Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Jasper Johns’ famous exhortation is one of the most succinct statements of aesthetics in 20th-century art, and the artists included in “Amalgam: Multi-Media Fusions by Four Florida Artists” seem to have taken his advice to heart and then…
Charles Nelson Reilly exists in several universes simultaneously — almost all of them in show biz. He was recently nominated for an Emmy for his guest appearance as Mr. Hathaway on The Drew Carey Show, and he played UFO expert José Chung on a popular episode of The XFiles two…
John Jerich glides effortlessly over the smooth asphalt of the practice area near the new in-line hockey rinks at Caloosa Park in Boynton Beach. Pushing off first with one foot, then the other, he ignores the few shallow puddles, water from which leaves trails from the wheels of his skates…
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin), the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger, has a dream. Nothing so grand as an Academy Award, or even a table down front at the Golden Globes. No, when Bowfinger allows his fantasies to run wild, he sees a Federal Express truck…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but Kiss doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when the band does show up, clad in its de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s simply to…
When he was 107 years old, the story goes, Broadway legend George Abbott was asked what he thought was the most important development in the theater to have taken place in his lifetime. His answer: “Electricity.” Though his active career as an actor, director, and producer spanned some six decades…
On most Saturday mornings, the Cinema Cafe in Fort Lauderdale turns into a pub, where men speaking with British and Irish accents gather to watch rugby and down a hearty meal similar to what they’d find in their homelands: fried eggs, English sausage, Irish bacon, grilled tomatoes, and toast. “They…
Two dancers stand statue-still on a bare stage just behind a third performer, who leans toward the audience and flashes a sarcastic grin. As the dancers move their torsos and arms robotically, the narrator begins to speak in verse: “My boy/Lost his innocence to the rain/And he tried, he/What Jack/Did…
In the highly competitive, dog-eat-dog world of the modern-day superhero in Mystery Men, the members of the group that eventually becomes known by that name start out with a couple of strikes against them. First off, there’s the little matter of superpowers: They don’t have ’em. Or let’s say that…
One of our leading men’s fashion magazines runs a column every month titled “What Were We Thinking?” to present a ludicrous photograph of a famous person dressed in what the magazine had earlier decreed to be a style that every hip cat would soon be wearing. In a few short…
Socrates and Plato, Emerson and Thoreau, Mr. Kotter and Vinnie Barbarino — the history of Western civilization is cluttered with memorable teacher-student pairs, each bringing its unique dynamic to one of the most powerful types of relationships in humankind. It’s no surprise that quite a few 20th-century dramas — from…
Like the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, which is currently showcasing pieces from its permanent collections in an exhibition called “Scale Matters,” the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami is putting the summer lull to good use with a show called “Heads Up!: Highlights From the…
“Youth is wasted on the young,” Irish-born writer George Bernard Shaw once said, and doesn’t Roslyn Kirsch know it. “So many painters today, they have the look, the energy, and sometimes the talent, but they don’t know what to do with it,” the Palm Beach County artist intones gravely. “Too…
If you think the popularity of Latin music in the United States is limited to the salsa dance craze and the pop schlock of acts like Ricky Martin, you’re missing the bigger picture. Rock en español — or Latin rock — bands are to Latin pop music what alternative bands…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the ’90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre…
Runaway Bride, the long-anticipated reunion of Pretty Woman stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, isn’t a sequel, but it feels like one. In everything there is a distinct sense of predestination, of events occurring according to some irresistible force of the inevitable. This makes life especially easy for Garry Marshall,…
If nothing else, Naked Boys Singing! lives up to the hype of its title. The cast members are naked, they are male, and they sing. In fact they sing rather well. That’s a good thing, since the revue, already a hit at the Celebration Theatre in Los Angeles (another production…
By Catherine E. Carlson The voice of someone singing an aria emerges from a private-lesson room and floats down the hallway at the University Center for the Performing Arts in Davie, but students waiting for their classes to begin are drawn instead to the cacophony coming from one of the…
By John Ferri Although she shares her name with a songbird, Barbra Nightingale can’t carry a tune. Her father told her as much when she was a child, always teasing her that she sang “in the key of L,” which, of course, is not a musicalkey. “I am so totally…
Feel like shooting lutefisk in a barrel? Pick on beleaguered Minnesota again as the epicenter of everything that’s square-headed and unhip in America. Want to let the world know that two plus two equals four? Take aim one more time at the vain stupidity of beauty contests. Drop Dead Gorgeous,…
You can tell the first wave of summer blockbusters has shot its wad when the studios start tossing out their second- and third-string films. Back in the old days, these would have been called “programmers” — thoroughly competent entries that reiterated all the conventions of their reliable, easy-to-market genres. Such…
The fascinating part of Twilight at Monticello: An Evening With Thomas Jefferson is not the hour-and-45-minute monologue that serves as the main attraction but rather the short qanda period that follows, in which actor-creator J.D. Sutton answers questions about the show’s subject. He does this first in character as the…
