Will Shortz pretty much lives crossword puzzles. The editor of the esteemed New York Times crossword puzzle, the puzzle master for NPR’s Weekend Sunday, and the founder of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, Shortz has a hand in every professional puzzle pie. Shortz sold his first puzzle at age 14…
Perhaps, if you’ve chosen a life of monastic celibacy or hermetic isolation, you may find nothing relatable in Dinner With Friends, currently enjoying a superlative revival at Palm Beach Dramaworks. But for the rest of us – the majority of the population who yearn for human contact and love, well…
Talk-show host Bill Maher believes that the way we live in the West is not just different from life in the Muslim world — it’s better. This sounds pretty reasonable, rational, and true, particularly when focusing on the restrictions on Muslim women. But good P.C. liberal Tavis Smiley argued on…
Was the new play Ghost-Writer really written by Michael Hollinger, as its credit states, or was it penned by Strunk and White? A grammarian’s play if there ever was one, Ghost-Writer announces itself by subverting conventional punctuation with its title. It is not the standard, hyphenless Ghostwriter, nor is there…
Michael Hall, the Caldwell Theatre’s founder and executive director emeritus, returns to direct his first production for the company since he passed the baton to Clive Cholerton in 2009. The inspiration for his return is the recent Tony nominee Next Fall, a play that’s funny, meaty, and humane enough to…
Christopher Buckley is the spawn of an endangered species: the principled, polysyllabic right-winger. His famous father, William F. Buckley Jr., was a crusading and sesquipedalian conservative thinker, founding the National Review and hosting more than 1,400 episodes of the public-affairs series Firing Line. Christopher isn’t as politically polarizing as his…
At first glance, the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens is among the films you would have least expected to be adapted into a Broadway musical, up there with My Dinner With Andre and Nanook of the North. It’s a nonnarrative account of the bizarre reflections, philosophies, and battles of former debutantes…
In the second act of A Bearded Lover, Lucia, the youngest sister in this three-character opus, delivers one of the play’s most telling lines: “I’m not lifeless anymore, like the two of you.” For much of the protracted duration of this production, set in prerevolutionary Cuba, it’s an insult that…
Consider the opening scenario of An Irish Curse: A priest, a jock, a fat man, a gay man, and an Irish immigrant walk into a church basement. Yes, the play begins like a joke, and not the good kind of joke. It’s more like a joke of pre-P.C. standup comics,…
There has perhaps never been a more deceptively innocent movie tagline than My Dog Tulip’s: “The story of a man who rescues a German shepherd and how the two become fast friends.” This animated feature, based on British wordsmith J.R. Ackerley’s memoir of the same name, is no saccharine, Disneyfied…
What a way to end a festival! ArtsUnited’s 11th annual, 15-day ArtExplosion LGBT fest concludes Saturday at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts with a guest lecture from Dan Savage. The pioneering sex advice columnist (“Savage Love” is his frank, edgy baby), author, and gay activist is on most…
Despite its out-of-the-way location, one of South Florida’s newest concert halls has become an unexpected enclave for great world cinema. Earlier this month, the Aventura Arts and Cultural Center launched its three-part 2011 Foreign Film Series with the heartfelt Swedish drama As It Is in Heaven. The series continues Tuesday…
Nothing Personal is art-house cinema at its most esoteric: ignored by most, adored by few, screened by fewer. Czech-born director Urszula Antoniak’s feature-film debut is a low-key study in late-blooming romance between a steel-trapped, fiercely withdrawn vagabond (a striking Lotte Verbeek) and the hermetic farmer (Stephen Rea) she encounters on…
Recently nominated by the academy for Best Documentary Feature, Waste Land shadows a recent project of Brazilian art phenom Vik Muniz. The visual artist, known for recycling unorthodox materials in his mixed-media representations, travels to the world’s mother lode of trash to treasures: the Jardim Gramacho landfill, located just outside…
So far as we know, David Blaine has never made headlines denouncing God, and David Copperfield has never bruited objectivist philosophy. But unlike most celebrity magicians, Penn & Teller are not content performing tricks, taking bows, and going quietly into the night. Rather, they have so successfully cultivated their images…
Nothing in Empire Stage’s production of Sex and Violence is as provocative or outlandish as the image on the playbill: a naked man in fishnets and stilettos, blood streaking down his chest, a chain saw covering his presumed member. Ronnie Larsen’s play, which is enjoying its world premiere at the…
