Utter the name Skipper Chuck to a long-time Miami kid and he’ll be transported back to a world of “peace, love, and happiness,” where a gentle host held his young audience in thrall, plying them with cartoons, puppets, sidekicks (including zany Scrubby and wholesome babe Cher), and games such as…
Elizabeth Marsh’s hobby allows her to slip into flowing dresses with draping sleeves and four-foot trains. When she dines, she uses only a knife and spoon. And all her cohorts address her as “Your Excellency.” In the so-called mundane world (reality), Marsh is a broadcast coordinator at Florida International University…
They stream in and out, all day and all night, one after the other: band members, producers, business associates, friends, family, strangers, hangers-on who stare at the familiar face made infamous long ago. The tour bus, this parked sanctuary where he can roll his joints and drink his bottled Starbucks…
At 82, Eric Rohmer is the oldest of the original group of French New Wave directors — the others include Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard — whose careers in film started with the journal Cahiers du Cinema. Yet as is apparent from his latest film, The Lady and…
Like a Jawbreaker that changes color every few seconds that you suck it, MIIB: Men in Black II delivers a quick buzz, lots of stuff to look at, and a totally nonnutritious joy that can only be attained with the aid of artificial flavorings and Yellow #5. In a nutshell,…
Take about a dozen people lubricated with beverages, alcoholic and not, appetites whetted by spareribs with Hoisin sauce. Put them in a luxuriously sparse kitchen showroom in the Design District. Add a patient instructor offering directions while wielding a spatula and well-seasoned wok — cast iron, please, not carbon steel!…
Cigar-chomping, fatigues-wearing Fidel Castro impersonators. Flamboyant flamenco dancers in drag. Political humor geared toward older Cubans, who erupt in laughter at the thought of Fidel’s brother Raul scurrying about in a tutu. Until recently live theater on Eighth Street (with a few exceptions) has included such a hodgepodge of acts…
Ancient festivals served as markers for human progress, celebrating the passing of time and the progression of the community. Although seasonal changes, harvests, and rites of passage are not the focus of today’s festivals, these celebrations still provide a forum for assessing a community’s evolution. Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “Life must…
In dramaturgical terms, a play by a man about men is called theater — from Hamlet to Nixon’s Nixon, male playwrights, actors, and themes are not distinguished as “men’s theater” (and thankfully so). In contrast a play by a woman about women is frequently dubbed “women’s theater,” “touchy-feely,” “man hating,”…
In an ongoing endeavor to develop, understand, and communicate “art,” our definitions are constantly morphing. At the speed that we identify and recognize, we deny and re-create, each time pushing the walls of the “white box” to a point of distension. Since the advent of modernity — when artists decided…
Talk about trading down: Adam Sandler now stands in for Gary Cooper, Winona Ryder for Jean Arthur, screenwriter Tim Herlihy (The Waterboy, Billy Madison) for Robert Riskin (It Happened One Night, Meet John Doe), and director Steven Brill (Little Nicky) for the immortal Frank Capra. The mind reels at the…
One hundred five years: Not long in the life of most cities, except if you’re Miami. Our town has changed radically over its brief lifespan. A glance at area buildings that reflect our history reveals just that. Dade County pine houses and bungalows offering porches and expanses of windows exemplify…
When Maria Stevenson learned about John Feight’s Foundation for Hospital Art, inspiration struck. According to www.hospitalart.org, since founding the organization in 1984, the Atlanta-based artist — with help from more than 100,000 volunteers — has completed in excess of 20,000 paintings for nonprofit/charity hospitals and nursing homes in 165 countries…
Steven Spielberg just might turn into a great director if only he’d stop sabotaging his movies. For the second time in as many films, he demolishes his product with a third act that renders all that’s come before it void. It’s as though Minority Report, set in a near future…
If it’s possible for a film to be simultaneously ambitious and banal, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is it. There’s little here we haven’t seen repeatedly in some form or another — growing up Catholic is popular fodder for filmmakers, as is growing up in the American South, usually…
In Miami the chances of a low-budget theater company finding a permanent home are as good as discovering a ramshackle HUD house in ritzy CocoPlum, but seven-year-old, Spanish-language troupe La Má Teodora has done just that. It opened La Magagna, a 150-seat warehouse space off Bird Road and SW 74th…
Shouldn’t have said yes, couldn’t say no. The deal was simple, and those who chose to accept it had made their own private pact with the showbiz-journalism devil. “You will spend an hour with Tom Cruise and an hour with Steven Spielberg,” said the publicist, a lovely woman from 20th…
When a historical play has done its work, one can expect to hear one of two exclamations from audience members as they file out: the ever-popular “My, how times have changed!” or the unforgettable “Oh, how history repeats itself!” GableStage’s production of Russell Lees’s Nixon’s Nixon might inspire both utterances…
A recent e-mail inquiry sent to “fine art landscape photographer and natural history author” Jeff Ripple — as he bills himself — triggered the automatic response: “In the field. Please leave a message at … ” Hardly a surprise, since the Gainesville-based Ripple, camera and notepad at the ready, has…
Beware of backhanded compliments. If you heed the critics and the advance press, you might have heard that the Stage Door Theatre’s Our Sinatra, the long-running musical imported from New York, is a stylish cabaret revue. This is true and that’s good, and it’s also not so good. Our Sinatra…
Artist Cesar Trasobares is the co-curator of “That Place,” an exhibit-installation involving paintings, photographs, and multimedia culled from prominent local collectors, and some site-specific works by local artists. Like a number of shows over the past few years, the art was picked and arranged to fit with a particular space,…
The plot of The Bourne Identity is astonishingly straightforward. It is bereft of twists (instead we’re offered tangible explanations), free of the gaping plot holes that swallow confused viewers, and absent the cynical machinations of filmmakers who believe that to entertain it’s necessary to also bamboozle. This adaptation of Robert…
