Creating theater frequently involves assembling miracles in small spaces. Extremely small spaces, if you happen to be the Florida Playwrights’ Theatre (FPT), which is mounting its Fifth Annual Shakespeare Festival in its postage-stamp Hollywood storefront venue. Squeezing Hamlet and The Tempest — Shakespeare’s most popular play and his most magical…
Take a peek inside the gleaming silver bridge tender’s house plunked on a Miami Beach sidewalk along Washington Avenue, right outside the Wolfsonian-FIU, and what you see may confuse you. Inside is artist Gareth James’s installation called The Department of Revolutionary, Everlasting Material, made with a fragile material: white paper…
Looking for a new Luke Skywalker with Blast Shield Helmet Star Wars action figure? Maybe that rare 1955 Roberto Clemente rookie card? How about a 1953 placard advertising Coca-Cola? Then poke around the event that bills itself as South Florida’s Largest Collectibles Show. An alternative to the tiny hotel conference…
thursday august 27 The kings of flamenco cool, the Spanish group Ketama, led the Eighties nuevo flamenco movement with their complex mix of Gypsy rhythms, rock, and underground attitude. That Ketama has left those cutting-edge days behind is evident on their latest release, Konfusion, which is composed of mellow blues…
In the bluish-green depths of the ocean, we see the deck of a sunken ship. Out of the murk, two pinpoints of light approach — humans, lured to the wreck by irresistible curiosity. It’s the beginning of a James Cameron movie, but it’s not that James Cameron movie. It’s the…
“That is known as the lowest point in my life, because I was basically a human barbell,” says Next Stop Wonderland star Hope Davis, referring to her role in the 1995 remake of Kiss of Death, in which she played Nicolas Cage’s girlfriend. “Big, big hair and really cheesy clothes,”…
The idea of destiny, especially the notion that two people are fated to meet and fall in love, is a load of crap, but a surprising number of people buy it. Probably for that reason it has proven to be a fairly popular component in movie romances, City of Angels…
There’s a moose in the guest bedroom in Michael McKeever’s new comedy 37 Postcards. The animal never makes an appearance onstage (a taxidermist crossed its path long before the play begins), but it does take part in the events that unfold when Avery Sutton, a young man newly returned from…
thursday august 20 Whew! The comedic play Making Porn gives us not just one naked man but three — and one of them is hunky gay porn star Ryan Idol! If that’s not enough to bring in the big audiences, there’s the script, which provides plenty of laughs; and the…
Every artist has a theory about the purpose of art. Some believe it should exist solely in the realm of aesthetics. Others believe it should be used as a tool to educate as well. Eric Hilligoss falls into the second group, that of artists who use their work to convey…
If you were to turn Jim Tommaney upside down, chances are a play would fall out of his head. The prolific South Beach multihypenate — who has written, produced, directed, and acted in “five or six” of his own plays since opening EDGE/Theatre in early 1995 — gives birth to…
As the lights came up after a screening of the new Neil LaBute movie Your Friends & Neighbors, a colleague next to me growled disapprovingly, “That was a nasty movie.” For LaBute — whose divisive debut film In the Company of Men (1997) is probably the worst date movie ever…
After a summer filled with third-rate pulp, Blade arrives with a pedigree that suggests first-rate pulp: characters and situations lifted from Marvel Comics; a screenplay by David S. Goyer, who earlier this year gave us the transcendent pulp masterpiece Dark City; and the presence (as star and producer) of the…
Actor Peter Haig embraces his role as Vincent Vincent, the pivotal character in the British farce Natural Causes, as though he were gorging on the theatrical equivalent of Thanksgiving dinner. Making his way through each savory episode, Haig samples multiple comic possibilities, devouring each morsel served up by playwright Eric…
Even performers of world music have trouble describing it. “It’s really a pretty generic overview that offers a lot of things,” ventures Sean Dibble, a percussionist who plays in two local bands that fall into the broad category. “It includes, basically, music from around the world.” Duh. If the concept…
thursday august 13 He’s witty, charming, intelligent, and a snappy dresser. He’s also grossly indecent. No, not your ex-boyfriend but trendy it-boy Oscar Wilde. Although he’s been dead for a good number of years, people can’t stop talking about him; tales of the tart-tongued Irish playwright are everywhere these days…
In 1947, when Thelma Anderson was living in Tennessee, she applied through the mail for a job as a nurse at Jackson Memorial Hospital, hoping to work in the operating room. When she arrived at Jackson, owned then by the City of Miami, to begin her job, management discovered she…
The timing couldn’t be better for How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The dog days of summer are upon us, and few prospects could be more welcome to asteroid-weary moviegoers than a light romantic-comedy that includes a trip to Jamaica as part of the package. Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan may…
Hollywood is openly neurotic about its hatred of psychotherapy. Witness, most recently, Barbra Streisand’s ridiculous Dr. Susan Lowenstein in The Prince of Tides who aggressively mischaracterizes the entire profession with each flick of her nails. In the theater, however, obnoxious psychotherapists tend to appear when a playwright is trying to…
Johnny Calderin and Cesar Hernandez-Canton wanted to put the glamour back in going to the movies. So they did what any self-respecting cineastes would do: They bought their own theater, the Alcazar Cinematheque in Coral Gables, which they rechristened the Absinthe House Cinematheque. Calderin, age 23, and Hernandez-Canton, age 25,…
James Randi is the sort of guy who has to have the biggest asteroid in the room. Without him, we might do something ridiculous like walk into Sharper Image and buy a laundry ball, a great leap forward in alchemy that purports to eliminate the need for Tide. Without him,…
thursday august 6 The most popular characters on kids’ TV are no longer turtles, purple dinosaurs, or color-coordinated crime fighters. They’re babies, stars of Nickelodeon’s Emmy Award-winning cartoon Rugrats, and they’re tops with the grade school set. The show’s star, Tommy, a brave, diaper-clad one-year-old, leads the talking tots through…
