Arts & Entertainment

Sometimes simpler is better. Way better. Whoever came up with the title for MoCA's dazzling career retrospective of the work of Morley, the British-born artist who settled in the States in the late '50s and became a citizen in 1990, not only hit the nail on the head but hammered it flush with the board. Whether you emphasize "the art of painting" or "the art of painting," you've got Morley in a nutshell. This larger-than-life character has traversed the territory from '60s photorealism (or what he prefers to call "superrealism") through surrealism into his own take on expressionism and back, all while never losing his ardor for the medium of painting and, in his masterful hands, its amazing range of possibilities.

Richard J. Simon, artistic director for Plantation's much-lauded Mosaic Theatre, seemed doomed to a life of greasepaint and footlights from the day he was shipped off to summer camp in Pennsylvania as a tot. He starred there in Oliver and Pippin and got utterly hooked on the sheer showbizzery of it all. Of course, Oliver and Pippin are not in his current repertoire. Far from it. This year, his production schedule includes Red Light Winter, Rabbit Hole, Glengarry Glen Ross, some of the most seethingly magnetic theater around.

New Times: Favorite play, outside of Mosaic Theatre, that you saw this year?

Richard J. Simon: Oh. Um . . . Glengarry Glen Ross. Oop. You said outside of Mosaic? OK. It would have to be — Rabbit Hole! Damn it! Sorry. Seriously, it would be Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Palm Beach Dramaworks. The acting of Lisa Morgan and Gordon McConnell is heaven on a popsicle stick.

What does the local culture need more of in order to create a good arts-incubating environment?

Too easy. Money. Philanthropy. Collaborative spirit. Stronger leadership. Arts education. Community involvement. Cultural facilities. Democrats

What does the local culture need less of?

Cuts in arts funding. Wasted tax-dollars on superfluous sporting arenas designed to make the rich richer. Greed.

What's your favorite exotic getaway spot?

Vegas, baby. Only in Sin City can a producing director get a lot of work done and truly focus on show business.

You go to Vegas to work?

Where else would you want to bring your laptop? You sit in a musty hotel room all day and night, crunching numbers, fine-tuning your strategic plan, drafting contracts, reading plays, totally, like, absent from all distraction.

Eh? Vegas?

Even in the café at the Flagler Museum, you'll learn something, like how the teabag came to be. (New York vendor Thomas Sullivan put samples of tea in silk bags and sent them to his customers in 1908.) And from Thanksgiving to the end of March, you can feast on a traditional Gilded Age luncheon and enjoy afternoon tea. You'll actually feel like a robber baron because this museum was first a mansion. Oil and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler built "Whitehall" in 1902 with his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan. Today, we peasants can explore the 55,000-square-foot classic revival-style mansion, which has 55 restored rooms featuring period furnishings, marble floors, walls and columns, ceiling murals, and gilding. Louis Comfort Tiffany is one of many artists featured at Whitehall, a National Historic Landmark, although the crowd-pleasing part of the tour is the camouflaged door leading to a secret passageway to Flagler's bedroom that he used to duck out on guests who bored him. The museum is open year-round on Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. and Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Even crack journalists like New Times’ own Ashley Harrell harbor secret crushes. Her decade-long infatuation with Michael Ian Black started back in the ´90s when he first crossed her television’s screen in the sketch comedy masterpiece The State; It has remained tucked away in her heart’s locket well into adulthood. So when word got out that MIB is heading to BPB, we sent her on a mission: Interview and flirt shamelessly with this stand-up dude, and document the whole blush-inducing ordeal in a Q&A for you loyal NT readers.

Michael Ian Black– comedian, writer, actor, and Sierra Mist spokeshottie – is touring the country doing stand-up with fellow The State cast member, Michael Showalter. It’s tough going, what with Showalter demanding they stop for cigarettes, Starbucks, and taking a dump every half hour. And then there’s the debilitating all-night poker playing. But the two alternative comedy heroes deserve a break. They’ve both released new stand-up albums and Black recently co-wrote the movie Run, Fatboy, Run, a comedy directed by David Schwimmer premiering in March. Showalter and Black are soon reuniting with the other nine cast members of The State to make a movie for Comedy Central, which Black admits he’s freaking out about. He also discloses his love of Taco Bell, his secret dreams of becoming an ice cream entrepreneur, and his fondness for tympani.

NT: New Times, this is Ashley.

MIB: Hi Ashley, It’s Michael Ian black calling.

NT: Oh, you’re the guy from those Sierra Mist commercials, right?

MIB: That’s right. That’s right. I understand I’m supposed to talk to you.

NT: Okay. I want to tell you I’ve been a huge fan of yours since seventh grade.

MIB: So you were making a little joke about Sierra Mist.

NT:Yeah, yeah, was it funny?

MIB: Well, no, because I thought you were serious.

NT: No!

MIB: Well yeah.

NT: Oh no. That’s horrible. This is getting off to a terrible start.

MIB: Well, so many people say to that me. And then I say, “yes I am.”

NT: So how are you feeling today?

MIB: I’m a little sleepy. Well I was out last night playing poker with my friend Michael Showalter.

NT: You do a lot of that, huh?

MIB: Yeah. I do. (sighs). I really do.

NT: So this is the perfect time for an interview?

MIB: I’ve been up for a few hours now because I had to do some radio. But man. I’m fading. I’m fading, Ashley.

NT: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

MIB: Well, it’s not your fault.

NT: Well, can you step it up?

MIB: (Laughs). I will try.

NT: Okay. I appreciate that. Where are you right now?

MIB: I’m in San Francisco. You know that town right? Earthquakes.

NT: Pretty buildings.

MIB: Lots of pretty buildings…all waiting to collapse.

NT: So I got your new album in the mail, “I am a Wonderful Man.” Then I noticed that your McSweeny’s column is called “I am a famous celebrity.” I’m wondering what’s up with the self promotion.

MIB: It’s all about branding these days. All about creating a marketable brand and then selling the shit out of it. That’s what I’m doing. I figure if I keep saying I’m a celebrity than eventually it will be true….So far it hasn’t worked.

NT: So you seem to have a character that you play on stage. This kind of narcissistic metrosexual that’s totally lacking in self awareness. I’m wondering how you developed this persona.

MIB: Jeez. Is it a persona? I’m a little concerned now about who I am. A self-aggrandizing metrosexual. Oh dear. Who has no self-awareness.

NT: It’s very funny…

MIB: It’s meant to be more self deprecating than anything else. I say for example, I have the body of a 12 year old girl. That my nickname was faggot. These kind of things. They’re intended to be self-deprecating. Even the self-aggrandizing is supposed to be laced with self-deprecation. In that respect there’s tremendous self-awareness. One might even say self loathing. If one were inclined to say that.

NT: I’ve noticed that you take a lot of cracks on your family life. Do you think that’s psychologically damaging to them?

MIB: Only because I play it at very loud volumes in the house. I play tracks on the CD at very loud volume in the house and I have my kids listen to that and I say, “do you hear that?” “Do you hear that?” “Do you hear what you’re doing to daddy?”

NT: What’s it like touring with Michael Showalter?

MIB: It’s great because he’s one of my best friends. But it’s horrible because he’s an eccentric freak.

NT: Can you say more about that?

MIB: It’s a lot of stopping every 25 to 30 minutes for whatever his particular needs are at that moment. Be they Starbucks. Be they cigarettes. Be they, taking a dump. Be they, whatever they may be. Maybe he left his cell phone at the place where he took the dump, kinda thing.

NT: It sounds awful.

MIB: I’m used to it. It is awful. But it’s my awful. It’s an awful I’ve chosen for myself.

NT: Is there any competition between the two of you?

MIB: Not at all. I think any competition that there may have been in the past, it’s now clear that I won.

NT: And he’s aware of this?

MIB: Oh yeah.

NT: Do you guys stay together, like in the same hotel room?

MIB: Um, what you think, if you had to guess?

NT: I’m not qualified to guess at that.

MIB: We’re men in our 30s who aren’t dirt poor. So yes, we do.

NT: Have there been any special moments between the two of you?

MIB: Like what do you mean by special moments?

NT: I guess I’m wondering what you would think of as a special moment, so I don’t necessarily want to define it.

MIB: I told him his haircut was nice.

NT: Did you mean it?

MIB: I did. He got a nice haircut. He needs that kind of stroking, though. You need to tell him his haircut looks nice.

NT: Have you ever been down to South Florida?

MIB: My mom lives in Plantation.

NT: You’re going to see her when you’re down here, I take it?

MIB: Not if I can help it. Yes, I will.

NT: Are you aware that there are a lot of Jewish people and how are you going to handle that?

MIB: In South Florida, there are Jewish people? I had no idea.

NT: How did you choose the last name “Ian Black?”

MIB: Well my middle name is Ian. Were it my last name, it would be hyphenated. It would be Ian-hyphen-Black. My last name is Black. It used to be Schwartz.

NT: Right. Which you changed because you were ashamed of being Jewish.

MIB: Exactly right.

NT: So you co-wrote a movie with Simon Pegg, Run Fat boy Run, and it’s premiering in the U.S. October 26.

MIB: Nah, they moved it to March.

NT: Oh. That’s what you get for trusting Wikipedia. Well, can you tell our readers a little bit about the movie and the writing of it?

MIB: Fat guy runs a marathon. Hilarity ensues.

NT: Do you have any writing rituals? Where and when do you do your best writing?

MIB: No. No. I really don’t. Writing is so hard that I just try to just write whenever I’m able to, which isn’t often. It’s hard to just sit down and write. So, when that happens, that’s fantastic. But it doesn’t happen enough.

NT: So you have to wait for it to happen to you?

MIB: No, you sort of have to force it.

NT: Are you a procrastinator?

MB: I’m not really a procrastinator, but writing is hard. It’s something that doesn’t come naturally to many people, myself included, so you really just have to struggle with it.

NT: Do you think you’re more of a natural actor or comedian?

MIB: I don’t know what I am. I’m just sort of a dude. Just sort of a really cool dude.

NT: Was it hard to work with someone with a last name like Schwimmer? (Run Fat Boy Run was directed by David Schwimmer).

MIB: Well I didn’t really work with him. He just went off and directed; I stopped by and said “hi.” That was the extent of our working together.

NT: Did you feel he bastardized your screenplay at all?

MIB: No, he actually did a great job with it.

NT: What kind of responses are you expecting from audiences in the U.S.?

MIB: Laughter. Applause. Cash money.

NT: Okay, let’s talk about the best sketch comedy show of all time – The State. What was it like to be part of the state?

MIB: It was pretty good. How’s that?

NT: Thanks.

MIB: We were all friends. The State and our friendships evolved simultaneously. It was fantastic. We were all terrific friends. We went to college together and then we found ourselves with our own television show and there was a lot of terrificness about that. It was also very difficult because in a professional environment, it’s hard to know where to prioritize your friendship versus your job and sometimes that conflicted.

NT: Did you wind up having fall outs with anybody?

MIB: Not at all. We’re all still great friends. In a weird way, the fact that The State just sort of imploded because of low ratings on CBS was good in terms of our friendship. We never got to the point where we hated each other. We just ended up just hating our entire careers.

NT: Will there ever be a revival?

MIB: Yeah. In fact, we’re doing one.

NT: What?! Like everyone’s getting back together and doing more skits?

MIB: Yeah. We’re getting back together and doing a movie for Comedy Central.

NT: Oh my God. That’s the most exciting thing I’ve heard all month.

MIB: I know I’m freaking out about it.

NT: Will it just be a bunch of skits?

MIB: I don’t know. We haven’t written it yet. We’re going to start writing it this Saturday.

NT: That is such good news. I haven’t seen that announced anywhere. I am I going to be the first?

MIB: I’ve talked to a few people about it, so you do not have an exclusive. You’re among the first that I’ve told.

NT: The DVD is coming out, soon, according to David Wain.

MIB: Yeah, he’s wrong. It’s supposed to come out soon. Like next month. But they’re going to hold it now until we do the movie. They’ll release everything together.

NT: I guess that’s a good strategic plan. Is everybody in the movie? All 11?

MIB: It’s everybody…You’re having a little cum over this.

NT: I am. You have no idea. Is it going to be all new stuff? Or references to older skits?

MIB: I know we won’t do any old skits. Whether or not we refer to anything, I don’t know.

NT: Do you have a favorite skit?

MIB: There’s a lot of them I’m partial to. I like Taco Man, of the ones I was involved in. Porcupine Race Track. I like the one, I’m not in it, it’s called Cutlery Barn.

NT: Spaghetti fried bumblebees?

MIB: That’s the one.

NT: I like that one, too. It’s a really bizarre one. Do you have a favorite other cast member?

MIB: Yeah, I like Kevin. Kevin Allison. He’s so totally gayed up.

NT: I haven’t seen much of him lately.

MIB: He kinda dropped out of show biz for a while. He was writing and he was, mostly writing. Now he’s sort of getting back into it.

NT: Do you have a least favorite cast member?

MIB: I’m not partial to Ken Marino. I just don’t like his sensibility, as a person.

NT: So he’s kind of a dickhead?

MIB: Kind of a dickhead. That’s not really true by the way.

NT: Do you have any favorite comedians outside the group?

MIB: I like that fat kid on Two and a Half Men. He’s good.

NT: I haven’t seen that.

MIB: I haven’t either.

NT: What do you think about the comedy scene right now?

MIB: Overall I’d say the comedy scene very good right now. There’s a lot of talented people doing a lot of good work in all different mediums. It’s a great time to be a comedian. People are supporting comedy. They’re coming to see it. They enjoy it.

NT: Do you prefer stand up or sketch comedy or what?

MIB: Well I like all of it, but standup is fun because it’s immediate. You’re out there on a stage. You do a stage for an hour or so and then you’re done for the day. When you don’t have a good work ethic, that’s a very good job.

NT: Now comes the personal part of the interview.

MIB: Are you going to hit on me?

NT: Probably. What’s something about you that nobody knows?

MIB: If I told you than people would know. You’ve really put me in a quandary here.

NT: Okay. And I’m not letting you out.

MIB: Okay. Dollar for dollar, my favorite restaurant is Taco Bell. I get the number 3. Three taco supremes and a soft drink. Sometimes I will get a fourth taco.

NT: What’s so good about it?

MIB: It’s, um, overall deliciousness, I would say.

NT: What are your secret dreams?

MIB: Secret dreams. I’d like to be an ice cream entrepreneur. I’d like to invent new ice creams.

NT: Do you have any ideas?

MIB: Um. Yeah. Like a green tea with uh, with fortune cookies and chocolate chips mixed in.

NT: That sounds delicious.

MIB: Yeah, thanks.

NT: What were you like as a young man?

MIB: How young?

NT: Five to ten.

MIB: Five to ten. Five to ten? I don’t remember.

NT: What about in high school? Were you cool or were you a loser?

MIB: Was I cool? No. I was sort of, you know, middle of the pack. Thinks he’s misunderstood but really isn’t, kind of teenager. I think they all understood perfectly well.

NT: Did you think you were funny back then?

MIB: I thought I was funny. I don’t know that other people agreed.

NT: Were you shy?

MIB: I wasn’t shy, but I definitely was not outgoing.

NT: If you could kill one person, who would it be?

MIB: Kill? (Long pause). I can’t think of anybody I would want to kill. That’s a horrible thing to say.

NT: If you could be a musical instrument, what would you be?

MIB: I’d be tympani.

NT: Why?

MIB: I just think tympani are cool. Is the singular of tympani tympano? Or is tympani always tympani?

NT: I just don’t know the answer to that.

MIB: You don’t know what tympani is do you?

NT: I know…I’ve heard of it. I know it’s part of the orchestra.

MIB: Alright, but there’s a lot of instruments in the orchestra, Ashley.

NT: Who’s doing this interview?

MIB: Fine, but don’t flaunt your own ignorance. I mean…

NT: Alright, I’m going to bring this to a close before you embarrass me more.

MIB: You’re embarrassing yourself. I haven’t done anything. You’re a journalist. You know, your job is to know words.

NT: Alright this is getting very cruel. I’ve already told you that you’re my hero and now you’re just breaking me down. I’m gonna go cry.

MIB: No. no. I just, I just. You know, you gotta prepare for the interview. You’ve gotta be prepared for whatever I say. If I say tympani, boom, you gotta know what that is.

NT: Alright, well, it’s been really nice talking to you.

(Laughter)

NT: Um, hey do you want to play some poker down here?

MIB: It depends, is there good poker in South Florida?

NT: Oh yeah, Seminole Hard Rock. Anna Nicole died there, you know.

MIB: Here’s the problem with the Seminole Hard Rock. They don’t have no limit…it’s a ridiculous system. So poker in South Florida, as far as I know, is not very good.

NT: Well, that’s true, but you’re an addict, right? You have to play, regardless.

MIB: Months will go by when I don’t play. I’ve got a family and everything. I can’t be playing poker.

NT: Do you miss it when you’re not playing?

MIB: Not particularly. When I start playing again, I want to play all the time. When I stop I don’t even think about it.

NT: When you play too much does it get boring?

MIB: No, it just gets disgusting. It just gets a little bit nasty. Like you’re up till 3 a.m. like I was last night. That kind of thing…On [an Internet] tournament site, I just looked and I’m one of the top 10. I’m actually number one.

NT: You’re proud of that aren’t you?

MIB: Well, I don’t even know what it means. I actually don’t know what that means. But I’m number one. I’ve never been number one in anything.

NT: You’ve been number one in my book for a long time.

MIB: Thanks Ash…Now how old are you?

NT: I’m 26.

MIB: You’re young. You’re young.

NT: It’s true.

MIB: Although, if I get divorced. Typically, a second marriage, the women is 10 to 12 years younger than the man. So that would work out fine for us.

NT: Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m counting on.

MIB: Let’s do that. Let’s do that at some point.

NT: Definitely. So I’m coming to your show. I’ll come say hello. Get some rest, and I’ll see you in a few weeks.

MIB; Alright, Ashley.

NT: Take care.

Drawing South Floridians away from the beach and into a museum has always been a challenge, but the Museum of Art of Fort Lauderdale has it all figured out. Exhibits like "Diana: A Celebration" and "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" have packed the 21,000-plus-square-foot building and helped the MOA become the first museum in South Florida to host more than 1 million visitors since 2003. The high-profile extravaganzas have also brought crowds to see the lesser-known pieces of art housed in the elegant galleries designed by American architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. Art's not cheap, though. So if you're paying the $15 adult admission for the big exhibits, might as well stroll through the William Glackens wing, filled with northeastern masterpieces from this American painter. (Sorry, folks, but the museum is closed this summer for remodeling.)

The Morikami's gardens have been stunning visitors for years, many of whom never knew that South Florida had much of a history at all, let alone one that includes a significant pre-World War II Japanese population. Curator Tom Gregerson makes it his business to keep that history — as well as Japanese culture in general — fresh in the mind. Yamato Road, near where the Morikami is located, takes its name from a small community of Japanese farmers who flocked there to grow pineapples and sugar. Eventually, many of the farmers bought property only to have it taken away by the U.S. government when they were sent to internment camps by the War Relocation Committee. George Sukeji Morikami was one of those farmers, and he was the last one to remain in Palm Beach County. The gardens and museum are on the property he bought near the end of WWII. Gregerson has curated countless exhibits there, including "The Morikami Portraits: Photographs by Akira Suwa" and "Flora and Fauna: The Japanese Influence on Late 19th and Early 20th Century Western Art," as well as two commemorating the 20th anniversary of the museum, which opened in 1977. Gregerson also oversees the permanent collections of fine and folk arts that illustrate the lives of the early farmers.

Poor James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He's destined for eternity to be famous for Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Painter's Mother — better known as Whistler's Mother, one of the most famous paintings of the 19th Century. Whether by choice or necessity, the Boca Museum's ambitious overview of the American expatriate artist's career omitted the notorious portrait and was all the stronger for it. Instead, the exhibition — culled from one of the two most extensive Whistler collections in the world — presented the artist in the context of his colorful life and times. Along with a dozen oil paintings, the show included watercolors, drawings, lithographs, and personal memorabilia, plus some of the etchings that contributed to Whistler's reputation for being, as Hunterian curator Peter Black notes in the catalog, "the greatest etcher since Rembrandt." While far from comprehensive, the exhibition sought to reclaim the artist's rightful place in art history despite, not because of, a flamboyant life that often threatened to overshadow the work. And in that, the show succeeded admirably.

Leave it to the Norton to take on the challenge of making us rethink the medium of photography and its aesthetic possibilities. The most democratic of all media — who doesn't have a camera these days? — has also become perhaps the most suspect, thanks to the computer's ability to manipulate and distort reality. This small but brilliant exhibition tackled the idea of realism versus illusion head-on by focusing on seven very different international photographers whose work wrestles with these current challenges. From the late 1970s/early 1980s work of Cindy Sherman (who made a name for herself with film-still portraits of herself as other people) to the cutting-edge illusions of the young German Thomas Demand (who creates meticulously realistic 3-D models of his subjects that he photographs and then destroys), the show provided an extraordinarily concise survey of its subject. The exhibition also threw in three shots, all culled from local collections, by photo superstar Gregory Crewdson. His Spielberg-meets-David Lynch suburban images, all staged and art-directed on the scale of a Hollywood feature film, offer new narrative possibilities for photography that are just beginning to be explored.

At some unidentifiable point along the way, Purvis Young went from being a street person in Miami's Overtown neighborhood to being a South Florida cultural institution. Last year, that metamorphosis was confirmed by a happy coincidence: a sweeping retrospective of the artist's career at the Boca Raton Museum of Art and the screening of a documentary about the artist at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. The exhibition, "Purvis Young: Paintings From the Street," featured more than 100 works by the prolific artist, including a wall blanketed with dozens of side-by-side paintings that re-created the feel of Young's famous Goodbread Alley installation of the 1970s, for which he nailed his paintings onto a stretch of abandoned buildings. The film Purvis of Overtown chronicles Young's origins in the Miami ghetto and his ascension to iconic status as a self-taught artist who documents his world using his own distinct visual language in media as varied as house paint, shards of discarded furniture, construction-site debris, and countless other found objects. Did we mention that Fort Lauderdale's Gallery 721 boasts a collection of Young works so extensive that it's known as the Purvis Young Museum? While his paintings now command prices in the thousands, the artist himself, amazingly, continues to live and work in — and draw his inspiration from — Overtown.

Wouldn't you know it: Just when a first-class gallery with an emphasis on Latin American art seemed to be firmly established outside Miami's orbit, the gallery in question gets sucked into that very orbit. We're talking Lurie Fine Art Galleries, which was previously one of the eight galleries that make up Boca Raton's snazzy, one-stop-shopping Gallery Center complex. But last year, Lurie (which also has an outpost in Studio City, California) was lured south to Miami's seductive Art and Design District. Its gain is our loss, especially since the overall gallery scene in Broward/Palm Beach is so dismal. Lurie's stable has grown to include such artists as Nelson Dominguez (Cuba), Ernesto Manera (Argentina), and Lula Flores (Chile), not to mention the hotter-than-hot Carlos Luna (Cuba by way of Mexico). At least Lurie was gracious enough to give us a knockout show of recent work by Fort Lauderdale-based American artist Matthew Carone before abandoning ship.

Cinema Paradiso used to be a church, and it still feels like one. With its stained-glass windows and its stature as home of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, it's a place that draws passionate people to worship celluloid idols. Even better than the theater's cushy plush seats and amazing film selections (sports flicks, anime, foreign films, documentaries) is that the concession stand sells beer. Directors and actors are always doing post-show Q&As. Last year, eight-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater personally dropped by to introduce the premiere of his newest film, and in March alone, there was a showing of Anna Karenina accompanied by opera singers and a wine-and-cheese reception and a tribute to John Waters with the trifecta showing of Pink Flamingos, Polyester, and Hairspray. But there are Rated G events too, like an Easter bonanza for kids featuring movies, an onstage dance-along, an Easter-egg hunt, and a petting zoo. And President and CEO Gregory Von Hausch has been known to loan the space for cheap, or even free, to nonprofit groups and good causes.

Sure, indie rock rules the scene, and a ton of imitation bands are cropping up all over South Florida (with matching hair, trying to become the next Fall Out Boy). But that doesn't mean that any of these cookie-cutter groups actually knows how to play. Locally, the band with the strongest instrumentation and best stage show is Marijah and the Reggae All-Stars. Their blend of Caribbean and West African music is impressive live or recorded; they've mastered instruments from those regions. They've also got incredible timing and lock into a groove that's unmatched by any other act locally. Everyone in the band has more than 20 years of playing experience and gigs frequently with other reggae singers throughout the tricounty area. There also aren't many female-headed reggae bands out there, and Marijah is working twice as hard to stay afloat in this male-dominated genre. What stands out about the group is its ability to get crowds rocking with conscious lyrics and a heavy roots-rock attitude. You don't have to be a lover of Caribbean music to appreciate this band and the reggae-Afro-fusion sound it cranks out live. Just don't be surprised to see that this reggae band is actually headed by an Italian-American woman from New Jersey.

Can a Christian singer really rock? How can a vocalist be powerful and edgy while belting out lyrics like "Oh who am I, this breath of fading mist?/Where do I stand on this speck of heaven's dust?" Nic DiPace somehow balances Christ-like humility with a powerful and expansive voice. He lends emotive realism to Americana-laced guitar work, spilling over into guttural screams during punked-out anthems and conveying urgency and intensity with his moody wails. Just check out the West Palm quintet's Northern Records debut The Skies Pale in Comparison. Even though the band's official statement on the disc is "We just think that The Skies Pale in Comparison to who He is, and who we are in Him," even the godless will be humming along in glee.

As far as hip-hopping and b-boying in Broward County is concerned, there's nobody else with the lyrical dexterity or the street clout of Fort Lauderdale's Butta Verses. He's a member of the De La Soul family and soaked in a lot of exposure touring with them, but he's still got his own rhyming style that's witty, aggressive, and often comical at the same time. On stage, he delivers punch lines at rapid speed and has the cadence and breath control of a veteran. He was born and raised in the Bronx and carries the essence of hip-hop culture in his persona, both on and off the stage. Graffiti work, b-boying, DJ'ing, and MC'ing are all apart of his repertoire, which is what it used to take to even be considered decent in this genre. With those bases covered, he's miles ahead of most of the fly-by-night rappers popping up recently. He's also put out a few stellar mixtapes since relocating to Broward County that showcase his rhyming ability and buttery-smooth delivery. And since hip-hop today, even at the local level, remains saturated with garbage, it's good to see a rapper like Butta V standing tall and hopefully showing the new jacks how to do it.

More than two years of fine-tuning and detail work went into creating this slice of mopey melancholy, and the results speak for themselves. Charting overseas and winning plenty of domestic college-radio airplay upon its February 2007 release, The Postmarks bore as much resemblance to a lowly local release as a cello does to a kazoo. Due to the perfectionism of bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Christopher Moll, every moment of this multitracked tapestry has been polished to within an inch of its life, with ear-pleasing results. Plus, when was the last time a local record was fortified with glockenspiel? Timpani? French horn? An entire string section?! All of which was impressive enough to curry the favor of Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne) and Andy Chase (Ivy), who produced the record. South Florida hasn't exactly been a hothouse nurturing the darling buds of pure pop perfection, but the Postmarks have at least laid the groundwork here. Yes, The Postmarks is delicate, fragile, sort of sad, and twee as all get-out, but damned if it isn't the most affecting collection of songs to come from this peninsula tip in a long, long time. Enjoy while gazing out a raindrop-covered window for maximum effect. Absinthe optional.

Our inaccessible geography aside, one major reason bands have forsaken us is our preponderance of pathetic venues with nasty bathrooms, bad sound, no parking, and just a general all-around malaise. Part of the problem is that few live music venues were designed as such — believe it or not, we've had everything from Cuban restaurants to Winn-Dixies doubling as rock-concert rooms. Naturally, like everything else in South Florida, Club Cinema is housed in a strip mall. But inside, the swankier-than-thou feel echoes famous rooms like the Fillmore. The lighting, the design, and the well-placed bars all signify class and attention to detail. Now, in these very pages, we've dismantled local politicians and exposed Club Cinema as a business that's very likely more mobbed-up than a Godfather-Goodfellas marathon. But what the heck — if that's what it takes to make audiences feel like they're watching a show in a real goddamned city, we'll take it.

This punk-rock band's members ranged in age from "barely old enough to drink" to "nearing retirement," but they all had a natural don't-give-a-fuck attitude that reminded you of your favorite group of high school misfits who just got a license but couldn't afford a car. So when they broke up last year, it was like losing a first love. They were the unifiers who kept the rest of us young, and their equal-opportunity disdain for anything mature was as infectious as their three-chord melodies. Fortunately for all involved, the boys of Stink started seeing one another again in secret — a small benefit show here, a warehouse show there — until they finally reunited. Who knows how long it'll last, so enjoy it while you can.

Modern metal is the new indie rock, let's just get that straight. Everyone has now officially traded in his Clairol black hair dye for a long, flowy metal mane. And despite this flooded market of mediocre metal, Fort Lauderdale is able to boast a band that was there all along, developing its musical identity, getting famous, and influencing this new generation of head bangers. May we present Torche. Exhumed from the ashes of Floor and Cavity, this four-piece produces an amazingly surreal take on stoner sledge metal. Vocal harmonies bind with slow-driving guitar riffs, while loosely tuned bass strings flail deep into the lowest sonic registers. Despite how much media hype surrounds this band, every time it returns home, it gets back to its roots, trading in larger, out-of-town venues for teenagers' house parties and small clubs like the Billabong. The boys of Torche embrace the energy produced at these shows and flip their hair in time with the music — along with the hundreds of smiling, jam-packed fans. Sabbath would be so proud.

It's not easy to draw out a moment of suspense — those instants when it's certain that something revelatory or horrifying is about to happen. In The Faith Healer, such a moment was drawn out for two hours. Barely a story, The Faith Healer, by playwright Brian Friel, is comprised of four monologues from three people — faith healer Francis Hardy (Stephen J. Anthony); his mistress, Grace (Sandra Ives); and his manager, Ted (Ken Clement) — recounting, in fragments, their two decades traversing the British Isles, healing or failing to heal as they went. What went wrong remains unclear, baffling even to those who were there. All they know is that, through some small accumulation of real or imagined betrayals, their journey destroyed them and in some way forced them to destroy one another. As the three actors tried to explain themselves, suffocated beneath the dead weight of memory, you wondered if the mysterious forces that acted upon them might not be present in the theater, ready to act upon everyone — and whether anyone would recognize such forces if they appeared.

Good directing is like alchemy: It is the trick of taking disparate, unknown elements and fusing them into a whole that not only makes sense but equals more than the sum of its parts. Kim St. Leon did this as well as it's ever been done with Inside Out Theatre's production of The Faith Healer. She had help, obviously — three actors who saw straight through to the soul of the piece — but she's the one who must be credited with the bravery and smarts it required to stake her production's success on the small clutch of intangibles allowed her in the story's anti-narrative. It was the way a pedestrian anecdote was made to seem monstrous through a slight change in Sandra Ives' vocal timbre or the way the slow lift of Loreena McKennit's cheesy synth-Celt muzak framed the last scene, when Stephen J. Anthony's titular faith healer was ready to ascend into heaven but looked ready to burst into flames. An event like St. Leon's The Faith Healer is something akin to a vision: both impossible to deny and impossible to explain. The great mystery isn't what it meant but how she managed to explain it to the actors in the first place.

If you saw Glengarry's original production or the 1992 film adaptation, you inevitably compared Paul Tei's fast-talking, gel-haired Ricky Roma to the interpretations by a young Joe Mantegna or middle-period Al Pacino. Miraculously, in spite of this heavyweight company, Tei suffered not at all from the comparisons. From his first scene, he came on like a cross between John Travolta and Satan — utterly amoral but unflaggingly sweet, too cool to let anything under his skin and too driven to allow anything to deter him from his purpose. When at last something did rankle him, watching the subsequent blowout was akin to looking out the rear window of the Enola Gay. In one of the dirtiest and most flagrantly outlandish roles brought to life on any Florida stage this season, Tei created one of the most complete, naturalistic, and straight-up entertaining portraits anybody's ever seen.

Taking on the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine in Caldwell's February production of The Lion in Winter couldn't have been an easy choice for Pat Nesbit, competing against a Katharine Hepburn incarnation that had won the movie star an Academy Award in 1968. Still, Nesbit took and held the stage with a grace and confidence that made her seem like the first person to ever inhabit the role. She was the very picture of poise, all of her emotions sublimated beneath the smooth politesse that's both royalty's reward and curse. You could call her dignity under duress and her deadpan delivery of devastatingly barbed wit virtuosic, riveting, or any of the superlatives you might ordinarily toss at a great performance. But the most fitting appellation is, simply, queenly.

Ken Clement is a superb actor who can endow big, overwrought roles with surprising subtlety and grace. He does this constantly, but it's rare to see him in a part that flatly demands that subtlety and grace from the get-go. Recently, he's had two. In The Faith Healer, he played Teddy, the titular healer's long-suffering manager after the two had parted ways. Dispensing showbiz wisdom in a bright cockney accent and struggling to hold himself together when suddenly stumbling into the minefield of his own memories, you felt as though you'd known Teddy forever, and it seemed that Clement never existed at all. In last winter's Rabbit Hole, he played a father reeling from the accidental death of his young son. This time, Clement was wild and mercurially unpredictable, swinging from one emotional extreme to another in a way that seemed entirely organic. When his wife — who, of course, was also a grieving mother — accidentally taped over one of the couple's home movies of their lost son, Clement howled in such a way that it was entirely unclear who was doing the howling, the audience or he. Usually, it was both.

Straddling a fine line between Cyndi Lauper and Johnny Rotten, gleefully decrying the evils of the world like Hannah Arendt screaming on an amphetamine skillet, Rebecca Simon's portrayal of Zillah Katz distilled all the heavy politics of Tony Kushner's anti-fascist dialectic into a punk sneer and a girlish laugh. When she sang a love song to a picture of Adolf Hitler, she communicated the seductions of totalitarianism more completely than Arendt ever did, and the full-bodied lust she put into the number would have made even Kushner nervous. Simon's only a grad student now, but this year, she made most pros look like they were phoning it in. Expect big things.

Theater is fun, but theaters usually aren't. Too often, they're viewed as life-support systems for stages — places for an audience to hunker down and passively observe beloved artists at work. Not so at Sol. There's a definite vibe happening, a vaguely grimy DIY aesthetic that spices up the theatergoing experience from the moment you set (trembling) foot to (cracked) asphalt and begin walking (quickly) to Sol's front door (which looks more like the entrance to a pawn shop, a storefront church, a strip joint, or a biker bar than an outpost of high art). On the way, you'll pass chairs and big antebellum iron ashtrays, glowing dully in the neon wash from Sol's garish signs. In the lobby, things are cramped as people get in line to guzzle free shiraz from plastic cups. Stepping into the theater, you pass a big poster of the Mona Lisa sucking on a spliff. Then you get comfy on a big, soft couch next to a friendly stranger or two. Even the worst seats in the house are less than 20 feet from the stage — close enough to feel a part of the action instead of simply a spectator.

Hatchetman was a very silly play about a golfing magazine called Putts. The script was fine, but it wasn't the sort of thing people would remember two or three years (or weeks) afterward. The production was another story altogether: inspired acting that treated the script with a lot more respect than it treated itself and a breathtaking set from Mark Pirolo that was a gift of grace, love, and humor. Creating Putts' editorial office must have been a profound pain in the ass, editorial offices being the incredibly busy, hectic, disorganized, and stuff-filled places that they are. But Pirolo rose to the challenge with a verve that made it seem as though he'd waited all his life to build a golf-mag's digs. The office's two rooms were clearly visible at all times, thanks to a cut-away wall and some tricky angle calculations. The walls were lined with dozens (hundreds?) of old Putts covers that had obviously been designed especially for the show, each of which appeared utterly authentic (and often hilarious, if you had your binoculars and you could catch some of the risque double-entendres happening in the headlines and the cover shots). Each office extended into a very business-looking corridor behind semifrosted glass, suggesting a vast warren of offices just out of sight, and everything was connected by a mysterious closet, out of which spewed golf bags, clubs, strange costumes, and people. Pirolo's set for Hatchetman was maybe not the prettiest of the season — offices are seldom pretty — but it was certainly the most evocative.

As a play, David Mamet's Glengarry doesn't hit a lot of notes: There's venal greed, mortal greed, lying, anger, and recrimination, and that's about it. Somehow, Mosaic's actors made that small clutch of emotions stand in for — and count for as much as — the whole varied spectrum of human experience. As an audience, you felt intense pity for the landlocked, self-loathing Ken Clement and a sad strain of love for the doomed and desperate Cary Leiter. You felt deep loathing for Barry Tarralo and utter contempt for Heath Kelts. And the whole came together at a hyperreal pace that should've been jarring — but it was executed with such style and poise, it seemed like a candid glimpse into an alternate universe that was every bit as corrupt and bewildering as our own but where the talking was faster, the minds more nimble, and everybody's teeth sharper.