A spotlight shines on the darkened stage alternately illuminating five characters: Arlin Jasper, Dodie and Ed MacDonald, Tom Hawkins, and Denny Hedges. Each one utters a piece of a fragmented soliloquy that speaks for an entire town’s shock, grief, and disgust. Welcome to Irving, a.k.a. “Anywhere, U.S.A.,” a one-post office,…
Neil LaBute is back to his old self again, and the cinematic world is a better place for it. Honestly, what was he thinking when he made Possession? Did the charges of misogyny, still lingering from In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, get to him so…
In March 2002, days before President Bush was scheduled to visit Peru, a car bomb exploded near the U.S. embassy in Lima, killing nine and injuring dozens. Government officials, here and in Peru, blamed the attack on Shining Path — a Marxist terrorist organization with roots dating to the 1960s,…
Time was, moviegoers could rely on European films for interesting ideas and unpredictable storylines. But in the 1990s, foreign producers decided that the way into the American film market was to make American-style movies. Since then we have been besieged by a series of lame comedies and generic thrillers that…
This girl I know — we’ll call her Sophie — told me she never touches herself, you know, down there — she never masturbates. Impossible, I thought. “She’s lying,” another friend said, in shocked disbelief. After realizing as a kid that women actually poop and fart and do everything men…
Argentine rock pioneer Nito Mestre felt somehow vindicated last Wednesday when Colombian star Juanes invited him to share one of his encores in front of the enthusiastic audience that packed the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts. “I wanted to meet him and give him my album,” says Mestre…
Mon 5/19 Miami’s urban neighborhoods are changing faster than you can say obstructed waterfront view. One second the Biscayne Boulevard Corridor is dubbed the hot new place to own or rent property. The next moment the hookers have been magically displaced as 50-story condos rise quickly from the ground. Residents…
Sat 5/17 “Oldtimers” who remember the destruction Hurricane Andrew wrought can celebrate a symbolic victory at Miami Metrozoo (12400 SW 152nd St.). After eleven years and $13.5 million, a new hurricane-resistant aviary opened this month. As part of the ongoing festivities and to complement the theme of its reborn “Wings…
Now 24/7 Creativity and a love for learning cool stuff is all kids need to become members of the Intel Computer Clubhouse. The after-school program is a casual drop-in center where kids between the ages of 10 and 18 can learn cutting-edge computer skills — from digitized filmmaking to Web…
Thur 5/15 If you have any doubts about the sensuality of Josephine Baker, you won’t want to miss the screening of the 1935 French gem Princess Tam Tam. In it Baker smolders as Alwina, a Tunisian Bedouin girl introduced into Paris society as a royal who proceeds to turn the…
Sat 5/17 Six years ago, Arroz Con Mango was a back-yard party with a neighborhood DJ put on by college kids to raise money for the fight against cancer. Today the event, organized by the Junior League Against Cancer, has graduated to a heavyweight fundraiser featuring performers like Latin pop…
Fri 5/16 Bird and Dizzy may be more famous, but Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell are equally responsible for creating bebop, the first radical shift in modern popular music. Even for geniuses, Monk and Powell were extraordinary artists. Monk was a brooding presence in the Harlem Renaissance while Powell was…
Sun 5/18 We must admit when we see a shaggy-haired guy playing an acoustic guitar with one of those harmonica-holding doohickeys attached, we want to run for cover. Few have the skills and the sense of irony — let alone the coordination — to carry the folk thing off without…
Thursday 5/15 Like the sour-apple martini, Chilean sea bass is perhaps one of the most fashionable items you can sample at your favorite bistro. But did you know that it’s WRONG? Just like wearing a mink coat might get you splattered with red paint by animal-rights activists, ordering the trendy…
The rainy season is back, the snowbirds have gone, but the theater season roars on. A number of plays currently on the boards are stories of dispossessed communities struggling to maintain their traditional identities and find new ones. One such is GableStage’s production of The Diary of Anne Frank, the…
Actor, writer, and director Larry Villanueva calls his play Allá Afuera Hay Fresco “una descarga.” The term descarga, usually reserved for music, refers to a jam session, but Villanueva asserts that in this case there’s no better word to describe what happens on the stage during this explosive one-act: “The…
“Shirin Neshat,” the latest show at the Miami Art Museum, with films and photographs of the exile Iranian artist, is a unique event, helping us to grasp the complexity of women’s struggle for social liberation under Islam. The exhibit brings a fresh perspective to difficult political and ethnic themes with…
Nobody can convey more, doing nothing, than Billy Bob Thornton. His minimalist style is appropriate for the ironically named Levity, but what is conveyed never quite generates the emotional charge of Sling Blade or Monster’s Ball. Writer-director Ed Solomon is best known as the screenwriter of the two Bill &…
Long ago Eddie Murphy had grown tired of Eddie Murphy parts: the fast-talking high-jiver, the preening put-on. Even before he began parodying himself in Bowfinger, Showtime, and I Spy, the latter two perhaps accidentally, he accepted high-paying roles in low-rent movies that neutered and humiliated the character he had sharpened…
To my darling husband, as I sit alone on the wooden bench at the Smoke Pit restaurant, watching that enticing pink pig sweating and slowly rotating on the spit, I’m reminded of the many wonderful years we’ve spent together, rolling with the punches, memories as rich and sweet as a…
Like a biochemist studying strains of reality, Cuba-based choreographer/performance artist Marianela Boan is constantly seeking new and bold mutations. Her work is a study of contrasts, a morphing of opposing influences without preconceived notions of what will turn out in the end. In her quest to discover new forms of…
Sat 5/10 It’s all around us. It’s in us — makes up 50 to 65 percent of our bodies, in fact. And soon it will fall from the sky on an almost daily basis. We’re talking about water. You know, the very precious resource that often tastes like bleach when…
