And Now, Let the Heat Begin

Never mind the calendar; summer arrives in South Florida when City Theatre rolls out its annual festival of short plays, “Summer Shorts 2003.” Now in its eighth year, this well-produced, stylish event has become a part of the area’s social scene as well as a highlight of the theater season…

Gay Pride — De-Sexed and De-Politicized

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone to challenge the notion that America’s gay liberation movement started with the Stonewall riots, which began on June 22, 1969, coincidentally (not to mention fortuitously) the same day Judy Garland died. You’d be equally hard-pressed to find any acknowledgment of this momentous event at…

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

FRI 6/20 Game show fanatics, unite! Robby Kendall has created a completely original game show called Know Thy Neighbor. Kendall, who also wrote and directed the popular local play Victoria Place, takes four couples — two straight, one gay male, and one gay female — and pits them against one…

Quiet Storm A-Risen

While R&B has moved on, blending hip-hop into the genre for a harder edge, there are those who insist on harking back to the days of yore, when rhythm and blues developed the Quiet Storm genre as a sort of response to soft rock. Named for the similarly titled 1975…

You Broke It, You Rocked It

What can be said about a band that has been banned and deported from Canada, banned from four venues in Mobile, Alabama, and banned from any city function in Sunnyvale, California? Well, quite a lot, actually. XBXRX, a rather mysterious but always entertaining group of noise assassins from California via…

Turner Tackles Football Future

SAT 6/14 Norv Turner, Miami Dolphins assistant head coach and offensive coordinator, is looking for a few good men. Actually, he’s looking for about 80 high school football players to take part in his football camp to be held Saturday at the Miami Dolphins Training Facility (7500 SW 30th St.,…

Duck and Cover

THU 6/12 The Art Explosion, that is. No, it’s not some sort of cheesy performance art where some French dude uses his body to paint a giant canvas (no, that guy opened for Gallagher). This is a bona-fide art experience for little ones, ages 2 to 5. The Family Center…

New Age for Dummies

TUE 6/17 The Florida Center for the Book has offered up-and-coming authors many opportunities in the past few months. Workshops have covered such topics as how to write for children, for example. But if children prove too incredulous for your writing, there’s always “How to Write for the New-Age Market,”…

Spanish Fly on the Wall

French putz Xavier (Romain Duris) is depressed. The poor guy lives in Paris, has Amélie’s Audrey Tautou as a girlfriend, eats gourmet vegan dinners prepared for him by his free-spirited mother, and is being set up for a graduate degree in economics by a friend of his father’s. “I don’t…

Greek Out

You need not leave the house to know what’s playing in movie theaters in coming weeks. You’ve already seen these films, with titles consisting of letters followed by numbers. There’s no surprise in the dark, just the bumping into of familiar faces, legally blond or largely green, and furious franchises…

Rough Trade

Of all the stage companies in South Florida, the Edge Theatre is perhaps the best-named. Jim Tommaney’s ragtag outfit has survived for many years on the far fringes of the local theater scene, and his choice of programming is almost always sharp and provocative. The literate, Ivy-educated Tommaney is a…

This Week’s Day by Day Picks

THU 6/12 Need a break from the snorefest of Grateful Dead cover bands? Then check out Hello Goodbye, South Florida’s own Beatles cover band. According to their website, the Merseybeat-lovin’ guys perform “Beatles songs played exactly as the Beatles would have played them, if they were us!” Right. They certainly…

The Ides of June

SAT 6/14 With sweet potato pies and folksy games like dominoes and hopscotch, Broward County residents are tapping into a festive tradition that dates back to the abolition of slavery. Juneteenth honors the day that a Union general galloped into Texas with the emancipation order that freed the last of…

Scream, Fall, Repeat

TUE 6/17 Remember when punk rock was about being a punk and bands like the Ramones were not just a T-shirt — they were a cult? Prepare yourselves, ladies and gentlemen. A four-headed Hessian, rolling naked through broken glass whilst spewing left-wing rhetoric, is coming to town. Fleshies have come…

Hollywood Babble-On

Having seemingly exhausted all permutations of the sports-comedy formula (Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump, et al.), Ron Shelton has now moved on to another obsession: the Los Angeles Police Department. Earlier this year, we got the uncharacteristically somber (for him, anyway) Dark Blue, a “what if” tale of the…

2 the Extreme

Whenever the stars of the adolescent street-racing fantasy 2 Fast 2 Furious were feeling balky or temperamental on the set, as movie stars are wont to do, the cure was probably easy — an oil change and a tune-up. John Singleton’s adrenaline-spiked sequel to the surprise summer hit of 2001,…

Undersea No Evil

If grownups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disneyfolk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the…

Hammer of the Gods

In November there will arrive on newsstands a music magazine edited by Alan Light, who left Spin to embark on his endeavor of publishing a journal devoted to that long-ignored audience: the over-30 CD-buyer, the old fart for whom “new music” is a mystery left to be fathomed by The…

No Cloning Around!

What does it take to succeed on Broadway these days? Nobody has the exact answer to that question, but many think they do. One long-standing strategy is to import London hits. Another is to stuff the show with movie stars. A third, and perhaps the most widely used ploy, is…

Jumble Boogie

On a recent Saturday morning, the sole employee on duty at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood rushed around turning on audiovisual equipment for several pieces in “The Hollywood All-Media Juried Biennial,” a show that had opened just the night before. The volume on two video installations was out…

Hey, Guy

Jacques Cousteau may have gained a certain degree of celebrity with his underwater adventures, but he never managed to transform that fame into a marketable enterprise. Sure, he has been immortalized by bad impressionists the world over, including the narrator on SpongeBob SquarePants. Who can forget that hypnotic French-accented voice?…

Events for June 5-11, 2003

THU 6/5 Tired of living in the basement of your parents’ house and eating dollar-store macaroni and cheese for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Well, if you can drag yourself away from Grand Theft Auto for a few hours, the South Florida Chamber of Commerce hosts the South Florida Expo and…