Performing Arts

Happy at New Theatre: How Content Are We, Really?

GableStage’s Venus in Fur Powerfully Explores Degradation and Desire

After she won the fifth season of So You Think You Can Dance, Jeanine Mason, the Miami-born dancer who ranks among the show’s most popular contestants, told reporters that she’d be putting down her dancing shoes to study journalism at UCLA — kind of an anticlimactic end to a series…

In Venus in Fur at GableStage, even the weather is choreographed. The play opens with a bracing thunderclap, one of many meteorological intrusions from sound designer Matt Corey. There’s no storm outside, at least not one we can see or hear battering the windows of the set. But, like brief…

When you think of the theater capitals of the world, you think of London, with its famed West End, and New York, with its Great White Way and dozens of other highly regarded companies. And at about this time next year, Miami will be one step closer to joining them…

Kids these days have problems. No, seriously: There’s teen pregnancy and substance abuse and mental issues and sexual pressure, in addition to all the “finding yourself” you’re supposed to be doing in high school. These are problems that deserve a serious, thoughtful, mature approach, both in real life and when…

Everyone loves the Golden Girls. Call ’em the original Sex in the City crew. Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia still serve as an inspiration to anyone who wants to grow old with a healthy sex drive and a killer Florida abode. And while three of the actors who made the…

This weekend the Arsht Center will present a unique performance, Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project, choreographed by Artistic Director Stephen Mills and performed by his Austin City Ballet Company. The work is a culmination of a three-month community and education collaboration in Miami-Dade — it’s both a dance and an…

The Hectic Lives of Antonio and Katie Amadeo

A Man Puts on a Play Antonio and Katie Amadeo

As an actor on the South Florida theater scene, Antonio Amadeo has played a wisecracking Afghan-American cabdriver, a revolutionary in late-’60s Czechoslovakia, a captured writer in a totalitarian police state, and a barkeep caught in a web of 9/11 conspiracy theories — to say nothing of his award-nominated performance as…

In the final weeks of one of the dirtiest presidential campaigns we’ve ever seen, it’s hard not to ask yourself, “Why can’t we all just get along?” But in Miami, one group of women is proving that hard conversations don’t have to be mud-slinging contests, and that talking politics and…

From Can’t Hardly Wait to Superbad, debauched teen parties have long been a theme on the big screen. But in live theater? Not so much. So when Girls vs. Boys opens at the Adrienne Arsht Center November 1, executive vice president Scott Shiller says, it could attract a new type…

From Can’t Hardly Wait to Superbad, debauched teen parties have long been a theme on the big screen. But in live theater? Not so much.So when Girls vs. Boys opens at the Adrienne Arsht Center November 1, executive vice president Scott Shiller says, it could attract a new type of…

Before the Miami City Ballet dancers performed for the first time without founder Edward Villella last night, new artistic director Lourdes Lopez took the stage to give thanks. Declaring that she was “back home,” Lopez reminisced about growing in up a very different Miami — one without MOCA, or the…

After months of controversy surrounding the departure of founder Edward Villella, Miami City Ballet debuts its first performance under new artistic director Lourdes Lopez Friday, Oct. 19. Program I features three ballets: George Balanchine’s Apollo, Sir Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs, and Paul Taylor’s Piazzolla Caldera.See also:- MCB Names Lourdes Lopez New Director- MCB…

Blood-sucking vampires? Scary. Demonic goblins? Frightening, sure. But the most horrifying part of The Vampire Circus, a big-top act at Bayfront Park that opened its tent-flaps for the first time last night, wasn’t the show itself. See also:- The Vampire Circus: Five Questions With Its Real Life Circus FreaksIt was the…

South Florida Haunted Houses: From House of Horror to Fright Nights

Like any evil villain, Count Dracula has one goal: world domination. And like most evil villains, he has a half-diabolical, half-comically unlikely plan to achieve it. “I’ll launch a traveling circus with my minions as the stars,” Dracula mused to himself in his lair in 19th-century Bohemia. “It’ll be the…

Tweenaged visitors at Miami’s House of Horror Amusement Park in Doral were having a rough time last weekend. It was long before they plunged into claustrophobic darkness of a cemetery littered with chainsaw-wielding psycho killers. The curtain was just rising on the 25-room haunted mansion, and already a girl clutched…

Have you been to IKEA on a weekend? If so, you know about the crushing crowds, the slow march through winding pathways until you find the perfect piece of build-it-yourself furniture for your crappy apartment, and the crushing defeat of making it all the way to the warehouse only to…

Ian Bagg: Meeting Presidents and Sucking Balls

In some ways, “Vote Right,” the video from New York City comedians Juan Bago and O, looks a lot like the last presidential debate. In the parody of Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like,” the right-wing character spouts off about supporting his own corporation — err, his common people. The left…