Suicide, abortion, death by torture, and plagiarism of an obscure British novelist are an awful lot to cram into a single play. In fact just one of these topics would be a challenge for the best of playwrights. Shakespeare’s potboiler, Titus Andronicus, for example, contains rape, mutilation, and family squabbling,…
If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you’ve taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelly a joint taped to a piece of cardboard just “to return the favor,” the 86-minute documentary called Trekkies is a must-see: love it or loathe it. In…
Relentlessly hip? You better be. Enjoy pretentious talk about the great god Art and the hidden meanings in old gangster movies? Couldn’t hurt. Like to sit up till dawn smoking black cigarettes and exchanging ironic barbs about the tragedy of life? Bingo. Amos Poe, an East Village-based avant-gardian since the…
Maybe it’s the damn blinking thing, because it’s not simply the foppish hair and boyish face, or, for that matter, even the vaguely befuddled reticence and wry, self-abasing demeanor we Americans prefer to see in our Brits. It’s got to be the blinking. That’s what he does, almost all he…
Count the legendary Hardy Boys among the visitors to Summer Shorts ’99, the annual festival of one-act plays produced by City Theatre. In fact include playwright Christopher Durang, too. The writer, who penned The Marriage of Bette and Boo, American theater’s most scathing sendup of family values, didn’t invent the…
thursday may 27 Remember Gino Vannelli? The hunky Canadian singer with the powerful voice was best known for “I Just Wanna Stop” and “Living Inside Myself,” his Top 10 hits from the late Seventies and early Eighties. The aptly named tunes mirror Vannelli’s career, which, as far as we know,…
Ahhh, summer in Miami: stifling temperatures, overwhelming humidity, daily deluges, and a dearth of cultural activities. Enough to drive many people north for the season. But not everyone. Local art enthusiast Rosie Gordon-Wallace is one who sticks around this sticky town and is glad most folks have no choice but…
In the GableStage production of Full Gallop, actress Judith Delgado reaches out and grabs the audience by their lapels. It’s a performance that would simply thrill Diana Vreeland, whose obsession with clothing infuses this one-woman show just as her hyperbole-driven fashion sensibility filled the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue…
Fans call it “that Star Wars feeling,” the raw emotional high achieved by watching or even just thinking about the films of George Lucas. It’s a sort of gut-swirling, swooning sensation, the effect of tripping on a fantasy world, a wonderland, a place unlike Earth or even the movies. And…
Even English actresses of a certain age have a difficult time finding good roles, so it’s understandable that Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Joan Plowright might jump at the chance to star in Tea with Mussolini, Franco Zeffirelli’s new film about a group of English expatriates living in Florence during…
No other filmmaker in movie history has immersed himself more completely in his art than the great French director François Truffaut. Nor was there ever a director who in his work would blur the line between fiction and autobiography, or who would advocate more passionately that the art of film…
thursday may 20 Yet another Cuban-themed movie has washed up on our shores. This time it’s a documentary about female Cuban dissidents and their hermanas in exile. Written and directed by New York City-based journalist and former television producer Mari Rodriguez Ichaso, Branded by Paradise offers interviews with former political…
Q: What do veterinarians call a newborn cat with a three-inch tail, black stripes, and tufted ears? A: A kitten. Cats have a sense of humor, so maybe they’ll laugh at that bad joke. Cat showing, however, is serious business, full of pointed talk about dominant and recessive genes, melanin…
“I saw Tango Argentino [the musical] ten years ago and I just fell in love with it. I knew I had to do it,” says Lydia of the first time she witnessed the smoldering moves invented in the brothels of Argentina. The one-name dancer and her partner Randy Pittman, a…
Early in Tom Stoppard’s comedy Rough Crossing, a character refers to the Irish policeman named Murphy who makes an entrance at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice. Don’t remember Murphy? You’re not alone. Never heard of Rough Crossing? You’re also in good company. The 1984 play by the coauthor…
David Mamet, famous for his in-your-face characters, brutal and frequently raunchy dialogue, and deliberate, staccato prose, would seem an unlikely choice to write and direct a screen adaptation of British playwright Terence Rattigan’s genteel drama about injustice. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning author (for Glengarry Glen Ross), whose body of work…
The Castle is a modest little comedy from Australia that falls into the subgenre of Capraesque idealism, in the little-guy-triumphs-over-evil-powers-that-be division. The story revolves around the unpretentious Kerrigan clan. Darryl (Michael Caton), the father, has his own towing business. Sal (Anne Tenney), the mother, is the family cook and a…
thursday may 13 Established in 1985, the Louis Wolfson II Media History Center had a mission: to collect, preserve, and catalogue film and video that reflect Florida’s history and culture. Fans of their regular weekly programs at downtown’s main library know they’ve been doing just that very successfully. In fact…
The Spanish word is anoranza, the romantic longing that creeps up on many Cuban exiles whenever they begin musing how nothing can compare with the Cuba of old. Those who enjoyed the island’s glory days often close their age-of-innocence tales with a reminder that before 1959 there was no reason…
Envision the age-old banyan trees lining Old Cutler Road in Coral Gables: majestic canopies, enveloping branches, massive root structures. Now picture those in miniature. It’s called bonsai (bone-sigh), a venerable art form (not to be confused with banzai, the Japanese battle cry) descended from Buddhist monks that dates back to…
The most surprising thing about the new teensploitation horror film Idle Hands is the lack of masturbation jokes. It is a movie about a seventeen-year-old boy who loses control of his right hand to an evil demon, yet there’s only one such obvious crack. As the gloriously lazy hero Anton…
When I asked the four-year-old next to me to explain the appeal of Snow White, she replied, “Seven beds. Seven bowls. Seven everything.” This little theatergoer has probably never heard of Bruno Bettelheim, who deconstructed the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm some twenty years ago. She was entirely oblivious…
