There’s an adage in the writing business: “Write what you know.” Albert Ramsdell Gurney, Jr., known as A.R., certainly took that advice to heart. After studying playwriting at Yale in the 1950s, Gurney set out on a writing career based almost exclusively on his upper-crust family background, the clubby Northeastern…
On a muggy Thursday night in the District, clusters of ragtag art urchins bummed cigarettes from swank passersby under the awnings of tony design and furniture shops. The youthful angels of nihilism shrugged their shoulders in sang-froid detachment as their flyers for art shows were casually tossed to the ground…
A Picasso: Picture this: Bearlike Pablo Picasso sits in a dark stone cellar amid stacks of paintings, staring intently at his beautiful female model, who happens to be a Nazi official. As the woman disrobes, Picasso sketches, and despite the dank, dark surroundings, you can feel the temperature rise. That’s…
Historias Recurrentes: For years Gustavo Acosta has untiringly pursued an imaginary space of architecture between the future and the past, nostalgia and satire. In his grand images, the viewer sees a monumental landscape with absolutely no human presence. It must be pretty weird to stand on a wide avenue filled…
Picture this: Bearlike, charismatic Pablo Picasso (Peter Michael Goetz) sits in a dark stone cellar amid stacks of paintings, staring intently at his beautiful female model, who happens to be a Nazi official (Lucie Arnaz). As the woman begins to disrobe, Picasso sketches furiously and despite the dank, dark surroundings,…
This just in: White people have a lot of secret racial prejudice. J.T. Rogers hammers home this theme in White People, now playing at the New Theatre in Coral Gables. The three-character show is more poetry than drama, a series of interlaced monologues that centers on deep-buried anger in white…
For years Gustavo Acosta has untiringly pursued an imaginary space of architecture between the future and the past, nostalgia and satire, nineteenth-century Friedrich Schinkel and twentieth-century Charles Jencks. Check out his show “Historias Recurrentes” at Praxis International Art. First we must understand the influence of architectural representation, starting with the…
A Picasso: Reviewed in this issue. Through May 2. Coconut Grove Playhouse, 3500 Main Hwy., Coconut Grove. 305-442-4000. Flyin’ West: Set in 1898, Flyin’ West follows three black sisters who’ve left the South and struck out on their own, settling in Nicodemus, Kansas. The hardships of freedom and independence are…
Love & Slavery in Miami: Willie Keddell is an artist who tills the fields of perception. The urban furrows of marginality are his seedbed of imagination. His work’s soulful aesthetic is abundant with concrete decay, the graffiti of untrod spaces, and the plaintive lament of the dispossessed. With assistance from…
A lot can happen in six years. And it seems just about everything has for the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Drama, intrigue, tragicomedy with plot twists and turns to keep followers of the event, especially the internal politics of it, on the edge of their seats, with a…
I am going to give 13 Going on 30 too much credit, though it is hardly worth the effort; Lord knows the filmmakers didn’t put much into it. It’s a shame, as far as these things go, because what could have been an engaging, maybe even enlightening story about the…
If only Dogville were at least involving enough to be perplexing. Sigh. In simplest terms — which it definitely deserves — Lars von Trier’s latest thingamabob is a large, pretentious blob of coulda-been. As in, it coulda been deep and insightful. It coulda been sociologically challenging. It coulda been formalistically…
In Israeli writer-director Nir Bergman’s Broken Wings, we never see an automatic weapon, a military roadblock or a horrific explosion on a city street. Rather than dealing with the volatile politics of the Middle East, this quiet, soul-wrenching film examines the unresolved traumas of one middle-class family trying to cope…
He’s a funny little enigma, that Prince guy. You could say he’s the original metrosexual. You could say he’s a religious freak. You could say he’s a sex god and a genius. In his early years, Prince pranced around in lingerie and hip boots, singing dirty lyrics like a nasty…
In February and March Mareeta McIntyre’s Eagle Care Productions was so jammed up with the jams it was presenting that the Super Talent Showcase had to be delayed three weeks. A mere ten days before the event, she and her crew were still auditioning acts to find the best of…
NOW 24/7 How do you own the moon? Many have tried; few have succeeded. Lunar expeditions have gotten rockets to land there and astronauts to bounce around in the gravity-less atmosphere. Painters such as Van Gogh, Rousseau, and O’Keeffe, and photographers such as Ansel Adams have rendered the planet in…
SAT 4/24 At the beginning of the 2003-04 season Miami Heat fans had a serious case of the doldrums. Megamoney draft pick Lamar Odom provided a glimmer of hope, but when the team went 0-7 all bets were off. Soon after, legendary coach Pat Riley threw in the towel, leaving…
SAT 4/24 Fifteen of Miami’s most dynamic street poets face off today, battling in a word-slinging competition for the title of Urban Poet Laureate for South Florida and a $500 prize. Each of the poets competing today is a winner of Lip Tongue Ear Productions’ monthly poetry slam contests, which…
SAT 4/24 Alejandro Sanz was selling out stadiums in Mexico when 10 terrorist bombs exploded this past March in Madrid. While watching the terrible images on television of hundreds killed and wounded, he recognized the backdrop: the houses of old friends, the station where he used to catch the fast…
Thursday 4/22 Whenever your child asks for yet another advance on his allowance, you always throw out the same responses: “What am I, the Bank of America? Maybe if you had to work for a living, you wouldn’t be so quick to blow all your money!” Well, today the little…
How far will one friend go for another? In Trembling Hands, Ivonne Azurdia’s grotesque, funny crime drama now in its world premiere by the Mad Cat Theatre Company, the answer is very, very far indeed. Following up on her splendid Tin Box Boomerang, a hit for Mad Cat last season,…
Catering to obsessed foodies who crave tasting menus, and battling boorish socialites who demand priority seating, Sam Peliczowski mans the telephone lines booking reservations at a wildly popular Manhattan restaurant. In Fully Committed we meet Sam, an actor for whom this is a pays-the-rent job, and a colorful cast of…
