Choreographer, director, and all-around multimedia artist Yara Travieso got her start dancing here relatively late, at age 13, and not in the usual realms of jazz, modern, or ballet. Rather, the self-described “super-sassy” teen was drawn instead to the flamboyance of flamenco. And though she later attended the New World…
Sam Shepard and Patti Smith performed Cowboy Mouth back in 1971. The play follows two sad sacks, Cavale and Slim. She’s kidnapped him at gunpoint in order to make him a rock ‘n’ roll star, but they’re just wasting away in a messy room. Sounds like college a little, no?This…
We have been shaking in anticipation of Reggie Watts’s performance at the Light Box at Goldman Warehouse this Thursday and Friday. Intersecting the worlds of music and comedy, Watts is truly unlike any “musical comedian” who has come before him. Using his loop petal, Watts completely improvises every performance brilliantly,…
Of all of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, his 1935 classic The 39 Steps would probably be the most difficult to bring to the theater stage. Yet that is exactly what the Actors’ Playhouse is doing by presenting one of Hitch’s first masterpieces. It’s a spy thriller that has it all: murder,…
Talking about Stone Groove. Then we can dig it. Jus’ hang loose, blood. What it is, big slick? Our mama ain’t raise no dummies. We dug the rap! Cut me some slack, Jack! Say ‘e can’t hang! Jive ass dudes don’t got no brains anyhow!Stone Groove is an avant-garde, bohemian,…
The Main Street Players in Miami Lakes presented a relatively impressive opening night performance of the insightful and amusing musical Company with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by George Furth. The production was engaging, the stage design perfectly simple, and, for the most part, the singers sounded good and…
Local choreographer Alexey Taran, filmmaker Carla Forte, and the Bistoury Physical Theater Company want us to confront our demons. Their new and extravagantly multimedia project Asesinos por una Noche (Assassins for One Night), performed on Friday, revolves around a simple principle: “as above, so below.” More specifically, brutal government regimes…
Miami theater this week: Meshuggah-Nuns, Cyrano, and The Red Thread
Roselyn Sanchez first erupted onto the big screen with her role as sexy Secret Service agent Isabella Molina in the second installment of Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour. Sultry and exotic, the Puerto Rican beauty sizzled onscreen. And now, a decade later, she’s managed to maintain her career, proving that she…
Joshua Henry, who graduated from University of Miami’s Frost School of Music in 2006, is nominated for a Tony Award for “Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical.” Last Fall, the actor played Haywood Patterson in The Scottsboro Boys at New York’s Lyceum Theatre.The musical,…
Fuck Christopher Hitchens and his lame opinion on funny women. Rachel Dratch and decades of hilarious female cast members on Saturday Night Live demonstrate that humorous females exist in abundance. Dratch told us about working on SNL, “We were a pretty evolved bunch. I never felt any disadvantage.” Women are…
Diavolo translates to “day” and “I fly,” so the spanking new South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center hopes this Los Angeles-based performance troupe will help the center take off. With their outrageously surrealistic and large-scale interdisciplinary performances — think larger than life-size everyday items such as doors, chairs, and stairways –…
Nuns performing Fiddler on the Roof on a cruise ship? You’d have to be a madman or a genius to think of that meshuggah idea. Nunsense creator and director Dan Goggin is the kooky brain behind the cockamamie concept of, what else, but Meshuggah-Nuns. The show marks the grand finale of…
You may not immediately recognize hip-hop as something to be deconstructed using classical poetic analysis, but Adam Bradley, editor of Yale Anthology of Rap alongside Andrew DuBois, argues that you may want to start counting meter next time the new Nicki Minaj single comes on the radio. The Anthology is…
When I think of opera, I think of things like little binoculars, corpulent singers and wealthy male and female audience members wearing matching purple and chartreuse suits and gowns. While I did witness all of these things last night at the premier of Cyrano at The Ziff Ballet and Opera…
French poet and dramatist Edmond Rostrand introduced us to Cyrano de Bergerac in his 1897 play. Since then, we’ve seen a lot of incarnations of the big-nosed romantic nobleman in film and theater (Steve Martin’s 1987 comedy Roxanne is probably the most famous). And now, composer David DiChiera is the latest…
The Red Thread: PlayGround Theatre’s magical Chinese journey
A toast to the next steps! Miami City Ballet (MCB) offers its hometown public another weekend to celebrate its 25th anniversary before honeymooning in Paris. This Friday and Saturday at MCB’s Wolfson studio theater in South Beach, the company performs excerpts from George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments and Twyla Tharp’s…
Let’s preface this whole thing by saying that I’m not accustomed to attending performances in Miami where a significant percentage of female audience members are wearing fur coats. That said, I imagine that for other opera novices, Don Giovanni is a good one to cut your teeth on. It’s got…
Last night, the PlayGround Theatre, which prides itself in bringing unique and innovative stories to the stage for all ages, unveiled the world premier of their latest foray into myth and fantasy with The Red Thread.Taking inspiration from a Chinese folktale called “The Magical Embroidery,” co-writers Stephanie Ansin (who also…
Remember that scrawny, bug-eyed creature from the sketch comedy show In Living Color? How about the overzealous tribal warrior from Ace Venture Pet Detective II: When Nature Calls? Never mind, once you see him on stage tonight at the Miami Improv it will all come back to you.Davidson spreads his…
Listen up all you overachievers out there: Naps can be very productive. In fact, The Red Thread, a new original production opening Wednesday at Miami Shores’ PlayGround Theatre, is the product of such a siesta. “The original inspiration came from a Chinese folktale called ‘The Magical Embroidery,’ which Fernando Calzadilla,…
