thursday june 12 International Hispanic Theatre Festival: The twelfth annual International Hispanic Theatre Festival concludes this week at Teatro Avante (235 Alcazar Ave., Coral Gables) with five final performances. Tonight and tomorrow night at 8:30 p.m., Uruguay’s Teatro del Escorpion performs Alvaro Angel Malmierca’s Bartleby el Escribiente. Argentina’s Grupo Teatral…
First the good news: Unlike most action film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been. Director Jan De Bont made a dazzling debut with the 1994 Speed. His riveting direction of action triumphed over a hackneyed,…
I spent the Eighties on the subway, commuting from my what-I-could-afford studio apartment in Brooklyn to a series of all-we-can-offer-to-pay-you theater jobs in Manhattan. Which is how I became acquainted with the ranter. A large Jamaican woman in a pink raincoat and matching hat, she would take her customary place…
A white horse clops across the small stage in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s pavilion gallery. Steady on articulated legs made from wooden dowels and metal hooves that formerly capped the ends of chainlink fence posts, the steed carries St. Barbara, an oil-can warrior with the beatific plaster face of…
thursday june 5 New York Philharmonic: Music director Kurt Masur makes his Miami debut as he conducts the legendary New York Philharmonic tonight at 8:00 p.m. at the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts (1700 Washington Ave., Miami Beach). The orchestra comes to South Florida for the first time…
It wouldn’t be completely fair to say that the hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it wouldn’t be so awfully unfair, either: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), and…
Short on irony, long on wit, writer/director Greg Mottola’s The Daytrippers breaks with the pack of recent thumbsucking U.S. indie productions to fashion a funny and frolicsome feature that scrutinizes the much poked and prodded American family. Working from what seems a slight premise, The Daytrippers, through economic storytelling and…
Many of my friends recently opened their mailboxes to discover something more hideous than notification of an IRS audit, more depressing than an ex-lover’s wedding invitation, and more frightening than a postcard proclaiming the impending arrival of freeloading friends: a class reunion announcement. At age 44, playwright Benjie Aerenson can…
thursday may 29 Subtropics 9: The Subtropics 9 New Music Festival wraps up this week with three performances at Miami-Dade Community College’s Wolfson campus (300 NE Second Ave., Breezeway Room). Tonight at 8:00 p.m. LaDonna Smith and Davey Williams offer the surrealist performance Transduo. Tomorrow at 8:00 p.m. the Shaking…
Time was when the annual Cannes Film Festival was about the only game of its kind. That colorful event having added a ton of gold to the coffers of Provence, it was only natural that other cities began to want their own festivals. Now one can scarcely find a town…
In a season of lumbering big-screen circuses, Rough Magic provides a rowdy creative sideshow. It’s the kind of haywire high-wire act that suspends the laws of science and grows more involving and comical with every artful near-fall. It’s about magic as illusion and magic as genuine miracle, and it shuffles…
In the spring of 1977, Broadway fell in love with Little Orphan Annie and her cheery, the-sun-will-come-out-tomorrow philosophy. Had the comic strip inspiration for Annie been able to stroll the eight blocks downtown from the Alvin Theatre to take a seat in the Belasco, she would have had the pupils…
thursday may 22 KRS-One: In a little more than ten years, Lawrence Krsna Parker has risen out of utter poverty to become one of the most respected and prolific rap artists around. His ninth album in eleven years, I Got Next, was released a couple of days ago, the latest…
The appearance of The Lost World: Jurassic Park carries a double burden. Not only is it the sequel to the most popular movie ever made, but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. Now that he has finally won his Oscar and achieved…
Although the ancient Egyptians probably had some form of theater as early as 4000 B.C., most of our information about drama’s origins comes from the Greeks. I once knew an uproarious stage manager who, disillusioned by countless tours with theatrical turkeys, insisted that an important part of theater history had…
thursday may 15 Happy Birthday, ArtCenter-South Florida: The ArtCenter-South Florida celebrates a dozen years of providing a haven for local and national artists on Lincoln Road with a new name (it used to be called the South Florida Art Center), a new look (the galleries have been revamped), and a…
Judy Davis is often at her ravaged best when she’s playing women pulled apart by their own warring impulses. Torn between their isolating desire for freedom and their need for solace, the women in films such as High Tide, Husbands and Wives, The New Age, and A Passage to India…
Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out … even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their seventies, so…
My earliest impressions of the American judicial system came from listening to earnest civics teachers and from watching reruns of Perry Mason; combined, they convinced me that courtrooms hold more drama than any Broadway stage, with lawyers playing for life-and-death stakes as they heroically defended the nation’s civil liberties (this…
Kenny Scharf was eight years old when he first saw the work of Salvador Dali. While playing at a neighbor’s house in Hollywood, California, Scharf, best known for his use of cartoon imagery in his paintings, must have been watching TV when he spotted a heavy book on the coffee…
thursday may 8 Celebrity Golf Challenge: A bevy of celebrities, including Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Dawnn Lewis, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Drew Bledsoe, and Barry Sanders, will take a swing at sickle cell anemia at this weekend’s Celebrity Golf Challenge. Among the events taking place this weekend are a celebrity bash at…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
