April may indeed be the cruelest month, according to poet T.S. Eliot. But if you believe Shakespeare’s soothsayer (and Julius Caesar really should have), mid-March is the time of year that really stinks. One of the few months boasting no real holidays to speak of (that is, unless you’re Irish),…
Enough with the letter i or lack thereof in actor Jim J. Bullock’s name. “I should have just left it Becky!” he jokes on the phone from his California home. The former costar of the hit ABC sitcom Too Close for Comfort once went by the cryptic handle “JM J…
When I think of Edward Albee, two particularly pungent quotes come to mind. “I have a fine sense of the ridiculous,” says American theater’s perennial bad boy, “but no sense of humor.” If you catch Albee’s witty, challenging The Play About the Baby, which is receiving its Florida premiere at…
Watching Intimacy, Patrice Chéreau’s latest film, is something akin to tracking a land-bound hurricane on the Weather Channel. You know the story will end in destruction, but you can’t help wondering when and where it will hit. Those looking for happy endings, or even happy moments, won’t find them here…
Victor Hugo called grief “a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched,” and anyone who has ever found himself touching the sleeve of his father’s favorite jacket on the day after his funeral, gazing at the toy-strewn floor in a dead child’s playroom, or surveying the carnage on a…
It would be easy, and tempting, to hail Kandahar as a masterpiece without even seeing it: It’s a foreign film, it takes on social issues, it’s directed by Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf, it speaks to the causes of our war on terror, and it first hit U.S. shores right as…
In 1996 playwright, activist, and screenwriter Eve Ensler gave birth not to a child but to a play known as The Vagina Monologues. The work — featuring three women waxing lyrical about good, bad, and ugly aspects of the vagina — has grown to be quite a precocious child: enjoying…
Cuban poet José Martí compared Miami’s most beloved cycad, the palm tree, to forlorn girlfriends who await the return of long-lost lovers. In the Miami context, they’d wait for exiles to return to a free Cuba. Whatever. Flanked by a row of the island nation’s native royal palms, Martí’s words…
“Are we gonna play chicken here, Robert? Who’s gonna go first?” That’s Chris Moore talking, from the other end of a cell phone–the preferred means of communication for the Hollywood producer too afraid of standing still. Moore–a producer of Good Will Hunting and the American Pie films, partner with Ben…
Cupid became a cue for creative contemplation in February. On Valentine’s Day Sherry Gaché presented Real Love, a performance and installation display of blown-up multilingual love letters, at a handsomely refurbished Green Door Gallery. Put aside your conventional idea of love and enjoy four couples as they unabashedly make out…
“The word cool in my day meant low temperature, nothing more,” explains Morton Glosser, real estate broker, avocado and lychee grower, human hotline for the South Florida Bluegrass Association, harmonica and banjo player, and founder of the bluegrass group Corn Country, where he goes by the alias Pop Corn. A…
Verbal and pictorial hosannas to the strawberry have been rolling in for eons. In 1795 gentleman farmer, founding father, and future two-dollar-bill poster boy Thomas Jefferson, noted for raising strawberries on his Virginia plantation, wrote to his chum James Monroe that, in Jefferson’s not-so-humble opinion, the plant was one of…
Theater comes in all shapes and sizes, from loud, lavish, traditional musicals to small-cast, single-set dramas. The most intimate of all, the solo performance, offers a chance for direct audience/actor connection and an opportunity to take on material that might be too risky for a larger venture. Two such shows…
“Pray for us.” So ends a note Judd Apatow sent out last week to television critics who have been supportive of his series Undeclared, among the few half-hour comedies to debut last fall with any modicum of acclaim and expectation. Set at a northern California university and populated by awkward…
After a long absence from American screens, British stage director Richard Eyre, best known for his agreeably nasty The Ploughman’s Lunch in 1982, makes his return with an alternately depressing and uplifting drama about Dame Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease and the heroic efforts of her husband, John Bayley,…
To call a movie the most accessible Dogme 95 film ever made is not merely damning with faint praise. It also threatens to alienate the two segments of the population that might consider going to see such a film in the first place: fans of the back-to-basics, no-frills-of-any-kind Danish filmmaking…
Maybe this won’t seem like such a big deal to you, since you don’t watch The Education of Max Bickford–which is on CBS Sunday nights. Or maybe you’re one of the 9 million who do, in which case, well, sorry about that. But stay tuned nonetheless, because this small tale…
From the first moments of Red Herring, Florida Stage’s sly new comedy, you know something’s up: A billboard advertising kippers reads: “Put a Fish in Your Pocket.” Characters talk intensely into phones that have no cords. In this wacky Fifties of playwright Michael Hollinger’s imagination, what seems normal and straight-faced…
Damien B. is a nonprofit arts center run by the Boisseau family from France. One of its goals is to bridge the gap between artists from Miami and Europe, offering them a place to work and show art. The three-story building has eight studios, a showroom, and a big outdoor…
So when was the last time we heard from Olivia Newton-John? Can anybody say “comeback time”? Don’t get too excited, now. Seriously, why is it that John Travolta gets to have resurrection after resurrection, forgiven for endless sins, yet no one seems all that enthusiastic about his former female costar?…
Miami is a notoriously tough town for jazz joints. For that matter, most types of musical venues encounter loads of trouble trying to survive here. Through the years jazz clubs have opened with much fanfare and closed with barely a whimper, leaving many a jazzhead in the proverbial lurch. Still…
Bamboo, spider mums, birds of paradise, and carnations of all hues fill the room. Seated among this motley profusion of stalks and stems, store-bought bouquets, and fresh yard clippings are seventeen women, most age 50 or older, members of Ikebana International, Miami chapter 131. Their work tables overflow with bushy…
