In his five-decade career, Cole Porter wrote songs for Fanny Brice, Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, and Bert Lahr, just to name a few. One measure of his virtuosity as a composer, however, is that no one singer really owns a Porter tune. Not even Frank Sinatra,…
Now that punk rock is dead and all so-called independent record labels are actually controlled by international supercorporations, underground music is as uncool as mainstream. Next big thing: underwater music. Okay, maybe not. And frankly, the music itself is somewhat beside the point. The fact that it’s being broadcast beneath…
“So much of what we are all about is what we see.” This according to Judith Ann Graham, a professional image consultant and a member of the Association of Image Consultants International, a nonprofit organization made up of men and women who specialize in working with individuals, groups, or corporations…
thursday july 9 In 1947 twenty-year-old Antonio Carlos Jobim left behind his dreams of becoming an architect and opted for a career in music. Vocalist, composer, arranger, pianist, guitarist, and one of the founding fathers (along with Jo‹o Gilberto and Vinicius de Mor‹es) of the bossa nova movement, Jobim became…
High Art is a low-budget, American independent movie about junkie-lesbian photographer Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so-world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential; the smoke curls out…
The winds that sweep across the Sahara kick up ferocious sandstorms. Dunes change shape by the hour, flying particles blind the eye, and all reason and sense of direction can be lost. In such disorienting surroundings, reality and hallucination converge; the most inexplicable, unimaginable events can occur. Passion in the…
Milton Berle isn’t actually backstage at The Last Supper, but his voice is, if only on Memorex. The Borscht Belt comedian has loaned his name and endorsement to Artie Butler’s hapless but ambitious new musical about a hapless but ambitious guy trying to sell a musical comedy to a Broadway…
Give the hippie-dippie music fest Woodstock a Nineties spin and the result would be raves, all-night concerts catalyzed by hypnotic electronic music and mind-bending light shows and tempered by a prevailing sense of tranquillity, which is often induced and sustained by drugs. Usually held at sprawling outdoor venues whose locations…
thursday july 2 Tonight at 8:30 the Wolfsonian-FIU presents the finale of its Florida on Film series, and the closing flick is a classic: Where the Boys Are. Boys and girls alike will have a blast at the Hotel Astor (956 Washington Ave., Miami Beach), which is hosting the event…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys (1995) and The Rock (1996) and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon, which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When…
Armed again with the comedy of despair but with far more focus than the last time out (1995’s Kicking and Screaming), director Noah Baumbach takes on perhaps the most coiled and resilient of the seven deadlies in his bright comedy of manners, Mr. Jealousy. The affable Lester (Eric Stoltz) has…
Since there aren’t many coming-out stories about lesbians in Hoboken, New Jersey, it’s easy to imagine why the folks at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville sat up and took notice in 1994 when Wendy Hammond sent in the script for Julie Johnson. What made them choose…
“The minute a man puts on a dress, something very theatrical happens. It’s funny.” So says visual artist David Rohn in explaining his latest creation: the pilot episode for the very theatrical Adora Adora, a television sitcom he wrote, directed, and in which he has a minor acting role. The…
There’s only one genuinely dramatic moment in Cloud Tectonics, but, boy, is it a doozy. A man leaves a room and re-enters it moments later. His clothes are different. He’s carrying letters written while he was away. To him, two years have unfolded in the interim. To the characters on-stage…
Think Parrot Jungle and you naturally imagine birds (and maybe bird droppings). A cockatoo riding a bicycle on a high wire, an Amazon parrot counting out loud, and other winged wonders rolling around on tiny skates. But the 62-year-old attraction contains more than just squawking technicolor avian daredevils. Two years…
thursday june 25 Launched from New York nocturnal haunts such as Save the Robots, the Palladium, and the Limelight to mixmaster-extraordinaire status, DJ Këoki lands at Groove Jet (323 23rd St., Miami Beach) tonight at 11:00 to show off his beat-heavy and hauntingly sampled brand of electronica. He’ll spin tunes…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
There will always be a Britain, and very likely there will always be movies about the pluck and sacrifice demonstrated by the little people during World War II. Not Billy Barty-type little people — though surely there must have been a few of them involved — but the simple, salt-of-the-earth…
The 1967 screen musical Doctor Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, 20th Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the original film — its disasters are more mundane. It’s a kiddie comedy that really…
By day Rosie Gordon-Wallace is a sales representative for the G.D. Searle pharmaceutical company. By night she’s an aspiring writer and a tireless promoter working to help her comrades in art who just can’t get a break. “The artists really just want to do their work,” notes Gordon-Wallace, who speaks…
Sun, surf, sand, and classical music. Four things you don’t necessarily think of together. But Florida Philharmonic conductor James Judd doesn’t think the way most people do. For the second year in a row, the maestro has been a guiding force behind the second annual Beethoven by the Beach, a…
No matter if you’re a Christian, Buddhist, Darwinist, or one of those folks who stick a Jesus-as-fish icon on your car, you must accept the fundamental tenet that we as a species are of the ocean. Whether by God’s hand or some other primal force beyond human cognizance, the cool…
