When he was 107 years old, the story goes, Broadway legend George Abbott was asked what he thought was the most important development in the theater to have taken place in his lifetime. His answer: “Electricity.” Although his active career as an actor, director, and producer spanned some six decades…
Socrates and Plato, Emerson and Thoreau, Mr. Kotter and Vinnie Barbarino — the history of Western civilization is cluttered with memorable teacher-student pairs, each bringing its unique dynamic to one of the most powerful relationships in humankind. It’s no surprise that quite a few twentieth-century dramas, from Educating Rita to…
First published under the title The Iron Man in Great Britain in 1968, The Iron Giant is a minor classic of twentieth-century children’s literature. The slim volume by the English poet laureate Ted Hughes is a pacifist parable in the guise of a sci-fi hero fantasy. Hughes spun his yarn…
It’s always amusing when the movie industry discovers its spiritual side. Profoundly secular institution that it is, Hollywood promotes, at its peril, the notion that teenagers spewing pea soup in Georgetown can be purged of their demons by Catholic priests, that angels from heaven intercede in the lives of ballplayers…
In the highly competitive, dog-eat-dog world of the modern-day superhero, the members of the group that eventually becomes known as the Mystery Men (they don’t really have a name through most of the movie) start out with a couple of strikes against them. First off there’s the little matter of…
“Once I started listening to jazz, it wasn’t hard to realize it was very soulful, high-quality music that you could get totally engaged with. Good jazz doesn’t get dated.” Thus says Michael Chertok, who runs the Chertok Archives, one of the nation’s most extensive collections of jazz performances. And Chertok…
Walk into Miami’s Museum of Science on the second, third, or fourth Wednesday of any given month, and the cross-section of gray Tolstoyan beards, gelled Caesar haircuts, Pushkinian muttonchop sideburns, and assorted facial piercings might remind you of an L.A. film-school version of The Brothers Karamazov. The surreal effect deepens…
If nothing else, Naked Boys Singing! lives up to the hype of its title. The cast members are naked, they are male, and they sing. In fact they sing rather well. That’s a good thing, since the revue, already a hit at the Celebration Theatre in Los Angeles (another production…
Runaway Bride, the long-anticipated reunion of Pretty Woman-stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, isn’t a sequel, but it feels like one. In everything there is a distinct sense of predestination, of events occurring according to some irresistible force of the inevitable. This makes life especially easy for Garry Marshall, the…
For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the well-known actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse — or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High…
Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting (from Shirley Jackson’s novel) has long been considered one of the milestones of the horror film. After 36 years, DreamWorks has bankrolled a new version under the direction of Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister) — an idea that should sound unpromising, even to…
Some performers search for signs of intelligent life. Others search for their own gray matter. When celebrated New York monologist-crank-lesbian-comedian Reno makes her first South Florida appearance as part of the Miami Light Project’s Come Out Laughing series, she’ll bring the results of her latest exploration in the show Reno…
Call Tamalyn Dallal the Rodney Dangerfield of dance. Dallal, a shapely attractive woman, doesn’t resemble the portly comedian in any way, but she and Dangerfield have one thing in common: Both are rather vocal about not getting any respect. Dallal is a belly dancer. Although the ancient dance’s roots stem…
The fascinating part of Twilight at Monticello: An Evening with Thomas Jefferson is not the hour-and-45-minute monologue that serves as the main attraction but rather the short question-and-answer period that follows in which actor-creator J.D. Sutton answers questions about the show’s subject. He does this first in character as the…
Finally Miami gets a proper gay and lesbian film fest, running through Sunday at the Colony and Alliance theaters. The celluloid marathon kicks off with a gala and the latest from Rose Troche, Bedrooms and Hallways, and ends with another gala and the star-studded trick. In between Miami will be…
Roughly halfway through Edge of Seventeen (July 22 at 9:30 p.m. at the Colony Theater, 1040 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach), the hero of this romantic comedy-drama, a very likable kid named Eric (Chris Stafford), is confronted by his mother (Stephanie McVay) in the living room of their home. “Are you…
In the world of maps Emilio Cueto is sort of the modern-day version of a sixteenth-century conquistador. Only he’s not reclaiming the New World for Spain, he’s taking over the blueprints once used to colonize Cuba, the pearl of the Greater Antilles. Twenty-five years ago, a friend of Cueto gave…
Until recently images of contemporary Cuba were in short supply on this side of the straits. Cuba was mostly a place imagined, created in the mind’s eye by memories, secondhand descriptions, or mere supposition. This mystique, along with eased travel restrictions and the sheer visual wealth of the island and…
What’s a nice socialist playwright like Naomi Wallace doing in Coral Gables? Getting a crackerjack production of her play at the New Theatre, that’s what. Wallace’s 1996-97 Obie-winning play One Flea Spare, is about class struggle, bubonic plague, and biting poetry, hardly the usual ingredients of polite Sunday matinees or…
“I’ve always wanted to do a shoe show,” says Barbara Young, Miami-Dade Public Library System’s art services director, who admits to having something of a shoe fetish. A longtime fan of Andy Warhol’s spirited advertising sketches of shoes, Young was curious to see what local artists would make of the…
thursday july 15 Get ready to bare your midriff and shake your hips when local belly dance sensation Tamalyn Dallal slithers in to Books & Books (296 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables) tonight at 8:00. Dallal, who runs Miami Beach’s Mideastern Dance Exchange, won’t be teaching a master class. She’ll be…
For all its claims of sophistication and open-mindedness, Miami continues to be, in many ways, about as cosmopolitan as Podunk. “We were inspired by the fact that other places have been doing this for a long time,” says Robert Rosenberg, a noted filmmaker and director of the first annual Miami…
