If you wandered off the street into “Against Design,” now at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in Lake Worth, you could easily get the impression you were in the showroom of a particularly eccentric department store. In the lobby sit five rounded cushions, with several items of clothing…
This is the summer of surveillance: MTV’s Real World. Survivor. Big Brother. The shows setting ratings standards this season are televised social laboratories that use humans as lab rats and money as the cheese. In his exhibition “Empathic Economies” at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, artist Lee Mingwei…
As the house lights go up at the end of Brief Encounters, the Lake Worth Playhouse’s second annual one-acts festival, the cast shuffles on stage, folding chairs in tow. Each Friday night of the three-week festival, audience members can stick around to ask questions and chat with the cast. The…
It’s tempting to think there’s something twisted about her tale. After all, she was a mere 18 the first time she had sex in front of a camera–for money, small change that would soon enough blossom into a pile of cash–and did so only at the insistence of her boyfriend,…
Italians are known for their hospitality. As they say, mia casa è sua casa, which means “my house is your house.” Primavera restaurant owner and chef Giacomo Dresseno and his wife, Melody, dispense such neighborly friendliness, providing personalized service amid the fresh flowers and terra-cotta tile accents in their elegant,…
While not adhering to any particular theme, the playbill for Brief Encounters: A Festival of One-Act Plays at the Lake Worth Playhouse promises several potentially seductive scripts. Of the 18 one-act plays performed throughout the festival, several deal with interpersonal relationships. Seduction, obsession, and betrayal are just a few of…
It would be the easiest thing in the world to write off But I’m a Cheerleader, the story of a teenager discovering her sexual identity through a program designed to repress it, as a Saturday Night Live sketch somewhat awkwardly inflated to feature length. But when you start looking deeper…
Rather than asking if this senseless and expensive new film from wunderkind entertainer Robert Zemeckis is devoid of merit (it is), or “worth seeing” (it isn’t), we should instead take the movie’s title — What Lies Beneath — as a direct question. Indeed, what does lie beneath? Possible answers include:…
Remember that instantly evaporating pop hit from the early ’80s, “Video Killed the Radio Star”? If ever there were a comparable anthem for the relationship of the small screen to the stage, it would be Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet. The backstage comedy that hit Broadway in 1991 pits art…
Somewhere along the way, he was surprised to find he had little interest in creating imaginary lands, discovering instead that there was enough magic in this land.
The Milagro Center in Delray Beach has become a hub for multicultural learning since it opened in October 1998. Classes are offered in dance, African drumming, tai chi, pottery, and various other visual and performing arts by a racially diverse faculty, and artwork on the walls represents artists from myriad…
Northwood Hills is one of the very few South Florida communities with “hill” in its name that actually sits on a promontory of any significance. In our mostly flat portion of the Sunshine State, the slope made the area mighty desirable to early settlers. The first houses in this West…
Murphy and Pryor. Skywalker and Kenobi. Amos and Zeppelin. Regardless of the creative universe, the maverick apprentice tends to stride off into territory beyond the edges of the master’s map. So it is with Alan Rudolph, whose career blossomed after serving as assistant director to Robert Altman on Nashville in…
The bewildering penchant of recent American movies for glorifying the lovable naif, the perpetual adolescent, and the village idiot takes a strange new turn in Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s hero, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), is a 27-year-old man-child who eats lollipops all day long, takes refuge…
While some critics would say Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dark tales are not of this world, The House of the Seven Gables reveals a work very much of two worlds, or rather two Americas — the new and the old. Woven from the black cloak of Calvinism but enlightened by the threads…
It’s that time again: the doldrums of the South Florida summer art season, when many of the big museum shows have ended or are winding down. This is when the museums typically turn to their permanent collections to help get them through to the fall. At the Museum of Art…
Bryan Singer did not read comic books as a young boy, because he couldn’t read them. As a kid, he was slightly dyslexic and, therefore, unable to follow the dialogue as it bubbled across panels and pages; quite simply, Singer says now, comic books confused him, so the Jersey boy…
Book FareChef Marvin Woods believes in keeping it real. He also believes Southern cooking doesn’t have to kill you.Take collard greens, for instance. “I leave out salt pork and fatback,” says Woods, who has made a name for himself by reinterpreting Southern cuisine. “They are all cured and have a…
Raving MadTen years ago Kevin Crawford helped found Palm Beach County’s annual Shakespeare by the Sea festival, the prevailing mission of which is to present classic plays, mainly those penned by the Bard. But that definitely doesn’t mean stodgy versions featuring powdered-wigged maidens and men in tights. How about Hamlet…
In Bryan Singer’s last movie, 1998’s Apt Pupil, Ian McKellen portrayed a Nazi war criminal hiding out in the suburbs, passing himself off as an ordinary old man crouching behind drawn blinds. In Singer’s new movie, X-Men, McKellen plays Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, the son of Jews who were murdered in…
Canadian documentarian Ron Mann, who previously examined aspects of pop culture in Comic Book Confidential (1988) and Twist (1992), takes on a broader and more controversial subject in Grass, a history of America’s second-favorite smokable substance. As he has done before, he provides a sugarcoated crash course on a huge…
The key to great parody is that it hits home in contemporary society. Although Cuban playwright Rolando Ferrer’s play Lila, la Mariposa (Lila, the Butterfly) was meant to be a criticism of Havana and the 1950s when it was first written back in 1954, Teatro Avante’s rendition continues the tradition…
