MON 3/8 Your days of screaming obscenities at the television screen are over. Don’t get too excited: Hardball, Chris Matthews’s annoying MSNBC gab fest, hasn’t been canceled — yet! The silver-haired pundit continues to offer up in-depth political analysis with weighty guests such as comedian Bill Maher. But if you…
SAT 3/6 Miami filmmaker Juan Carlos Zaldivar laments the dearth of countercultural icons in a world rife with war, corporate greed, and disease. He bemoans the growing apathy in cities and the eerie quiet that comes with assimilation. Once-radical heroes such as John Waters, he observes, maintain a comfort in…
On the face of it, Jolson and Company, the latest biographical musical presented by the Coconut Grove Playhouse, should be dead on arrival. Its subject, Al Jolson, became a star before World War I, died more than a half-century ago, and hardly registers in the contemporary Zeitgeist. He was reputed…
Blind Date: The New Theatre presents another world premiere with Mario Diament’s Blind Date. Diament is the Miami-based, Argentine-born author of The Book of Ruth and Smithereens. As the title suggests, the play explores encounters between strangers, sighted and blind. Directed by Rafael de Acha. March 6 through April 4…
By the Woods: This show takes us to a humorously dark side of nature. Pepe Mar’s Totem brings taboo to the realm of innocence via stuffed toys, butterflies, trinkets, and Blue Puffy Head. More akin to Strindberg’s gloom, Norwegian painter Frank Brunner’s misty works portray nature, light, and artifice. Chris…
Thursday 3/4 Skate rats and nouveau punks will be getting their fiercest attitude together as Linkin Park, the rocking clash of old-school hip-hop and hard-driving rock and roll, brings its Meteora tour to town. The altmetal quintet packs a loud and energetic wallop despite the fact that its members are…
Ars longa, vita brevis, goes the old Roman saying, and it remains true today. While decades and centuries come and go, art endures. The tumult of prerevolutionary Russia is by now a dim memory, but Chekhov’s plays remain to recall the era. So it is with the plays of Jon…
Chekhov in Repertory: Actors engage in a battle of egos as they struggle through an ill-fated production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters; presented in rotating repertory with The Cherry Orchard. Through February 28. University of Miami Ring Theatre, 1312 Miller Dr., Coral Gables. 305-284-3355. The Drawer Boy: Watching Florida Stage’s…
Miami Art Central, known as MAC, is a project shaped and funded by Ella Fontanals Cisneros, the Venezuelan philanthropist who last year purchased a two-story building at 5960 Red Rd. and asked architect Alessandro Fiorentino to remodel it. MAC now stands as a handsome arthouse with two levels of exhibition…
(Making Up) Carolyn: Ever daydreamed of what Jacques Derrida would do with a Home Depot gift certificate? Then survey this site-specific installation by Shane Aslan Selzer. The sculptor poetically invigorates sundry building materials while deconstructing the history of the Carolyn Apartments, now teetering on the brink of extinction before the…
This Jew has spent several hours in the past week reading all four Gospels, as well as various supplementary (and often inflammatory) texts, upon which Mel Gibson based his The Passion of the Christ. I’ve read the interpretations of scholars, the apologias of popes, and the damnations of zealots. I’ve…
This is not a good movie. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is, in fact, a bad movie. The script bleeds one cliché after another, the female lead can’t fire up the heat necessary for her role, and the plot resolves nearly every conflict it introduces within minutes. Worse, even as the…
God is coming. Put away your prayer books and slip on your boogie shoes because he’s gonna scoop you up with a chunky bass line, heavenly vocals, and phat-phat glam. In case you didn’t know, God is Nile Rodgers, the prolific producer of disco megahits and the man responsible for…
There’s an apocryphal tale, or “urban legend” as such fables are now known, that New York’s Waldorf Astoria prepared a red velvet cake for some diners back in the Thirties or Forties — and then presented a $100 charge for the dessert. Back then $100 was big bucks, but even…
We barely had time to scream our tits off. We bitched when we heard that the Cactus Bar and Grill, Miami’s longest-running gay bar and home to Biscayne Boulevard rough trade, was closing. We lamented the passing of glam and grift, once hallmarks of the gay underworld and fodder for…
SUN 2/29 At last, a wrestling outfit that knows that fighting is all about the mask. Along with a range of over-the-top identities, many of the fighters who participate in Lucha Xtreme Wrestling possess some of the most compelling costumes in the sport. The Mark of the Mask tour, which…
FRI 2/27 In Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film Network, Peter Finch plays a washed-up television anchorman who begins to lose his sanity. When in a rage he encourages his audience on live television to stick their heads out their windows and shout at the top of their lungs “I’m mad as…
FRI 2/27 Now that Sex and the City is off the air, actor/dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov is screwed. He has to find something else to do besides playing a moody artist who beds Sarah Jessica Parker’s character Carrie Bradshaw and whisks her away to Paris. Well, it seems the 55-year-old Russian…
Thursday 2/26 Don’t count on hearing gripping stories about the Titanic or the Andrea Doria or even the S.S. Minnow from Gilligan’s Island when you pay a visit to the Historical Museum of Southern Florida’s (101 W. Flagler St.) latest exhibition, “Shipwrecks and Rescues: 1550-2000.” The disasters and heroic events…
Watching Florida Stage’s new production of The Drawer Boy is a bit like observing a bumblebee in flight. Based on the evidence, it shouldn’t fly, but there it goes. Michael Healey’s 1999 script is riddled with implausibilities and secondhand ideas. Nevertheless it offers some gentle humor and soul, and both…
Beauty of the Father: There is much to savor and even more to contemplate in Nilo Cruz’s new play, now receiving a visually compelling world premiere at the New Theatre. The production offers several pleasures, first and foremost of which is Cruz’s poetic, luxuriant language. Listening to Beauty is like…
When considering the work created by male artists, tag lines or descriptive phrases such as malenist, phalloist, masculist — or any equivalent of “feminist” — do not exist. Male artists create or interpret their personal experiences and the world around them from very individual perspectives. A female artist’s work, on…
