As the dance music thumps away, Steve Baez leads a group of women through a rigorous set of rhythmic punches and kicks. Women of all ages are throwing their fists and letting their feet fly, building up a sweat as they kick repeatedly — front, back, sides. This may look…
Florida Marlins fans didn’t just lose the lineup of their World Championship team as it was being ripped apart last winter. The massive fire sale that reduced the payroll also cost fans their chance to savor a World Series victory, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin. “You rethink it all winter…
Rule number one: When crafting a thriller, make sure the audience can relate to, identify with, or empathize with at least one of the characters. Rule number two: The characters’ motivations must be clear. Fail in either area — or, worse, in both — and you end up with a…
By June 28, the end of its third season, City Theatre’s Summer Shorts festival will have put on 48 new plays on its main stage, about three times the number of productions of your average professional company. In fact, as you read this, fifteen premieres of blackout sketches, comic monologues,…
Thursday June 11 In order to provide equal-opportunity enjoyment, rabbi/standup comedian Bob Alper flips through “flash cards for the Judaically challenged” whenever he starts off his G-rated show. The cards, bearing phrases like “Passover = No Bread,” let non-Jews in on the rabbi’s jokes, such as the one about the…
Walking through the woods on a sultry evening, Jim Higgins suddenly stops and waves something that looks like a transistor radio in the air. It’s a bat detector, which picks up sounds humans can’t hear and beeps when it senses a bat nearby. Whenever he hears a beep, Higgins scans…
Thursday June 4 The title of Andrew Weil’s book 8 Weeks to Optimum Health sounds a tad too optimistic. He obviously has supreme confidence in the holistic health system and clean living prescribed within, but has he really seen the shape most Americans are in? Gotta wonder, because two months…
While Cuban and American troops cleaned their guns and sharpened their bayonets for battle, William Glackens readied his pens and ink. Feverish from malaria, the illustrator huddled in a trench in Cuba while documenting the famous attack on San Juan Hill in 1898. Photography was still in its infancy back…
Most people associate the disco era with hedonism, homosexuality, a sense of community, tacky fashions, and awful music. But in his new The Last Days of Disco, writer-director Whit Stillman imagines the era as merely a singles bar for romantics in search of soul mates, mostly heterosexual and hardly debauchees…
The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the Zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It’s all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force — a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, get written about not only…
There’s nothing like a loud bang at the end of Act One to make you impatient for the end of the intermission so that you can scurry back to your seat and find out what happens next. Especially if that bang shreds every notion you had about the play up…
There are no other Everglades in the world. The opening line of the late Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ famous The Everglades: River of Grass kept echoing through my mind as I walked among the 22 black-and-white photographs that make up “A Portrait of the Everglades: The Photography of Clyde Butcher.” Again…
Like an omniscient general, Frank Steffens is able to pick one toy soldier from among the thousands in his collection and tell you everything about him — uniform, weapon, military unit, even the manufacturer. To prove his point, the Hollywood toy collector plucks Colonel Cardigan, the commander of the 1854…
Thursday May 28 Feeling guilty about their shallow, career-driven lives, the four protagonists in Richard Greenberg’s romantic comedy Eastern Standard invite a waitress and a bag lady to spend the summer with them in the Hamptons — a sweet, yet still shallow, gesture. And that’s the point. The four main…
At 9:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, Tavern 213 bartender Bryan Ganz is pouring pints of beer for an off-duty barkeep and a few regulars. The stereo system pumps out rock music as an NBA basketball game flickers on twin TVs, mounted above either end of the long wooden bar. The…
Only one week after lizards came crawling across the nation’s screens in Godzilla and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, along comes the bloated Hope Floats, toting a barge full of saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions. Let’s start with the title: two words the juxtaposition of which is neither evocative…
The “Size Does Matter” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the actual movie. It’s also highly annoying and has spawned a spinoff: The ads for a new film called Plump Fiction inform us that “Width Matters, Too.” Perhaps the best thing about the much-ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla…
Of all the theatrical hams that have wandered across the stage of American pop culture — from the late-career John Barrymore to, say, Joan Rivers and Jim Belushi — none have endeared themselves as much as the tiny shank bone that wanders home atop the legs of Scout Finch near…
Hanging out as his nightclub alter ego, Petey Punkineaty, Petey Mongelli looks like a shorter version of Pete Burns, the wild-haired, cross-dressing lead singer from the ’80s group Dead or Alive. So when a woman approached him several months ago at the now-defunct Squeeze nightclub and asked if he’d pose…
Thursday May 21 The fish are living high on the hog at the Sailfish Marina and Resort. At the marina’s “Feed the Fish” Seawall Aquarium, visitors buy fish food for 50 cents a bag and toss the pellets into the drink along the docks and seawall. Even if they aren’t…
Grandma and Grandpa aren’t just sitting around the condo playing bridge, at least not in the retirement mecca envisioned by the comedy troupe Separate Checks. In the sketch “Century Village Presents The Half Monty,” bass-heavy dance music thumps while two women residents are entertained by five geezers shaking their butts…
In director Barbara Kopple’s new documentary, Wild Man Blues, we follow Woody Allen around Europe as he takes part in a whirlwind concert tour with the New Orleans-style jazz band with which he plays. He kvetches from the get-go. “I would rather be bitten by a dog than fly to…
