Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Miserables, which he began in 1845, runs to around 1500 pages in most editions. The most recent film version — there have been five other adaptations for movies or television — runs a bit under two and a half hours. It’s an expert piece of…
With I Love You, Don’t Touch Me!, first-time filmmaker Julie Davis has made a low-budget movie about love and abstinence among under-30s that takes its cues less from the work of her generational peers — Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming (1995) or Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (1997), for instance –…
Antisemitropolis is the city Hitler never built. Blame that on playwright Dan Kagan, who imagines it as the name the Nazis gave their section of Heaven — “a place with only people like them,” explains Jerry, a character in Kagan’s spirited black comedy Antisemitropolis, now getting its world premiere at…
“She was able to really find a vocabulary that clearly communicated her ideas.” FIU dance professor Andrea Mantell-Seidel is talking about American dance enfant terrible Isadora Duncan. “She believed in the Greek ideal of developing the body, spirit, mind, and emotions — one not sacrificed to the other. The spirit…
They will not spot a roadrunner. Nope. No way. Forget it. No roadrunners. Okay, maybe through a miracle, the world’s most wayward roadrunner will take a very sharp right-hand turn in Flagstaff, Arizona, and somehow, a la the animals in The Incredible Journey, show up in the midst of the…
thursday april 23 Who needs Michael Flatley? Certainly not the cast of Riverdance, the Irish jig fest that has continued to stomp successfully despite the 1995 defection of its star/choreographer. Flatley, an American born to Irish parents, went on to create Lord of the Dance, his own sensational Celtic extravaganza,…
Gwyneth Paltrow gets another chance to show off her letter-perfect English accent in Sliding Doors, an engaging romantic comedy that employs a rather novel narrative device: After introducing the main characters and setting up the basic story, the film splits into two separate but parallel plot lines. It’s a twist…
In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey, Jr., plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York City actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo that he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic…
Icebergs figure prominently in Titanic, Christopher Durang’s absurdly wild 1974 deconstruction of family life, but then so do hamsters, marmalade, and tortured slices of Wonder Bread. There’s no Leonardo DiCaprio, but there is a captain. He’s the one sporting the black dildo on the white tennis headband — a getup…
thursday april 16 Yellowman has overcome bouts with cancer and the prejudice related to his albinism to become one of reggae’s best-selling artists. The Jamaican started off as a DJ in the mid-Seventies, then leaped to huge popularity in the Eighties as a cornerstone of dancehall music. Long ago he…
When six-year-old Mike Hiscano received a handful of Miami-theme postcards from his father’s friend Seth Bramson, he was bitten by the collecting bug. Thirty years later, pack-rat extraordinaire Hiscano owns 2000 Miami-related postcards and a prodigious amount of other memorabilia pertaining to the city. “I’ve always had a strong sense…
“We do music for the people. It’s dancey and fun. I hope the audience loves what they hear and really gets to see what we’re all about.” So wishes Khadir drummer Joe Eshkenazi, whose Latin funk band finally performs at Tobacco Road this Saturday as part of the Miami Rock…
The John Grisham industry has claimed another heavyweight. Late in 1997 Francis Ford Coppola delivered up John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, and now Robert Altman sails into view with The Gingerbread Man, based on an “original” Grisham story, although it’s basically a recycling of other Grisham recyclings. Who would have guessed…
From its very first frame, Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy whooshes us inside the rollicking, deranged world of twelve-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens). Francie is a redheaded rascal who lives with his alcoholic “Da” (Stephen Rea) and screw-loose mother (Aisling O’Sullivan) in a small town in the north of Ireland…
Crack open a playwright whose career has just gotten under way and you’ll more than likely find a dreamer wrestling with the ghost of Anton Chekhov. American theater festivals are littered with reworkings of The Three Sisters, the Chekhov classic in which characters saddled with longing speak of the day…
“It doesn’t get much cheaper than this,” declares furniture designer and artist Matthew Zbornik. “There’s so much openness to create here. If you have an imagination and you have the energy, it’s like, do it.” Zbornik “does it” — making curvy yet functional furniture from wood and metal — at…
They’ll be no talk of booze and broads when vocalist Walt Andrus joins the Don Wilner Quartet to perform A Tribute to the Music of Frank Sinatra this weekend. You see, Andrus doesn’t need Scotch and gender slurs to emulate Ol’ Blue Eyes. He is not an impersonator, a subspecies…
Thursday April 9 You want to write a novel but are daunted by the prospect. All those characters to develop. How do writers do it? Ask Donald Antrim, whose delightfully wacky novel The Hundred Brothers is populated by 100 characters — all of them brothers. The siblings range in age…
If nothing else, The Big One, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest, has a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in…
When you think about how some of the smartest, most surprising films about women have been made by men — and vice versa — you start to realize that directors should dare to speak for the other gender more often. Few filmmakers know the ritual bonds and betrayals of men…
Moments after the legendary showboat Cotton Blossom pulls up to its Natchez, Mississippi, berth, skipper-cum-thespian Cap’n Andy, declares, “You’ve never seen a show like this before.” Chances are, though, you’ve seen many shows like this before. Indeed, you may have even performed in a show like this. Show Boat –…
The genius of choreographer Twyla Tharp’s brilliant three-decade career has largely resided in her ability to combine athletic bravado with balletic emotion, instilling the dance vernacular with virtuosity by wedding everyday movement to the romance of the stage. Musically, Tharp has been all over the map. Mining both the ubiquitous…
