Director David Cronenberg has led his loyal fans down some pretty spooky corridors, including the telepathic netherworld of Scanners, the violent sibling rivalry of twin gynecologists in love with the same woman (Dead Ringers), and the drug-haunted imagination of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). So it comes as no surprise…
In nature, living things prey upon each other all the time. Humanity, on the other hand, has a choice. It is flouting this choice that excites director Gaspar Noé. In his latest project, Irréversible, he basically swipes Christopher Nolan’s backward-narrative structure from Memento to tell a lurid tale of rape…
In Ghana, the polyrhythmic drum-driven musical style known as takada is a woman’s cry to freedom. “To be a composer or drummer among the Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana was something reserved for men,” explains Corina Fitch, drummer, dancer, professional midwife, and the director of the Takada Women’s Ensemble. “But in…
Thursday, March 27 New World Symphony founder, artistic director, and recent Grammy Award winner (for a San Francisco Symphony recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6), Michael Tilson Thomas welcomes renowned soprano Ying Huang for a little more Mahler. This time the Romantic composer’s delicate Symphony No. 4 is on the…
Not long into George P. Pelecanos’s just-published crime novel Soul Circus, protagonist Derek Strange — black, mid-fifties, veteran private detective — and his partner Terry Quinn — white, early thirties, new to the business — cruise the streets of Washington, D.C., in Strange’s Chevy searching for a key witness in…
SUN 3/30 Every day, soldiers struggle in the “homeland” to keep a biological agent at bay. The agent is the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that has infected almost 900,000 people domestically. Although effective treatments have reduced the epidemic to an afterthought in the American psyche, AIDS continues to spread and…
MON 3/31 Okay, so the Florida Marlins lost more games than they won last year, shed some of their most popular players, and — with the exception of one high-profile acquisition — have done little to improve themselves. And yes, they fired their mascot. But so what? Hope springs eternal…
FRI 3/28 Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, a sprawling novel detailing the cat-and-mouse game played by an ex-con and an obsessed policeman, takes place as a bloody student uprising envelops nineteenth-century Paris. One wonders if the students Hugo had in mind were ninth-graders. Regardless the Miami Children’s Theater production of Les…
WED 4/2 Forty feet long, four feet high, with a porcine pink exterior and a blood-red hollowed interior, and featuring a gaping portal at either end, the snakelike whateveritis on first appearance looks like 1) a grisly, forbidding Claes Oldenburg sculpture, 2) a portion of the disemboweled body of Paul…
WED 4/2 Imagine you are something other than a person, something in nature. What would you like to be and why? What would you look like, sound like? Upon reading Charles Simic’s poem “The Stone” to a clinically depressed group, certified poetry therapist Barbara Kreisberg poses those questions. For Kreisberg,…
Sometimes life is like a fairy tale. Not the Teletubbies kind, the Grimm kind. Things are humming along really well, then blam! Something mysterious strikes out of the blue and your sweet reality is suddenly transformed into a nightmare. That pretty much sums it up for Peter Hoskins, the central…
Lawrence Kasdan directs and co-writes (with William Goldman) Dreamcatcher, the latest addition to the Stephen King adaptation genre, currently at 74, including film and TV, and counting. Taking the Internet Movie Database as a source, this puts King handily ahead of Michael Crichton (23) and Bram Stoker (38), closing in…
Set among South Beach’s understated Art Deco hotels, the groovy Fifties motor lodge recently rechristened The Creek (as in adjacent to Indian Creek) looks like it may have dropped in from outer space, or at least from Southern California. Formerly known as the Banana Bungalow youth hostel, the site is…
March 20, 2003 Considered by some to be the world’s greatest rapper, LL Cool J has topped the pop charts for almost twenty years. Hits like “Mama Said Knock You Out” and “U Can’t F**K With Me” have fueled his tough-guy image. But you are bound to experience a softer,…
Renaissance festivals allow you to hobnob with the likes of Olga, a fictional farm girl played by Web designer Sarah Hanafourde. Dressed in appropriately sweet garb, toting a yoke with empty milk buckets, and calling out to her pretend cow, Helga, who wandered off, Olga is among the many characters…
Adolf Hitler killed his own dog. Most of his other evil is well documented now, and words alone are inadequate anyway, so let’s begin by considering this comparatively microscopic offense. For the many who shower their canines with at least as much affection as they offer other human beings (and…
When Neil Burger’s debut as feature-film writer and director, Interview with the Assassin, was being shopped around, it had many intrigued but few interested enough to buy it for distribution. The theory goes that some distributors, among them Miramax, felt its subject matter was a bit off post-September 11; they…
Could Dylan Thomas, boisterous Welsh poet and advocate of public readings, have predicted today’s open-mike nights? Siamese twins reciting rhymed quatrains in unison; anemic beat poets accompanied by ferrets and inbred Chinese dogs; the drunk, the infirm, and, of course, the eighteen-year-old who must read the painful rendering of his…
March 13, 2003 Form follows function, or is it the other way around? When brought to bear on our physical beings, such cut-and-dried theorems don’t necessarily apply. Rio de Janeiro’s Lia Rodrigues Dance Company will explore the infinitesimal possibilities of our collective mortal coil in Such Stuff As We Are…
The Raleigh. The Ritz Plaza. The Tides. The Marlin. The Tiffany. The Victor. For anyone the least bit familiar with Miami Beach’s hallowed Art Deco District, those hotel names instantly conjure up visions of clean lines, sweeping curves, dazzling terrazzo floors, gleaming metal railings, shimmering etched glass panels, block and…
By a recent count, more than 300 theatrical productions are staged each year in South Florida — just about one new show a day. Of course, it doesn’t work out so neatly — most shows open on or near the weekends and go up against an array of competing openings…
One of the maddening aspects of theater is how uncertainty plays havoc with the best-laid plans. Gather the best actors and directors to work on the best scripts and you still can end up with a misfire. That’s the end result of The Countess, now in production at the Caldwell…
