive phrases such as malenist, phalloist, masculist — or any equivalent of “feminist” — do not exist. Male artists create or interpret their personal experiences and the world around them from very individual perspectives. A female artist’s work, on…
Capsule reviews below by Carlos Suarez de Jesus and Alfredo Triff. ART+ haiku: If Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ isn’t your cup of tea, try Sting on a Crucifix at ART+ during a retrospective of fashion icon Francesco Scavullo’s work, on display through March 10. The dean of the A-list lensmen,…
It is by now clear that Meg Ryan, the bubbling sweetheart of half a dozen romantic comedies, means to bring new substance and seriousness to the latest phase of her career. Witness the lonely New York English teacher she played in last year’s brainy slasher flick, In the Cut: In…
It is so very nice when a movie completely outstrips the expectations conjured by its trailer, as is the case with The Dreamers. At first blush, this tale of three passionate youths caught up in the Parisian counterculture revolution of the Sixties looked downright trite. Never mind that esteemed veteran…
You hear it in contemporary pop songs like Missy Elliott’s “Work It” and Iconz’s “Get Crunked Up.” You see it in modern dance steps: the swirling movement of the torso, the stomping of the feet. It’s the clave, “a pa-pa-pa that comes from the Afro-Cuban rhythms, which [have] been more…
Late on a February morning from Seattle, Erik Larson is discussing death over breakfast. Washington State might be home to the infamous Green River Killer, but Larson isn’t an assassin plotting his next move. He’s an acclaimed author who last year wrote of a murderer and an architect; his number-one…
NOW 24/7 Getting naked in public and running like hell. It was a fad among college students in the early 1970s, its crowning moment occurring in 1974 when a streaker bounded across the stage of the Academy Awards telecast right under the nose of prim Brit actor David Niven. Back…
SAT 2/21 Modelizers, you better be ready. Among the requirements for the nearly 300 models participating in the 11th Annual Volleypalooza Model Volleyball Tournament is that they will be scantily clad. Can they serve the ball, bump, or set? Who cares? All that’s important in this fundraising event for PETA…
FRI 2/20 TheatreworksUSA brings children’s book author Beverly Cleary’s (The Mouse and The Motorcycle) beloved character Ramona Quimby to life onstage at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts (201 SW 5th Ave., Fort Lauderdale). Ramona’s adventures on Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon, have entertained and instructed elementary school-age children…
FRI 2/20 American filmmaker Todd Haynes is an iconoclast. His 1991 film Poison was dismissed as pornography at first, but when it won prizes at Cannes it became regarded as a benchmark in nouveau queer cinema. Tonight Haynes’s 1998 feature Velvet Goldmine will be screened, along with his groundbreaking and…
SAT 2/21 We all know the poem: “A Dream Deferred.” Langston Hughes wrote it, if you hadn’t heard. “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore — and then run?” One of the greatest black literary figures of the 20th Century, Hughes was…
Thursday 2/19 For years Spanish master guitarist Paco de Lucia has been taking flamenco music to new frontiers. His collaborations with jazz artists have forged his signature style of nuevo flamenco, a sound many critics consider a harbinger of the renaissance of Andalusian music. A consummate artist, de Lucia takes…
At the opening of The Fog of War, the brilliant new documentary from director Errol Morris, we see a composed, sharply groomed, and middle-age Robert McNamara, preparing to brief the press on the Vietnam War. He asks two questions: First, if the chart he’s set up is visible and, second,…
When the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, consisting of twenty raw college men, beat the seemingly invincible, state-hardened Soviets and went on to win the gold medal at Lake Placid, the event was regarded, even in palm-lined Miami and iceless Honolulu, as the most amazing feat in U.S. Olympic history…
A few things you might not know about actress/singer/dancer Eartha Kitt. She makes her home in Westport, Connecticut, with toy poodles. When she’s not performing she doesn’t wear makeup, is fond of sweatsuits, and might be seen in the neighborhood grocery store doing her own shopping. She’s an admitted TV…
Reparations have to begin somewhere, so while circuses are generally thought of as one of those shows you have to take your children to lest they be forever traumatized by the denial, this gilly provides something more than guilt prevention for indulgent moms and dads and hay for its imprisoned…
NOW 24/7 Love is a one-night stand in a Hialeah honeymoon suite. Love keeps the meter running. Whether an all-night affair or a whirlwind roller coaster ride lasting as long as your favorite soap opera, motel romance is always exciting. And Miami’s abundance of no-tell joints, equipped with mirrors, vibrating…
FRI 2/13 The upstart Major League Wrestling purports to offer a scintillating alternative to the mainstream television fare put on by World Wrestling Entertainment and other purveyors of the pseudo-sport. Judge for yourself this weekend. While the 4-match fight card boasts a World Heavyweight Championship bout, it’s the special challenge…
THU 2/12 Long before Janet Jackson shocked the world by baring her breast on international television, we had already spent many years besieged by racy cleavage-heavy images. A lot of those provocative shots were of supermodels on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, courtesy of fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo, the mag’s…
FRI 2/13 Okay, don’t get mad, but Meg Ryan is not a member of Just the Funny, Miami’s rollicking group of improvisational actors and sketch comedians. This is important to keep in mind during the troupe’s upcoming performance of How We First Met, a Valentine’s Day show celebrating those first-encounter…
