If exuberant performances were the only criteria for judging good theater, two musicals playing in Miami this summer would earn unequivocally high marks. At Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables, a quartet of veteran musical theater artists have an infectiously good time singing, dancing and mugging their way through Tom Lehrer’s…
Latin American Women Artists 1915-1995, currently at the Center for the Fine Arts, is an equal opportunity exhibition, embracing both mastery and mediocrity under the guise of revisionist history. A broad, academic survey, it was organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum as a showcase for female artists from Latin America…
thursday july 25 Fito Paez: The music of classic rocker Fito Paez, like that of his mentor Charly Garcia, embodies the quintessential sound of rock argentino: a mix of emotional melodic vocals, literary lyrics, tango rhythms, Beatles-esque psychedelia, and the occasional funk beat. The 33-year-old singer, songwriter, and occasional actor…
Trainspotting is the most powerful, disturbing, and darkly funny movie I’ve seen since Crumb. The second film from the team that made 1994’s Shallow Grave (screenwriter John Hodge, director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, and star Ewan McGregor) delivers the kind of drugged-out nihilistic rush that cinematic adaptations of Naked…
Well, now we know: Liv Tyler can act. That probably doesn’t qualify as an earth-shattering revelation of the magnitude of, say, discovering life on Mars or unraveling the mystery of Stonehenge. But music-video-maiden-turned-aspiring-movie-actress Tyler is this year’s “It” girl, and writer-director James Mangold’s self-consciously small but well-acted debut feature film…
At the heart of the provocative 1992 drama The Twilight of the Golds lies a hypothetical medical and moral dilemmma: If you are pregnant and find out, through a futuristic prenatal genetic test, that your child is going to be gay, what do you do? For some of us, if…
thursday july 18 Art Hour Concerts: Meza Fine Arts (275 Giralda Ave., Coral Gables), a gallery devoted to works by Latin American and local and national American artists, becomes a music venue six nights a week, with regular weeknight concerts and special Saturday dinner concerts. Every Thursday singer Malena Burke…
Every time Denzel Washington dons a military uniform you know you’re in for a damn good movie. The actor has done some of his best work playing soldiers: He earned his motion-picture acting stripes with an outstanding supporting performance in 1984’s A Soldier’s Story, distinguished himself in combat alongside Morgan…
In the musical comedy Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down, currently playing at Hollywood Boulevard Theatre, three actors with energy to burn work admirably hard. Dan Kelley, Terrell Hardcastle, and Kevin Bogan sing, dance, and sweat their way through two acts and twenty-four musical numbers about a trio of…
A large fiberglass satellite dish sits on the floor of Fredric Snitzer’s gallery in Coral Gables. Fourteen feet across and about three feet high, the old parabolic antenna that artist Mark Handforth found junked in a Hialeah yard makes for a formidable piece of furniture. Visitors to the dimly lit…
thursday july 11 Miccosukee Freedom Festival: Once fervent enemies, cowboys and Indians appear to have made amends, at least for commercial purposes. Accordingly, the Miccosukee Tribe hosts Randy Travis as the headliner for its fourth annual Freedom Festival. Travis gained considerable attention with his 1986 major-label debut Storms of Life,…
Stealing Beauty has two things going for it: the lush, inviting beauty of the Italian countryside of Tuscany where the movie was filmed, and the lush, inviting beauty of Liv Tyler, the film’s doe-eyed, succulent-lipped, barely postadolescent star. The rest is all numbing pseudointellectual trash that would have to undergo…
If other intelligent life forms do exist in outer space, let’s hope they never catch wind of Independence Day. Director Roland Emmerich’s triumphant merger of cutting-edge computer-generated special effects with the narrative conventions of Irwin Allen-style Seventies disaster movies — a big ensemble cast of archetypical characters playing out cliched…
A pink neon sculpture of a hooker beckons from just inside the glass front doors of ART-ACT, the gallery-cum-theater tucked into a corner of the Design District. A sprawling, eclectic space, ART-ACT features a coffee bar at the far end of one side of the huge room, while folding chairs…
Jon Turteltaub’s Phenomenon wants so desperately for you to like it that you feel guilty if you don’t. In an attempt to create a Capraesque fable, screenwriter Gerald DiPego and director Turteltaub stack the deck to make the film’s main character, George Malley (John Travolta playing warm and fuzzy) the…
Striptease may not be as precious as pure platinum or solid gold, but for most of its nearly two-hour running time the film is tauter than its $12.5 million star Demi Moore’s washboard abs, and almost as funny as last year’s crime-fiction-best-seller-turned-hit-movie Get Shorty. Viewers who would rather club Madonna…
The logistics of Summer Shorts seem to require a calculator and slide rule to figure out what’s going on. An invigorating festival of eighteen one-act plays (each fifteen minutes long or less) that features a twelve-member acting company and eleven different directors, it runs through the end of this weekend…
Russian conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were in Miami on June 12 to give a slide lecture at the Bass Museum of Art in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibition Monumental Propaganda. Komar and Melamid initiated the show in 1992 when they solicited artists’ proposals for salvaging socialist-realist…
Demi Moore continues her one-woman assault on classic literature with her appearance in Disney’s latest animated feature, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Less than a year after making critics see red by adding gratuitous nudity and a happy ending to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Moore — or at least…
Eight gay friends gather together during one summer in an idyllic spot outside New York City and learn poignant lessons about love, commitment, and terminal illness. Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, right? If the 1994-95 Tony Award-winning Broadway show about gay men — some of whom are HIV-positive — springs…
If his new turkey Eraser has any effect on Conan the box-office Barbarian’s future per-picture asking price, perhaps Maria Shriver’s square-jawed, stogie-toking hubby should consider trading in his Hummer for a Hyundai. Rarely does one get a better chance to witness how the “too many chefs spoil the broth” axiom…
Mark Rappaport makes funny movies. Not funny in the ha-ha, laugh-out-loud sense; rather, funny in the oddball, hard-to-categorize sense. Rappaport calls his features “fictional autobiographies.” Others have labeled 1992’s Rock Hudson’s Home Movies and 1995’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg “imaginary monologues,” “mock autobiographical documentaries,” “blends of fiction, biography,…
