The artists assembling for Y100’s Jingle Ball seem to have nothing in common. Failed American Idol Elliot Yamin, the nasally Plain White T’s, good-girl Brit Natasha Bedingfield, master of the universe Timbaland, baby-faced genre-bender Sean Kingston, Good Charlotte, some band called “Florida,” wimp-rockers One Republic — what’s the explanation? I…
John Patrick Shanley’s Danny & The Deep Blue Sea is currently running at The Alliance Theatre Lab in Miami, and if you get the chance to see it, do. The story of two incredibly damaged societal rejects meeting in a bar and discovering their potential for mutual healing, Danny is…
Andrea Bocelli was initially discovered by Pavarotti — presumably when the late, great tenor from Modena was already losing his hearing. Bocelli had his endorsement, and his career took off like a (very quiet) rocket. Since 1994, he’s recorded a bunch of operas (though he’s rarely ever performed one, because…
Scientific studies of birds on lithograph tend not to mix well with political satire. Or maybe that’s conjecture. I certainly haven’t tried it; seems a bit counter-intuitive. But the superimposition makes perfect sense to famed printmaker, John Alexander — who also toils away with landscapes, woodscapes, and studies of fishes…
The little press release that went out in advance of Mosaic Theatre’s new production, Guest Artist, was uncharacteristically misleading. It said: “In his most autobiographical work yet, Jeff Daniels explores the glory of theater, hero worship and the nature of artistic risk in a gentle and poignant comedy about a…
At Barry University on a recent evening, Antonio Amadeo was showing signs of strain. “All my writers are leaving,” he said as he watched another top-tier SoFla playwright disappear into the night. He looked like a kid whose best friends had bailed at a slumber party. “My prediction is, in…
Even people who hate Yoko Ono come around eventually. This seems odd since by all rights, anybody believed to have “broken up the Beatles” should be marked for life — but between then and now, stirring evidence of John and Yoko’s almost creepily profound love has come floating into the…
I’m getting old. This is the first thing I learned during Cosi Fan Tutte at the Carnival Center last week. When I saw Samson et Delila at the Broward Center a few months back, I could very easily read the translation of the libretto projected onto the screen above the…
There are some things in this world — not many, but some — that exist only because they have to. They don’t make sense, they have not an ounce of rationality to them, but they’re there all the same, and the world is somehow more complete because of it. Pat…
Gosh, French writers can get tiresome. They’re so smart, so interested in harrumphing endlessly about all the things they see and you don’t. I mean, where else but in France could this become a popular slogan: “People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life,…
Rolling Stone’s Elysa Gardner praised her “feisty courage.” That same magazine’s Greg Kot said she “glowed with a hard-won grace.” Robert Christgau, late of The Village Voice, called her “boring.” Alack, Bonnie Raitt is probably worthy of all of this and more. She has been a barefoot Boston folkie, an…
You’re not a masochist.” “Oh, yes I am. I’m an insurance seminar hostess!” High-pitched twitters; big Tupperware-party smiles. This is the kind of exchange with which Uncommon Women & Others begins, and it makes you doubt the veracity of the title. The Mount Holyoke College alumni meeting for drinks in…
Triptych is not a play about Lisa Morgan’s boobs, but they deserve a shoutout. Morgan’s got a stunning, stunning set of knockers. Perhaps a gay theater critic can find more constructive uses for his time than ogling an actress’ Carbonell-caliber cleavage, but it was hard this week. All throughout Triptych’s…
Inside Out Theatre’s second-to-last play, Manuscript, was about a conniving woman devoted to man’s ruin, and the men who avenged themselves against her. Then came The Faith Healer, about a woman ruined by a man too self-absorbed to notice. Both productions were jewels, tucked improbably away in the little theater…
Juliette Lewis has always projected danger. As early as 1990’s Too Young to Die?, she seemed not-quite-right; like a person you couldn’t help but watch but might not want to meet. Those who picked up on the vibe were proved right by 1994’s Natural Born Killers, in which the then-…
Most of the experiments slated to run at the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator under construction outside Geneva, involve blasting protons at one another and seeing if any weird bits of matter are produced. Hopes are high that the collider will produce a Higgs boson — the mysterious little…
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 Arts Academy of Hollywood love their leafy danger — they live…
The Promethean Theatre’s premiere production of Red Tide opens with three actors in a vaguely unnerving tableau, stretching across the Mailman Theatre’s small stage. Mathew Chapman is sitting to your left, waving a baseball bat around his scummy little apartment, freaking out about some dream he just had. Is there…
“When you see it,” says Danielle Lanteigne, “it all makes sense.” Lanteigne is the owner of Leche Vitrines, Fort Lauderdale’s newest and most event-happy fine-arts gallery (3038 N. Federal Highway, Times Square Design Plaza, Building F, 2nd Floor), and she should know. Seldom does a week go by when Vitrines…
Shared experience: You are in a bar, sipping whatever you’re sipping, waiting for a friend to come back from the bathroom. There’s a lone man a few seats away, and he makes you nervous — he keeps giving you a look that says, “Man, I really want to talk to…
Film festivals are tricky. Moviegoers around the world know how hard it is to fill a night with interesting cinema, never mind 37 days. If you’re foolhardy enough to try, you’ve got to be resourceful, cunning, inventive. How else would the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival come up with the…
If you played poker with Cashetta, you’d lose. You wouldn’t be able to keep your eyes on your hand. Cashetta is a towering drag goddess of unholy charisma, and where she goes, eyes helplessly follow. Even if you could keep your eyes focused on your cards, your attention would soon…
