Marble’s Got Feelings Too

The Norton Museum would like to correct a wrong. According to the museum’s recent press release, the world is full of paint fetishists who absolutely adore canvasses but turn up their buttony little art world noses at sculpture — a grosser, sweatier art that’s really more of a “craft.” According…

Not Dumb at All

Dumb Show is the “small, light show” Joe Penhall wanted to write after the “big, dark show” Blue/Orange. The Promethean Theatre has always been better at darkness, so its successful Blue/Orange four years ago was no surprise. I am delighted to announce, however, that it has now dispatched both Penhall…

A Break From Luck

Bad things happen to the Promethean Theatre, the resident theater company of Nova Southeastern University. It’s an awesome company, no question — headed by the brave and foxy Deborah Sherman, it has done soul-searing work on budgets so small they are literally invisible to the unaided eye — but in…

The Queer Cheers

Sidelines Sports Bar is 3 years old this week. It is Wilton Manors’ only gay sports bar — in fact, one of the very few gay sports bars in the world — and it’s something of a bellwether establishment. Three years ago, all the local gay culture was bound up…

Gender Politics

Broward Stage Door didn’t have to make The Odd Couple edgy. It didn’t have to drag the thing in any exciting new directions. It didn’t even have to top the Art Carney/Walter Matthau/Jack Klugman/Tony Randall/what have you incarnations that have come before. At Broward Stage Door, all the punters wanted…

Fuzzy Math, Yippy Dogs

Cinco de Mayo hits Delray on the tres de Mayo this year, and as the moment draws nigh it is worth taking a look at the illustrious, though tragic, history of this little-understood holiday. It was the Fifth of May in the turbulent year of 1862 when handsome, bespectacled Ignacio…

All Colors of the Rainbow

Used to be, the only place where black gay dudes got together in any quantity was the Coliseum, and a helluvalot of those guys were on the DL. It was more than a little tense: there were beautiful boys with whom you’d really, really like to dance, but who looked…

That Other Local Film Festival

Here are the facts: The Palm Beach International Film Festival is a big, ambitious project undertaken by a group of people who probably make about half of what they’re worth, and who want nothing more than to show us all some movies that we’ve never heard of. They’ve cobbled together…

Palm Beach on Film

The Palm Beach International Film Festival runs April 23 to May 3 and features 120-plus movies playing in five venues — plus parties, filmmaking and marketing seminars, and, for some reason, an appearance by the kindly-eyed human from Babe, film actor James Cromwell. To find out more, check out pbfilmfest.org…

The Real World

Tonight, 27 fresh-minted artists working in every imaginable medium shall begin an exhibition at The Ritter Gallery. The artists are students — seniors in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at FAU — who’ve worked for four long years or more in relative secrecy, toiling to develop their skills and…

Political Poontang

Listen: It’s going to be extremely hard for me, as a happy gay man, to sensibly assess Sol Theatre’s production of The Vagina Monologues. I’m aware that gay men become gay for different reasons — hormones in the womb, an exposure to community theater, or brie at some critical developmental…

The Poontang Declamation

Third Wave feminists said it was reactionary and anti-male. Conservatives said it promoted the rape of young girls by bull dykes. We say only that it’s the most you’ll ever learn about a cooter without a hand mirror. It’s The Vagina Monologues, that ever-morphing collection of speeches, stories, riffs, and…

Evil Ruffage

There are a great many things that you shouldn’t trust to amateurs, and one of them is this: dancing and singing doo-woppy show tunes while tending to a 2,000-pound carnivorous plant from outer space. But the folks at the Hollywood Playhouse love their leafy danger — they live for it…

No Shirt, No Shoes, No Cover

The Jackhammer is a gay bar (attached to a “video lounge”/dance club called Steel), and it caters more to the leather than the chiffon crowd. It is a fun, unpretentious, self-assuredly non-descript place, dark and unburdened by the will of any flamboyant interior decorator. What atmosphere it possesses has always…

Shut Up and Look

Photography is a gorgeously democratic medium, and it becomes more so each time a teenager buys a cell phone and starts snapping away at the bathroom mirror. In the new century, photographs multiply like tribbles — your MySpace profile, which five years ago could accommodate only ten pics, can now…

Sodomites In The Sun

Lori Michaels, a devastatingly cute 30-something aspirant to pop stardom, is not the best reason to go to Pridefest ’09. Though she’s close. Michaels — a Jersey girl with a pre-law degree — combines everything that was ever cool about gaydom in a single, sexily androgynous package: hot techno beats,…

Culturebeat

Dangerous, written by Michael McKeever. Directed by Clove Cholerton. Run time, approximately 90 minutes. Presented through March 29 at the Caldwell Theatre, 7901 N. Federal Hwy., Boca Raton. Visit caldwelltheatre.com, or call 561-241-7432. For his first adaptation, SoFla playwright Michael McKeever reimagines an 18th-century classic, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Les…

Between History and Nothing

Russian Jews were in a precarious position in the early 20th Century. Already, the century had brought them cruel social and economic oppression in Tsarist Russia, and then betrayal by the Bolshevik movement to which they’d largely given their sympathies. In the Revolution, Jews were demonized and killed by armies…

Beautiful People

You are all. So. Beauuutiful.” So says Anita Berber (Ashley Ellenburg) in the opening monologue of Michael McKeever’s new play, Dangerous. It is not a compliment. Berber has been ruined by beautiful things, and her slow, slurred words are a warning wrapped in a sneer. She is a bombed-out refugee…

Culturebeat

There is something wonderful in the dancing cadences of Sarah Ruhl’s The Dead Man’s Cell Phone: the way its madcap scenes chase each other like bits of the author’s associative thought process. The tale follows Jean, a shy and needy woman who one day finds herself seated next to a…