From the works of Edgar Allan Poe to Hollywood’s The Fly, classic American ghost stories indulge our fascination with the decay of the body. They’re overrun with maggoty cadavers, telltale hearts, and monsters that stalk us through dark alleys, graphic reflections of our fear of inexorable death. European tales, on…
Thursday October 29 When it’s bill-paying time, boat owners tend to see their boats as holes in the water into which they throw all their money. With that in mind, anyone visiting the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show today through Monday can see some of the biggest holes in the…
Wearing a long, dark robe with a hood, the spell caster mixed two pinches of sea salt with two drops of water blessed in the light of a new moon. Slow, rhythmic drumming accented by the tinkling of a tambourine drew an assembly of colorfully dressed people. They circled a…
Cathy Stern doesn’t go that extra mile for her artistic endeavors — she travels 400 or so. Every summer, for four days, the Coral Springs resident and a few female artisan pals board a camper and aim it for garage sales in Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Ohio, among other states…
As it enters its 13th season, the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival continues to evolve far beyond its humble origins in the mid-’80s. Is that good or bad? A little of both, perhaps. The Greater Fort Lauderdale Film Festival, as it was called once upon a time, was primarily a…
Nobody knows if Scott Joplin ever knew Irving Berlin. In The Tin Pan Alley Rag, Mark Saltzman’s well-meaning musical, however, the two composers not only meet cute (Joplin, disguised as a composer’s agent, appears in the office where Berlin works as a sheet-music publisher), they reminisce, play tunes, and dip…
“Come on in!” shouts Luann Myatt, a pitcher for the Seadogs, as she hits practice balls to the infielders on her team. Some of the balls sizzle past in a cloud of red-clay dust; others are snagged in soft leather gloves and hurled to first base for imaginary outs. Myatt…
Backstage Pass You’ve just seen the latest touring Broadway musical, and the show was so good you’re humming the tunes on the way home. But suddenly you think to yourself, I wonder what the cast is like? What do they look like without stage makeup? And how do those tap…
Thursday October 22 Dr. Roberto Machado’s black-and-white images of prerevolutionary Cuba will be shocking to anyone who’s seen what the island looks like today. An overhead shot of a sparkling white Hotel Nacional and its manicured grounds overlooking Havana Bay might as well be South Beach. Another shot features a…
A riveting but darkly disturbing thriller, Apt Pupil isn’t easy to sit through. The subject matter itself proves deeply unsettling, while two brief acts of sadism are so horrifying as to be unwatchable. And yet this brutal film borders on the brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central…
Love may indeed be a fragile thing, but its clumsy male and female protagonists can’t help “endlessly crashing into each other like two bumper cars.” That’s the observation of one character in the musical revue I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, an affable if not particularly insightful commentary on…
“Eating Monkey Brains, The Baboon Nurse and Other Tales,” Robert Morrison’s audacious one-man show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lake Worth, is pretty much an all-or-nothing proposition. If you like one piece in this exhibition, which is as provocative as its title, you’ll probably buy into the whole…
James Joyce gets a kick out of people who point out that he has a famous name. He gets even more excited when they know something about the guy who made his name so notable. For a long time now, James Joyce, a mechanics supervisor for Broward County Public Works,…
Thursday October 15 At the Anything Goes Open Mic — you guessed it — anything goes. Starting tonight Warehaus 57 owner Lauren Tellman will open her storefront-window stage to artists every Thursday. Writers, musicians, comedians, and actors will be invited to do their thing for crowds both in the coffee…
The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long slog. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition. On one hand it tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and…
The hero of The Mighty — the title character, in fact — is an eighth grader known by the nickname Freak (Kieran Culkin). His might isn’t physical — he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he’s able to walk only…
Nobody who’s seen the off-Broadway version of The Fantasticks at New York City’s Sullivan Street Playhouse will recognize the set of the appealing new production at the Hollywood Playhouse. (That’s a lot of us, given the 15,000 or so performances the show has racked up since it opened on May…
A blue heron takes off from a gnarled mangrove root as local playwright Ed Reardon and a tour group ply the waters of West Lake Park in Hollywood by boat. Suddenly Reardon lets fly a few lines from Rose Strong Hubbell’s 1932 poem “The Mangroves Dance” as the water laps…
Thursday October 8 According to Clyde Butcher, you can’t appreciate the subtle beauty of nature while flying along the highway at 70 mph — the way most of us do our sightseeing. And if slower transportation — say, biking or hiking — makes for better viewing, Butcher has taken it…
Every Thursday night at North Miami’s Backstage club, Jomo Faulks transports audiences to the heart of Africa. What gets you first is the beat, a mixture of hypnotic African polyrhythms accentuated with electronic percussion samples. Lush synthesizer sequences lull listeners into an almost meditative state. Pulsing bass grooves provide some…
Kurt Volker learned something about nature photography while shooting a gigantic tree in California. The 200-foot-tall redwood caught his eye because a fig tree had rooted itself in the redwood’s skyscraper-size trunk. Looking for an interesting angle, Volker stretched out on the ground and aimed his camera, not realizing he’d…
Every year the Montreal World Film Festival runs for ten days through Labor Day, and the Toronto Film Festival picks up a few days later and carries on for another ten. Twin colossi of the Great White North, they unspool some 300 movies each, and, as in the past three…
