Voice Not Silenced

Talk about your etiquette dilemmas: What’s the proper way to say thank you to a kidney donor? Do you marry them? Buy them a car? Pay off their house? Send them flowers every month for life? If you’re spoken-word artist Sekou Sundiata, you write a show about the whole harrowing…

Get Sauced

The better a barbecue sauce, the more likely you’ll end up with it all over your hands, says a Southern rule of thumb. If it’s an extremely good sauce, you’ll likely find some smeared around your mouth, giving you that inimitable I-applied-lipstick-while-drunk look. Dirty hands and messy mouths occur because…

The Pain Train

Rawson Thurber has been so busy the past few days that by the time he finally returns a reporter’s phone call, he does so at 1:30 in the morning–and he doesn’t even realize the late, or early, hour till he hears the groggy croak on the other end. He’s sorry…

Your New Friends?

Last October, Sue Vertue found herself in a Los Angeles soundstage watching the filming of a pilot for a would-be NBC sitcom. The storyline of this particular episode dealt, more or less, with the horrific (and, of course, capital-H hilarious!) fallout that comes when a man’s girlfriend finds his porn…

This Food’s Tasty

Some plays don’t just offer food for thought; they serve up fresh ideas, then eat them raw. One such carnivore is Nicky Silver’s The Food Chain, now on display in a tasty production at the Mosaic Theatre in Plantation. Silver’s scabrous wit slices and dices a number of human foibles,…

A Female Perspective

Anat Ebgi and Nina Arias are two young, independent Miami curators who have produced interesting shows in the last year. Most recently during Art Miami, Ebgi put on an all-female exhibit called “Manifest Destiny,” and Arias curated “Drawing Conclusions,” both in the Design District and both critically acclaimed. They have…

Blowin’ Smoke

First off, make no mistake: Biker Boyz is not, and has no intentions of being, The Fast and the Furious on two wheels, which will be considered a serious shame by the twelve-to-twelve-year-old demographic who were hoping to chug a little more Diesel fuel till the official sequel’s release this…

Where the Heart Isn’t

It used to be that the only Korean films to be seen in the U.S. were somber art-house films like Jeong Ji-yeong’s White Badge or veteran Im Kwon-Taek’s Chunhyang and Sopyonje. But as South Korea has developed a more technically sophisticated commercial film industry, these have been joined by hard-edged,…

Shanghai Surprise

Just when a cynic might think there are no more Holocaust stories to be told, yet another undiscovered perspective pops up on local screens. But even if you’ve seen The Pianist and The Fighter and Night and Fog, there is still Shanghai Ghetto, a documentary by Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir…

Slave & Seminole Rebels

“Act boldly and unforeseen forces will come to my aid,” says Carol Durbin, relating some words that were favorites of Martin L. Marcus, her partner of thirteen years. Marcus, who passed away last month after a long battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), certainly took that expression to heart. Thoroughbred…

Hopped Up

Appreciating beer is an art, as is pairing it with the proper foods — and we don’t mean peanuts or pizza. Tasting involves more than just the tongue, claims Patrick Jones, head brewer at Miami’s Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant. He is one who’ll share his enthusiasm for the beverage during…

Bush-Era Banality

In some ways schlock is similar to pornography: You may not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it, and there’s a lot of it to be seen on South Florida stages this season. The Coconut Grove Playhouse seems particularly interested in schlock musicals. Earlier…

Mind Games

Compiled in the cold light of day, the sum of Chuck Barris’s contributions to American culture are the top 40 ditty “Palisades Park,” which he wrote in 1962, and his discovery, a few years later, that many people are willing to make complete fools of themselves in front of a…

Sour Hours

It all begins with the word. “I believe I may have a first sentence,” murmurs Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), commencing labor on the author’s fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The year is 1921, but skillfully intercut segments illustrate that the book’s heady emotional content will…

Real Rural

Small-town stud Tully (Anson Mount) works the family farm with his younger brother Earl (Glenn Fitzgerald) and their inexpressive, unsmiling widower Dad (Bob Burrus) in Tully. The sudden possibility that they might lose the farm opens up a trove of disturbing family secrets, challenging Tully’s heretofore shallow nature. Hilary Birmingham…

Hot Dog!

“There’s no other dog like a dachshund,” says the first line of the “Dachs Song,” penned in 1991 by Paul de Vries and Murray Weinstock and available on CD via www.dachsong.com. Devoted owners of wiener dogs all over the world must agree. In 1991 one of them, Adrian Milton, founded…

Very Fine Lines

“I feel most honest and sincere when drawing on paper,” artist Pedro Vizcaino confesses in the slim catalogue accompanying the exhibition “Drawing Conclusions,” which opened last week on the second floor of the Buena Vista Building in Miami’s newest hipster hangout, the Design District. “Drawings are a process by which…

The Master Revised

While filmgoers hungrily await this year’s Miami International Film Festival feast, there are several tasty cinematic hors d’oeuvres now being offered at the Cosford Cinema. George Capewell, the Cosford’s programmer, has scored a number of Miami premieres that should keep art cinema lovers happy in advance of the festivals yet…

The Fling’s the Thing

Everyone has remembrances of flings past, especially that once-in-a-lifetime first time. Playwright Richard Nelson’s take on that oft-told subject is Madame Melville, an intriguing wisp of a tale now playing at the New Theatre in Coral Gables. In it, Nelson depicts the coming of age of an awkward American fifteen-year-old…

Sites Seen

Standing inside Cesar Trasobares’s exhibit “Social Fabric: Old Pillows and Recent Money Works” at FIU’s main library feels like being swallowed by a cannibalistic capitalist ecosystem. There’s paper money, mostly one-dollar bills, some scribbled with stories, promises, and exhortations; some painted over; some defaced or stamped with terms such as…

Male Fraud

Paul Morse (Jason Lee) has this terrible problem. He’s all set to marry the take-charge, raven-haired beauty Karen (Selma Blair, thanklessly playing second fiddle as usual), but late in the game finds himself also falling for her free-spirited blond cousin, Becky (Julia Stiles). Gee, what’s a guy to do? It’s…

Soundman God

Music industry insiders and audiophiles may be the only people who have heard of Tom Dowd, despite his work engineering and producing countless classic albums for five decades, and a 2002 Grammy Award. Miami-based director Mark Moormann spent the last seven years filming a documentary, Tom Dowd and the Language…