Day of the Dead 2012 Fort Lauderdale: Inside Jim Hammond’s Puppet Parade

One of countless survival stories to splinter from the tragic tree of Holocaust fiction, Barbara Lebow’s A Shayna Maidel opened off-Broadway in 1985. It has become an enduring testament to perseverance, family, and the horrible reverberations of Nazism. It charts the relationship between two Polish sisters — one a concentration-camp…

If the concept of an ice cream bar — that is, a bar erected for the sole purpose of selling ice cream — doesn’t sound like the perfect end to a night out, then I question your patriotism. An ice cream bar is just one of the highlights of the…

Tweenaged visitors at Miami’s House of Horror Amusement Park in Doral were having a rough time last weekend. It was long before they plunged into claustrophobic darkness of a cemetery littered with chainsaw-wielding psycho killers. The curtain was just rising on the 25-room haunted mansion, and already, a girl clutched…

The characters in Thinking Cap Theatre’s All-American Genderfuck Cabaret discuss and engage in many a godforsaken activity over the play’s two-plus hours. So it’s a good thing they have their own omnipotent, omnipresent god who intervenes in their lives and doesn’t care what they do with their genitalia so long…

In the middle of the great modern musical The Drowsy Chaperone, audiences are treated to a show-within-a-show parody of a much older musical, in which an American lady duets with a pidgin-English-speaking emperor in imperial China. Everyone is dressed in ridiculous “Oriental” garb and singing politically incorrect rhymes like “What…

What if Stephen King were hunted down by a rabid dog or a crazy car? Or if Anne Rice were suddenly bitten by vampires? In the “be careful what you write” category, the award-winning 1981 play In a Talent for Murder follows a best-selling mystery novelist who finds herself at…

Not many comedians can pull off impersonations of Liza Minnelli and Bruce Springsteen, but such is the range of Mario Cantone. A Tony-winning Sex and the City alum who brings Broadway panache to his standup comedy routines, Cantone’s versatility is without peer — as evidenced by his dead-on skewering of…

If you don’t cringe when you hear the term smooth jazz — with its connotations of elevator Muzak and Kenny G’s polenta sax noodling — then this publication might not be for you. But if the genre needs a savior, it might be the lovely Keiko Matsui, a Japanese child…

“The All-American Genderfuck Cabaret” at Empire Stage: Sometimes Even a God Has to Come Down and Make Out With Someone

Simultaneously quaint and funky, West Palm Beach’s Northwood Village community is easy on the eyes and easier to miss, an enclave of fine dining, shopping, and entertainment a mile north of downtown West Palm. And if you’ve never visited the self-proclaimed “historically hip” street, there’s no better time than from…

In 1939, New Yorker writer James Thurber published The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a short story that has transcended its time and is soon to be made into an epic film by, improbably, Ben Stiller. The title character is an ineffectual, henpecked husband who has elaborate daydreams about commanding…

Take this, Angelina Jolie: Olga Nenya is a foster parent in Ukraine who has mothered a brood of children whose number varies; some descriptions say 16, others up to 23. At any rate, it’s a lot of screaming, runny noses, diaper changes, and food receipts. In her new documentary, Family…

Now this is a ’70s night we can get behind, one that doesn’t involve disco dancing and bell-bottoms. The Strikers, South Florida’s professional soccer team, will play at Lockhart Stadium at Saturday evening’s Legacy Night, meaning that attendees will be paying admission prices they would have paid in the 1970s,…

We Floridians know Bert Kreischer well — firstly from a 1997 Rolling Stone article that proclaimed Kreischer, who spent six and a half years at FSU, as “the top partier” at “the top party school in the U.S.” Others in such a position might slide into a degenerate adult life…

Fort Lauderdale’s Gateway Theatre opened in 1951, a year after the release of Sunset Blvd. and a year before Singin’ in the Rain. Both films, along with 13 others, will screen at the theater beginning Friday during the theater’s first monthlong Gateway Classic Film Festival. An event such as this…

Not much is known about mysterious singer Olivia de la Garza. The Boca Raton resident doesn’t have a website, and a video search yields a giant goose egg. The few pictures that exist on the interwebs suggest she could be a seductive bombshell from a Bond movie. She purportedly has…

Ace of Base had Buddha, Joker, Linn, and Jenny; the Kinsey Sicks have Winnie, Rachel, Trixie, and Trampolina. All but Jenny are stage names, only in the case of the Kinsey Sicks, the performers are actually men — Irwin, Ben, Jeff, and Spencer — dressed as ladies. Trademarked as “America’s…

In playwright Tom Jacobson’s minimalist exercise The Twentieth Century Way, set in 1914, two out-of-work actors gather in a dank, brick-lined room lit by a single-bulb floor lamp. They are there to audition for a part in a Hollywood movie. As in Waiting for Godot, they’ll be waiting a long…

The revolving door of offbeat theater that is Empire Stage continues to revolve. Less than a week after closing its last show, Baby Girl, the prolific space has opened another production, this time courtesy of Island City Stage (formerly Rising Action Theatre). The Twentieth-Century Way, an award-winning dark comedy from…