In 1996 Rent picked up the Pulitzer Prize for its rock and roll update of Puccini’s La Boheme, edging out another work that has ties to the classical canon: Jon Marans’ drama Old Wicked Songs. The latter play, about the life lessons a young pianist and his seasoned vocal coach…
The juxtaposition, faintly surreal, reminds me of a shop I once saw in the rural Deep South, housing both a beauty salon and a hardware store. But Needlepoint Originals and Paradise Gallery (the italics appear right there on the business card), an unassuming little establishment next to the Riverside Hotel…
thursday november 20 Merlot, pinot noir, chardonnay, and other varietal wines vie for palate-pleasing prominence during the three-day Las Olas Wine Festival, held today through Saturday. Modeled after a similar annual event in Aspen, Colorado, this celebration of fine food and wine features winetastings at 24 Las Olas Boulevard locations…
Everyone knows that Don Juan is a stud. So how come the protagonist in Mozart’s sensual opera Don Giovanni — “Don Juan” translated from Spanish into Italian — is such a romantic washout? And what really happened between him and Donna Anna? Find out the answer to these and other…
This weekend’s Hollywood Jazz Festival is dedicated to the late Jaco Pastorius, the undisputed master of the electric bass guitar. Pastorius actually gave the title to himself back when he was just a South Florida session player who dreamed of becoming a great jazz artist. The story goes that one…
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a bestseller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way director Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) or The Conversation (1974) did, The Rainmaker makes…
Over the past three years, Twentieth Century Fox has built an ambitious new animation studio in Phoenix, putting the promising Don Bluth and Gary Goldman in charge. The two were obvious choices. Since the animators defected from Disney Studios in 1979 to form Don Bluth Productions, they’ve turned out the…
Even if you’re the type destined to arrive late for your own funeral, you should make it a point to show up at least fifteen minutes early to see Grandma Sylvia’s Funeral, the interactive comedy now on-stage at the Broward Stage Door Theater in Coral Springs. That’s the time Grandma…
He was nine years old when he saw his first Marx Brothers film, A Day at the Races. “That night I remember acting out scenes from the movie with my brother,” says actor Frank Ferrante. “From that point on I became absolutely intrigued by Groucho Marx.” So intrigued, in fact,…
In April 1995, twenty years after fleeing with her baby from the terrors of war in Saigon, a Vietnamese artist resolved at last to translate the horrors of her war experiences into paint. It was hard to do. The screams, the bombs, and the deaths she had witnessed were things…
thursday november 13 If you’ve procrastinated this far into the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, what the heck are you thinking? A plethora of independent, art, and foreign films fall into your backyard (okay, nearby theaters), and you missed them all — almost. There’s still a chance for celluloid slackers…
You’re part of a team of Russia-based international bad guys that wants to knock off someone at the very top of the U.S. government. Who you gonna call? The Jackal. As personified by Bruce Willis, this assassin di tutti assassins is a rather tight-lipped psychopath with an alarming collection of…
Put brutally the marvelous The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frame-up that backfires. Thankfully nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical movie. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini cut to the thick of Henry James’ masterpiece about amorous extortion and moral purification. Helena…
When you can’t figure out in which direction the stock market may head or which nation isn’t complying with nuclear disarmament, it’s soothing to know that somewhere on the television dial things remain constant: Mary Richards will never find Mr. Right, Lucy Ricardo won’t headline at Ricky’s club, and Gilligan…
The big surprise about “Breaking Barriers: Selections From the Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection of Contemporary Cuban Art” is how little of this large, ambitious show is explicitly political. Sure there’s a nod to Che Guevara here, a reference to raft refugees there, and a handful of works include oblique…
When Jim Collier was growing up in Deerfield Beach, the land behind the row of white cottages lining the north side of Hillsboro Boulevard — now a suburbia-scape — was still wooded and vacant. The Kestor houses, as the twenty or so tidy Florida bungalows were known, were constructed by…
Just don’t call it “sci-fi.” The term conjures images of scantily clad women in the arms of bug-eyed beasties. “SF” is the acceptable shortened form for today’s smarter, socially conscious incarnation of science fiction, warns Connecticut SF and fantasy author Esther M. Friesner, a guest speaker at this weekend’s Tropicon…
thursday november 6 The twelfth-annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival features art exhibitions, gala parties, workshops, and — of course — plenty of films. Emmy- and Oscar-winning composer Leonard Rosenman talks about music’s influence on the mood of a film in the seminar “Music for Motion Pictures” 9 a.m. today…
Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s 1951 Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the coruscating Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’ supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV…
A glance at the cast list for the new Sidney Lumet hospital drama Critical Care might lead you to expect an embarrassment of riches. Instead, the results are often just plain embarrassing. How could a film starring James Spader, Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Anne Bancroft, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace…
To borrow a line from the great soul singer Sam Cooke, I don’t know much about history, but I do know that Benedict Arnold turned traitor during the American Revolution. In the world premiere of Benedict Arnold, now playing at Palm Beach’s Florida Stage (formerly the Pope Theatre Company), playwright…
