“It’s like eating a great meal: You don’t always like every single thing on your plate, but you’ve got to taste everything, and you might like it.” So says Sheldon Schwartz, director of the Florida Dance Association, referring to the mind-boggling variety of offerings that constitute the Florida Dance Festival,…
Rule number one: When crafting a thriller, make sure the audience can relate to, identify with, or empathize with at least one of the characters. Rule number two: Make sure the characters’ motivations are clear. Fail in either area — or, worse, in both — and you end up with…
By June 28, the end of its third season, City Theatre’s Summer Shorts festival will have put on 48 new plays on its main stage, about three times the number of productions from your average professional company. In fact, as you read this, fifteen premieres of black-out sketches, comic monologues,…
thursday june 4 Suffering from a chronically short attention span? Then you’ll love City Theatre’s Summer Shorts. Two different programs consisting of comedies, musicals, and dramas, each less than twenty minutes long, will alternate over the next four weeks at the Ring Theatre on the University of Miami campus (1380…
In a perfect world, Mario Ernesto Sanchez would be able to squeeze an entire troupe of Colombian actors through the tight door of immigration regulations for visiting artists, but this year he’s happy to have a clown. “I haven’t been able to bring a group from Colombia for the past…
Long before the Pope’s visit filled the world’s television screens with pictures of Havana, local audiences were imagining contemporary Cuba in the darkness of the MDCC Wolfson Campus auditorium. Since 1993 the Wolfson Cuban Cinema Series, organized by Alejandro Rios, has presented films and videos portraying Cuban life from every…
Most people associate the disco era with hedonism, homosexuality, a sense of community, tacky fashions, and awful music. But in his new The Last Days of Disco, writer-director Whit Stillman imagines the era as merely a singles bar for romantics in search of soulmates, mostly heterosexual and hardly debauchees. The…
The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the Zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It’s all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force — a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, are discussed not only by…
There’s nothing like a loud bang at the end of Act One to make you impatient for the end of the intermission so you can scurry back to your seat and find out what happens next. Especially if that bang shreds every notion you had about the play up to…
thursday may 28 Heard at spas and wellness centers around the world, the jazzy new-age music of guitarist Nicholas is said by some to have healing qualities. Find out for yourself how soothing the sounds can be as he performs two shows at South Beach’s new wine and champagne bar…
After working for eight years as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Chris Mancini retreated into private practice. That was in 1987. He still thrives on crime, though — for fun. Along with historian Paul George, Mancini has conducted the Miami Murder, Mystery, and Mayhem Tour since 1995. What…
For a guy who possesses such a refined touch when it comes to designing objects and interiors, Philippe Starck can be downright clumsy with words. Three years ago, just as the snazzy Starck-ified Delano Hotel was set to open, the Frenchman candidly decried Miami’s terrible style and lack of sophistication…
Only one week after lizards crawled across the country’s screens in Godzilla and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, along comes the bloated Hope Floats, toting a barge full of saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions. Let’s start with the title, two words whose juxtaposition is neither evocative nor yielding of…
The “Size Does Matter” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the actual movie. It’s also highly annoying, and has spawned a spinoff: The ads for a new film called Plump Fiction inform us that “Width matters too.” Perhaps the best thing about the much-ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla…
Of all the theatrical hams that have wandered across the stage of American pop culture, none have endeared themselves as much as the tiny papier-mache morsel that wanders home atop the legs of Scout Finch near the end of To Kill a Mockingbird. She has just appeared in a school…
One thing South Florida probably doesn’t need: more hot air. You got your embattled politicians proclaiming innocence. You got your drag queens loudly signifying up and down Washington Avenue. You got Cuban Americans of every political stripe huffing and puffing in each other’s faces. Well, prepare for a bit more…
“The world sucks sometimes. The world is great. Then it sucks again. But you’ve got to be able to laugh.” So declares Charlotte Glover, writer, actress, and ad hoc publicist for Punch 59, which bills itself as South Florida’s only skit comedy troupe. “Mentally imbalanced for your amusement,” proclaims the…
thursday may 21 So what’s with all these lawyers turned authors? Brad Meltzer, who grew up in North Miami Beach, joins brethren Scott Turow and John Grisham as attorneys who now spend most of their time pecking out fiction rather than worrying about billable hours. Meltzer has already enjoyed a…
It’s the tail end of the 1996 California primary election campaign and incumbent Democratic senator Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days, famished, he channel-surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office. In a rare moment of lucidity, he has an inspiration: He arranges to…
In director Barbara Kopple’s new documentary Wild Man Blues, we follow Woody Allen around Europe as he takes part in a whirlwind concert tour with the New Orleans-style jazz band with which he plays. He kvetches from the get-go. “I would rather be bitten by a dog than fly to…
Roughly the size of a double-wide trailer, the performance space at the Hollywood Boulevard Theatre is so small you can stare into the eyes of the actors, size up their varicose veins, and follow the trajectories of their spit with dumbfounding intimacy. As it happens, intimacy, or the spitting image…
Thirty-eight bands, three dance troupes, and a fire-eater are slated to perform at this weekend’s Miami-Little Haiti Roots & Culture Festival. But for Albert Jean Alexis, one of the festival organizers, the crowd is the main event. “What we’re trying to do is bring unity to the community,” explains Alexis…
