Ah, what a miracle that Andy Kaufman was. So sublime his wit, so pioneering his spirit. Astonishing! A hero to be loved, adored, and emulated by all artists and performers for the rest of eternity. An opener of doors, a smasher down of barriers, a glorious, luminous, intrepid spirit without…
Smack-dab in the middle of the sidewalk along Washington Avenue stands an old bridge tender’s house, a small steel hut that once upon a time overlooked the Miami River. The presence of this glistening anachronism in the heart of South Beach is weird in itself, but what’s even weirder is…
Horses gallop, bugles blare, swords clang. An abusive Sean Connery-sounding voice taunts you, urging you to surrender. You aren’t deep in the heat of battle. You’re playing chess, the parlor game of choice for intelligent kids (okay, geeks), with one Ivan the Terrible. It’s not a dream. The Russian ruler…
Like most people at a recent performance of Arje Shaw’s powerful work The Gathering, I had tears in my eyes by the end of the two-hour drama. And like many around me, I suspect, I found the plight of Gabe, the Holocaust survivor at its center, imperiously heart-wrenching. All the…
The heroines of Gavin O’Connor’s offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her feisty twelve-year-old daughter Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), who set out together from a back hollow in West Virginia to make a new life, or something like one, in…
Long before Ricky Martin was a glimmer in his mother’s eye, real and imaginary Latins were insinuating themselves into the American psyche. Take Babalu Aye. Thanks to Cuban entertainer Desi Arnaz (the actor/singer who played the beleaguered Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy), who frequently was seen banging a drum…
In the multimedia performance memoryscan, New York-based modern dancer, choreographer, and composer Koosil-ja Hwang wields the instruments of Nineties pop culture like a scientist. The 39-year-old Hwang and her company, Dance KUMIKOKIMOTO, are the subjects of inquiry, relating personal memories through abstract movement, gesture, sound, and monologue. Hwang’s scalpels are…
It is rare to find a movie that is as accomplished, multilayered, and rewarding as the novel from which it was adapted, but The Cider House Rules is such a film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?), the film displays the kind of…
Harmony Korine’s directorial debut, Gummo, was like a hard smack to the face of contemporary cinema. Relentlessly nonlinear, filled with disturbing imagery and impossible to synopsize, it caused many viewers to wince in pain, and persuaded even more to walk quickly past its poster of a slightly misshapen child’s head…
True Identity at the Dorsch Gallery is a new show comprising 21 works, most of them woodcuts, by local artisan Brian Reedy (a young teacher at Florida International University and the University of Miami). In this exhibit Reedy explores issues of self intensely, to put it mildly. His images parallel…
Viscerally exciting, dramatically riveting, emotionally overwhelming, Patrice Chéreau’s Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train definitely is one of the finest works of modern French cinema. That’s easily said. The hard part is citing the fact that it’s also the greatest gay film ever made. We all know the…
Over nine days beginning Saturday, December 11, the Miami Jewish Film Festival, in its third year, will unspool 32 films, mostly at the Regal on South Beach. While the movies all have a Jewish connection, this year’s offerings are an impressively varied and top-quality lot. A few are familiar, such…
Six dancers dressed in white run their hands along their arms, cleansing themselves with invisible water. They push against the air as if sliding into a pool or rising from a river. The gesture is simple, repeated over and over in choreographer Ronald K. Brown’s work Water. The dancers’ arms…
To quote fictitious talk show hostess Linda Richman: “Talk amongst yourselves.” Here’s a topic: Potential members of The South Beach Gay Men’s Chorus don’t have to be gay or male. Discuss. Yes, you heard right. Men and women of any sexual orientation are welcome to join the three-month-old nonprofit organization…
The seedy Berlin of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret is so familiar to us that to encounter the sedate world of John Van Druten’s I Am a Camera is something of a shock. Instead of the Kit Kat Club, we get Christopher Isherwood’s tiny apartment; in place of goose-stepping Nazis, we…
I dare anyone who thinks movies and television come near to providing the thrill of top-drawer live theater to go see Closer, and not just because actress Jen Ryan spends part of Act Two wearing little more than a see-through mesh top. You can observe Jen’s breasts, sure, but you…
When Jacques Demy died in 1990, one might have thought his unique style of filmmaking died with him. For while the history of movie musicals is rich and multifaceted, Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort, and his lesser-known Room in Town and Three Seats for the…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twentysome years, the fanaticism of American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession. More’s the pity, because Lupin…
“The Fiesta de Miami will be the biggest festival of them all,” boasts Oscar Alvarez of Eden Rock Promotions. No small claim in a town that hosts the annual Calle Ocho, officially the largest outdoor festival in the world in terms of both attendance and square feet. “Well, the biggest…
Ask Homestead Montessori school owner Betty Calabrese what most people usually think of as storytelling, and she’ll say, “a bunch of preschool children sitting around the knees of a grandmother reading to them.” It’s an inaccurate notion, and one Calabrese is quick to correct. “It’s totally changed,” she reports. “Today…
Writer-director-star Daphna Kastner seems to have designed her second feature, Spanish Fly, primarily to make out with as many attractive Spanish men as she can. Male actor-directors do this sort of thing all the time, usually with a lot less flair. Perhaps it’s the female touch, but Kastner has a…
Tim Bennett’s set — a sitting room in an English manor, dappled with gorgeous pink light and a dozen vases of cut flowers, opening out on to a rose-strewn garden — is so inviting that I wanted to walk up onstage and move in. That’s the only positive thing I…
