FRI 2/20 TheatreworksUSA brings children’s book author Beverly Cleary’s (The Mouse and The Motorcycle) beloved character Ramona Quimby to life onstage at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts (201 SW 5th Ave., Fort Lauderdale). Ramona’s adventures on Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon, have entertained and instructed elementary school-age children…
FRI 2/20 American filmmaker Todd Haynes is an iconoclast. His 1991 film Poison was dismissed as pornography at first, but when it won prizes at Cannes it became regarded as a benchmark in nouveau queer cinema. Tonight Haynes’s 1998 feature Velvet Goldmine will be screened, along with his groundbreaking and…
SAT 2/21 We all know the poem: “A Dream Deferred.” Langston Hughes wrote it, if you hadn’t heard. “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore — and then run?” One of the greatest black literary figures of the 20th Century, Hughes was…
Thursday 2/19 For years Spanish master guitarist Paco de Lucia has been taking flamenco music to new frontiers. His collaborations with jazz artists have forged his signature style of nuevo flamenco, a sound many critics consider a harbinger of the renaissance of Andalusian music. A consummate artist, de Lucia takes…
At the opening of The Fog of War, the brilliant new documentary from director Errol Morris, we see a composed, sharply groomed, and middle-age Robert McNamara, preparing to brief the press on the Vietnam War. He asks two questions: First, if the chart he’s set up is visible and, second,…
When the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, consisting of twenty raw college men, beat the seemingly invincible, state-hardened Soviets and went on to win the gold medal at Lake Placid, the event was regarded, even in palm-lined Miami and iceless Honolulu, as the most amazing feat in U.S. Olympic history…
A few things you might not know about actress/singer/dancer Eartha Kitt. She makes her home in Westport, Connecticut, with toy poodles. When she’s not performing she doesn’t wear makeup, is fond of sweatsuits, and might be seen in the neighborhood grocery store doing her own shopping. She’s an admitted TV…
Reparations have to begin somewhere, so while circuses are generally thought of as one of those shows you have to take your children to lest they be forever traumatized by the denial, this gilly provides something more than guilt prevention for indulgent moms and dads and hay for its imprisoned…
NOW 24/7 Love is a one-night stand in a Hialeah honeymoon suite. Love keeps the meter running. Whether an all-night affair or a whirlwind roller coaster ride lasting as long as your favorite soap opera, motel romance is always exciting. And Miami’s abundance of no-tell joints, equipped with mirrors, vibrating…
FRI 2/13 The upstart Major League Wrestling purports to offer a scintillating alternative to the mainstream television fare put on by World Wrestling Entertainment and other purveyors of the pseudo-sport. Judge for yourself this weekend. While the 4-match fight card boasts a World Heavyweight Championship bout, it’s the special challenge…
THU 2/12 Long before Janet Jackson shocked the world by baring her breast on international television, we had already spent many years besieged by racy cleavage-heavy images. A lot of those provocative shots were of supermodels on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, courtesy of fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo, the mag’s…
FRI 2/13 Okay, don’t get mad, but Meg Ryan is not a member of Just the Funny, Miami’s rollicking group of improvisational actors and sketch comedians. This is important to keep in mind during the troupe’s upcoming performance of How We First Met, a Valentine’s Day show celebrating those first-encounter…
Want to know my definition of good theater? It’s when you take a seat, see a show, and go home a changed person. That’s what you can expect from the M Ensemble’s new production of Strands, now on dazzling display at the venerable company’s North Miami theater. Strands is one…
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…
Deeply Rooted Distilled Flower Fungus Seedpot Pollen: Jason Hedges’s Deeply Rooted Distilled Flower Fungus Seedpot Pollen is a spectacle in between sensorial zones, a performance feast of sight, taste, and smell. At the opening you could sample three different kinds of grappa, and he exhibited a variety of mushroom vitrines,…
Thursday 2/12 There’s a reason they call corporate logos “brands.” Though they don’t stink of burned flesh anymore, today’s brands still retain their air of slavery. The aim, it seems, is to pollute the human mind with a barrage of commercial slogans, swooshes, and “lifestyles.” San Francisco artist Hank Thomas-Willis…
SUN 2/15 Imagine the pressure put on a singer when critics compare his style with venerable musicians like Paul Simon, Raffi, and Mr. Rogers. (Wait a sec, when did Mr. Rogers become a musician? Well, he did sing “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”) Such acclaim means he must embrace the…
If you’re looking to see theatrical craft in action, I suggest you get over to the Coconut Grove Playhouse’s carefully wrought production of The Chosen, which features an array of fine acting talent and one world-class performance by Theodore Bikel. In a modern world that relies on fast-paced glibness for…
According to a recent New York Times article by Benjamin Genocchio, a young generation is slowly changing the way art (and art business) is done in New York. The driving force behind this is, writes Genocchio, the “precarious economics” of the ventures and few interested sponsors. He evaluates the new…
Valentin Childhood memories are part of filmmakers’ stock in trade, and many a director has based films on them — Fellini’s Amarcord, Boorman’s Hope and Glory, and Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, to name but three. Alejandro Agresti’s Valentin (2002) continues this tradition with the tale of an owlish, bespectacled eight-year-old boy…
James Norwood Pratt has been called America’s Tea Guru. As author of The Tea Lover’s Treasury, the seminal tome on the subject published in 1982, it could be said he started a trend, one that’s taken a bit of time to catch on, but a trend nonetheless. The world has…
If after a rash of layoffs your boss sends out a memo instructing you and your office mates to chill out, have some fun, and mix it up as an effort to turn around the communal dread of additional corporate hatchet jobs, be careful. Be very careful. The Bush administration’s…
