It’s not easy to glamorize Amtrak. Riding those dirty, seamy trains and buses can feel a bit like being squeezed down an intestinal tract. But one artist, Arnold Levin, has managed to make travel on our neglected public transport system look adventurous, even classy. “Arrivals and Departures” is an exhibit…
The Art and Culture Center of Hollywood is running a magical sort of raffle, one in which everybody wins. “Abracadabra: The Fourth Annual Fund-raising Art Exhibition and Raffle” requires only that you buy a $345 raffle ticket to go home with one of 100 pieces of art donated by invited…
The Killing of Sister George, by playwright Frank Marcus, is a parody of social attitudes toward lesbianism that was misread and taken seriously in its 1964 debut. The play follows June Buckridge, who stars in a radio series as a benevolent village nurse — a sort of Dr. Quinn, Medicine…
Broadway Bound is considered one of Neil Simon’s greatest plays. It’s his semi-autobiographical account of two brothers struggling to become comedy writers; and their parents, whose marital troubles become fodder for the brothers’ radio skits. The father is cheating on his wife with a dying woman. The mother is helplessly…
In Raisin in the Sun, the first Broadway show by a black playwright, an African-American family moves into a bourgeois white neighborhood in Chicago called Clybourne Park. Today, a play called Clybourne Park puts a new spin on the story. In act one, it’s 1959, and a white family in…
It’s the ultimate intellectual showdown. Freud’s Last Session, a new play at Palm Beach Dramaworks, pits the Christian apologist and Narnia chronicler, C.S. Lewis, against the cancer-ridden, cigar-smoking father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in an imagined bull session at Freud’s office in London on the day England enters WWII. The…
Marvin Dixon is a standup comedian with promising entrepreneurial ideas. “I’m gonna have a club for just wheelchair people. It’s gonna be called Club Ramp… You all laughing. I’m gonna blow it up.” Dixon has been on HBO’s Def Comedy Jam. So has Marcus Combs, who will be performing with…
It’s a deficiency of the English language that there’s no single word for “morbid curiosity,” the compulsion that makes humans slow down their cars as they pass accident scenes. It’s the pleasure of the intensely familiar and the strangely unexpected that is the fodder for “STARE,” a collaboration between artists…
Tony Tripoli is a gay comic and former cruise-ship singer with a Valley Girl inflection incongruous with his bulging musculature. He’s appeared on Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List and Two and a Half Men. In his standup, he riffs on the homeless of L.A., the horrors of having…
The Golden Age of Hollywood produced actual demigods. The silver screen imbued the stars with impossible glamour. But the studio system was no heaven: It overworked and disposed of actors and churned out movies in the brutal fashion of an assembly line. Perhaps that’s why so many photos of stars…
The family model featured in Goldie, Max and Milk, a new comedy at Florida Stage, would make Dan Quayle choke on his own vomit. Max is both a single mother and a lesbian. She has little idea how to breast-feed her 4-day-old child. In comes Goldie, a “lactation consultant” and…
The Congo has improved little since Joseph Conrad portrayed colonial barbarism there in the Heart of Darkness at the turn of the last century. What is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) underwent a Belgian-sponsored coup in 1960 that replaced a democrat with a despot and spelled doom…
A new kind of cinema is opening in Broward — a plush movie house for indie and foreign films. Living Room Theaters serves not popcorn, Coke, or processed nachos but wine and scrumptious dishes like gourmet pizza, paninis, spicy tuna hand rolls, and lemongrass flank steak skewers — served while…
At first glance, the works of Miami artist Frances Trombly represent a new low in conceptual art. A bunch of scrunched-up Publix receipts? A plank of plywood leaning against a wall? A roll of toilet paper? In a gallery space? That’s not art. Is it? But take a closer look…
European Renaissance painters, at least on canvas, liked their naked women coy and sumptuous. If those artists were transported in time to the Tom Wesselmann exhibition at the Museum of Art|Fort Lauderdale, would they croak at the violently erotic pop art nudes? Or would they kick themselves and think: “Why…
The United States has 2 billion square feet of self-storage space, and the self-storage industry makes more money than Hollywood. Self-storage units have been used as homes, meth labs, and waystations for bomb-making materials — and, in one disturbing case, as a clinic for an unlicensed gynecologist. In Lake Worth,…
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes it’s an exploding cigar, of the harmless kind with which Ernest Hemingway pranked a Turkish general, or of the deadly kind with which the CIA planned to assassinate a certain communist dictator. One thing’s for sure: Cigar appreciation spans the political…
There’s a strange fundraiser sponsored by the Lighthouse Center for the Arts in Tequesta. Every guest goes home with a piece of art. But they have to run for it — specifically, sprint through the gallery like crazed shoppers on a Black Friday. At this year’s Fourth Annual D’art for…
Miss Vicky Keller has given much of her life to the local gay community. The straight mother of three — and surrogate mother to many gay men cast out by their families — founded a lesbian choir and an ’80s anti-AIDS organization. She notarized the first domestic partnership in Broward…
The Boys in the Band is the catty gay version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The 1968 off-Broadway play (which ran for 1,001 shows) takes place in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where a motley group of gay men is holding a birthday party for…
If you aim to dress up like Gene Vincent for Halloween, head over to the Kreepy Tiki Tattoos and Rockabilly Lounge to stock up on wingtip shoes, vintage hats, and pomade. The retro accouterments, for both men and women, are being sold from a new section of the shop that…
Friday is the opening of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival (FLIFF), the region’s ultimate cinephilic event. At 7 p.m., Nice Guy Johnny screens at Broward College’s Bailey Hall (3501 SW Davie Road, Davie). It’s a comedy about — you guessed it — a nice guy named Johnny. Played by…
