Philosophical question: If a play includes a character so annoying that it becomes unwatchable, is it still a good play? This is the question posed, perhaps accidentally, in The Dead Man’s Cell Phone, a characteristically weird romp from Pulitzer-nominated author Sarah Ruhl. In a nondescript café, a shy young woman…
An eloquent bartender named Elliott explains that the building currently occupied by the Hotel Biba was built in 1939, in the “Bermuda vernacular” architectural style, which reminds this writer of a manor house on an especially verdant tropical slave plantation. It probably never occurred to the architect who designed it,…
“Shock of the Real” is a lavish look at a movement that more or less came and went nearly half a century ago. Of the roughly 18 artists generally considered to make up the first generation of the movement — including Robert Cottingham, Richard Estes, and Ralph Goings — nearly…
“Small is beautiful” might serve as the motto of artist Timothy Leistner’s Artist’s Eye Fine Art Gallery, a postage-stamp-sized space tucked away in the shops of Canterbury Square in Dania Beach. But what he lacks in square footage he makes up for in artistic vision and ambition. Leistner continues to…
A crude symmetry informs Robert Hooker’s decision to produce Sex Drugs Rock & Roll right now, when his theater, the Sol Theatre Project, is doomed. It has maybe two more shows in it, and then Hooker and his partner will pack up and move to the Carolinas. Sol Theatre shall…
In 1669, English theater houses were still just experimenting with allowing women on stage. Rascally King Charles II had liberalized the country’s theater-licensing policies nine years earlier, but some theaters still employed males only, using boy players in female roles. Playhouse Creatures is an inquiry into the lives of some…
If you were queer, male, and 15 at the end of 2003, you already know who Richard Cortez is. He was the teenaged song stylist with the abs of a god, the voice of Rufus Wainright’s basso-profundo older brother, and the schnoz of a Caesar. He was everywhere then, singing…
The Bridegroom of Blowing Rock is like an old Appalachian ballad — like one of the mountain songs captured in the 1930s by Alan Lomax and played by Dylan, full of lust, damnation, magic, and death. It is set in the immediate wake of the Civil War in the mountains…
I don’t think anyone can explain the point of Frost/Nixon — the play or the movie. That goes as well for playwright Peter Morgan, who apparently believes that a play about a disgraced president squaring off against a marginal TV personality is so novel, such a smashing good idea, that…
It’s hard to believe, but there used to be actual tea served at tea dances. Well-appointed ladies and gents would gather on Sundays after church and do wholesome little dances like the minuet or the gavotte, drinking Earl Grey and chattering into the evening. But then the gays came along…
Your local fair wasn’t always exotic. They sold hot dogs and burgers and fried things, and this was not novel. You ate that stuff all the time. They judged poultry and cattle and pigs, and that was normal, too, because those animals belonged to your neighbor and you’d sometimes sit…
The young Hannah Arendt, who would go on to become one of last century’s most brilliant political theorists, was the star pupil of phenomenologist Martin Heidegger in mid-1920s Germany. When Arendt was still a teenager, they began a romantic relationship that endured, in secret, until secular Jew Arendt fled the…
What happened to Downtown At The Gardens? What was once a lovely dining destination is rapidly becoming a restaurant graveyard, staffed by people with bad attitudes and bunker mentalities. We called and spoke to someone in The Gardens’ marketing department about a wild rumor about the fact that four –…
Fort Lauderdale institution the Downtowner is extraordinarily romantic, despite being located next to a jail. It is housed in what looks like a very old building almost directly underneath the Andrews Avenue Bridge, where the strange acoustics of the surrounding stone and water magnify the footfalls of passersby, and where…
Tonight at 7:30, a legion of card-carrying Republican white men shall descend on the Bank Atlantic Center to see a 31-year-old former body builder named John Cena beat the shit out of a guy who catastrophically broke his collarbone back in June (that’d be “Legend Killer” Randy Orton). And for…
Mario Diament’s A Report On The Banality of Love is a play about the stormy, weird romantic relationship between philosopher Martin Heidegger and his most famous student, the phenomenologist and political theorist Hannah Arendt. It dares to ask the question, “What do two of the 20th Century’s smartest people talk…
What a treat it is to see one of our professional theater companies take on an old-fashioned 1950s mindfuck like The Chairs. Eugene Ionesco is the kind of discomfiting relic that nobody wants to touch, and other than a local college’s very fine 2007 production of The Balcony by fellow…
Palm Beach Dramaworks discovered something important this season: that playwrights named Eugene had a bead on this whole capitalist apocalypse thing long before anyone else. Dramaworks’ first Eugene play (by Eugene O’Neill) spoke of the depths of depravity to which a man can tumble if he thinks he might lose…
Three, two, or even one year ago there wouldn’t have been anything notable about getting a decent lunch for $3.99. The fact that you could spend your lunch hour at scenic Fort Lauderdale Riverfront, grubbing on a blackened tilapia wrap at the Palm Grill while swilling $9 vodka martinis would…
I do not like Mart Crowley anymore. Crowley is the old queen who rocketed to worldwide fame and acclaim with the 1968 play The Boys in the Band — and who spent the next 40 years trying to remain, and occasionally succeeding at remaining, relevant. According to Sol’s director, Robert…
Good things come in small packages. Or so goes the thinking behind “Small Stuff 2,” a droll holiday-season show at Bear and Bird Boutique + Gallery in Lauderhill. Everything in the exhibition is no bigger than a sheet of notebook paper, and much of it is considerably smaller, the better…
“Johnny’s used to just be a twink bar,” says owner Sean David of the venerable gay club in the days before he owned it. “Now we’ve got all kinds of dancers. All kinds!” In fact, Johnny’s has over 50 dancers, and you’ll find 30 or so working the floor on…
