The Atlantic Ocean’s actually a couple miles east of the venues for Beethoven by the Beach IV, but we can let the Fort Lauderdale festival’s tenuous title slide. After all, no one would want sand in his or her shoes while enjoying two weeks of Florida Philharmonic Orchestra concerts, chamber…
Why is the film called Disney’s The Kid? Is it really possible that the studio was so concerned that someone might actually mistake the film for an update of the Chaplin classic that the brand name had to be formally incorporated in the title? Or was this an attempt to…
Director Alison Maclean, from Canada by way of New Zealand, turns her camera on the American landscape — or more accurately the underbelly of the American landscape — in Jesus’ Son, an uneven but often effective adaptation of Denis Johnson’s autobiographical book. Billy Crudup stars as a thoroughly marginalized character…
Walking out of the Caldwell Theatre’s production of Snakebit, you can be certain that you will not hear a playgoer over age 60 sigh, “Ahhh! To be young again!” This hard-hitting drama leaves no room to fantasize about the potency and possibility of the thirties. Playwright David Marshall Grant’s increasingly…
The Bock Gallery in Plantation doesn’t really lend itself to a typical exhibition. It’s a relatively small display space with not much chance of establishing any sort of flow to a show. And besides, because it’s a commercial gallery, that limited space is also crammed with all sorts of other…
Bigger is better in Boca — and in the movie-theater biz — so the recent opening of the massive Muvico Palace 20 in Boca Raton couldn’t have come at a better time or in a better place. Smaller multiplexes are becoming obsolete as megaplexes with lavish off-screen amenities reel in…
Had Julian Glover not broken his leg at the beginning of January, it’s quite likely he would be off filming a movie. But, Glover reminds, having a broken leg in the movie business is like being pregnant in the movie business: “It lasts five years,” meaning casting agents don’t phone…
If you combined a 17th-century religious satire with a 20th-century musical about the angst of parenting, you would come up with Festival Rep 2000. This year Florida Atlantic University’s annual repertory theater festival pairs Molière’s timeless play Tartuffe with Sybille Pearson’s short-lived 1983 Broadway musical, Baby. “We have to keep…
The press kit for The Perfect Storm contains the damnedest thing I’ve ever read: a “special request” that reads, in full, “Warner Bros. Pictures would appreciate the press’ cooperation in not revealing the ending of this film to their readers, viewers, or listeners.” All due apologies, but that seems highly…
A strong monologue, very much like a steaming jazz solo, should always seem improvisational, even if it’s not. Like music it moves and gathers momentum and, in doing so, meaning. No long-winded plot summary or pedantic sermon, the final monologue in GableStage’s production of Warren Leight’s Side Man does its…
Despite what many believe, it doesn’t come down to explosions, star power, or millions of greenbacks thrown at the producers. The true indicator of success for a summer movie is the Moment, that one memorable scene that sticks in your head, the one that Billy Crystal parodies the following spring…
Bulbous black ants — each a foot long — appear to crawl across the light gray walls in the corners of the room, which is also graced by several Daliesque paintings. In fact the painted insects, a favorite of the Spanish surrealist, could have marched off a Dali canvas and…
Nick Park speaks so softly that the tape recorder barely registers him at all. His is a whisper of a voice, the sound of a man who has spent years in isolation talking to no one but himself. Transcribing an interview with him is like trying to decipher a man’s…
Like a little kid playing with his toys, quirky puppeteer Paul Zaloom makes believe that a cardboard cutout is a miniature logging truck and that a bunch of junky fake flowers is a tropical rain forest. Little plastic gag monkeys (the type you can hang from the rim of a…
Heading into the South Beach Cinema for an opening-weekend glimpse of the dance-culture flick Better Living Through Circuitry,it’s immediately obvious how far underground the rave scene still is. Although it’s mere minutes from landmark dance clubs, on this Saturday evening the small theater is populated by a hearty crowd of…
About nine years ago, in a humble Southern California nightclub, urbane British folksinger Billy Bragg reappraised 20th-century politics — as is often his socialist wont — by means of an intriguing correlation. Might it be, he postulated, that contemporaries Leon Trotsky and Harlan Sanders were not merely striking doppelgängers but…
In the new Jim Carrey farce, Me, Myself & Irene, the rubber-faced comedian plays a meek Rhode Island state trooper named Charlie whose aggressions are so pent-up that they finally have to break out in the form of a second personality called “Hank.” Where Charlie silently endures potty-mouthed curses from…
Occasionally something happens as it should. South Florida is quickly becoming home to some of the best Hispanic theater in the nation. In its 15th year, the International Hispanic Theatre Festival, which concluded June 18, consisted of 15 productions from 10 countries. The festival was the largest and most prominent…
Museums and galleries get inexplicably overexcited about the word juried, as if a juried exhibition is somehow more legitimate or worthy than an ordinary show put together by a museum curator or gallery director. But as we all know from real-life civil and criminal trials, a jury’s verdict is subject…
There exists deep within any man who once read comic books and collected them–protected them, actually, with plastic sleeves and cardboard backs and boxes that fought off the yellowing of time–the mythical being known as The Fanboy. A long time ago, The Fanboy pored over every issue of World’s Finest…
Cuban-born artist Ernesto Rodriguez’s piece Lunch Break is a shimmering, bucolic, Renoiresque picnic scene, sans diners, in which a blanket and basket sit beneath the shade of a large tree. Renoir and other impressionists gave their landscapes a gauzy effect by incorporating broadly painted, broken brush strokes, capturing the essence…
Sure, you could drop $30 per night on an acting class, during which you’d get maybe 15 or 20 minutes of individual instruction and spend the rest of the time watching other people try. “Is that any way to learn how to act?” Billy Yeager asks, somewhat indignantly. Of course…
