Some plays don’t just offer food for thought; they serve up fresh ideas, then eat them raw. One such carnivore is Nicky Silver’s The Food Chain, now on display in a tasty production at the Mosaic Theatre in Plantation. Silver’s scabrous wit slices and dices a number of human foibles,…
The Irish have a long tradition of killing each other off. For the past century or so, it’s all been about religion and home rule, though that wasn’t always the case. Now, however, peace seems to have finally come (aside from the occasional isolated incident) to the Emerald Isle. Of…
One thing you can say consistently about Super Bowls, especially since around XXVI or so, is the high quality of the commercials in between all the action. Not soon will gridiron fans forget the simple pleasure of offering your deluded buddy, already into you for a few hundred bucks on…
Hitler as artist… Hitler as artist… Damn. So much for the ol’ “summarize plot, tease overpaid actors, pontificate wildly” formula. Reviewing Max — about the wonder years of Der Führer (Noah Taylor) and his fictional Jewish benefactor, Max Rothman (John Cusack) — looks to be something of a task. Set…
Compiled in the cold light of day, the sum of Chuck Barris’ contributions to American culture are the Top 40 ditty “Palisades Park,” which he wrote in 1962, and his discovery, a few years later, that many people are willing to make complete fools of themselves in front of a…
There’s a gimmick at the heart of “The Smiths: Tony, Kiki, Seton,” but it’s a good one: Combine wildly disparate works by two generations of an artistic family and all but dare people to concoct connections among those works. The exhibition, now at Lake Worth’s Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary…
Book and lyrics by Mark Saltzman, with traditional Neopolitan music arranged by Louis Forestieri; directed by Mark Woldrop. With John Paul Almon, Natalie Hill, Andy Karl, and Adam Monley. Presented through February 2 by the Coconut Grove Playhouse, 3500 Main Hwy., Miami, 305-442-4000.
Written by Claudia Shear; directed by Joseph Adler. With Ian Hersey, David Kwiat, and Margot Moreland. Presented through February 2 by GableStage at the Biltmore, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables, 305-445-1119.
In an era when warfare increasingly consists of bombs dropped from remote-controlled pilotless drones, when Madison Avenue-style marketing brands missions for mass consumption (Operation Enduring Freedom, for example), the image of flesh-and-blood humans locked in deadly air combat, sans some press-friendly handle, seems almost quaint — an overheated Hollywood relic…
Referring to the plight of the Jewish writer in American society in the 1950s and 1960s, Saul Bellow wrote of Jewish culture: “We must accept the mixture as we find it — the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.” Perhaps no other genre but film…
It all begins with the word. “I believe I may have a first sentence,” murmurs Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman, yes really) to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), commencing labor on the author’s fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The year is 1921, but skillfully intercut segments illustrate that the book’s heady emotional…
Intacto, the first feature film by 34-year-old Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, is a complex meditation on luck, fate, and the torments of memory. It has some opaque moments, and once in a while, it gives off a whiff of film-school pretension. But the young Spaniard looks like a force…
Everyone has remembrances of flings past, especially that once-in-a-lifetime first time. Playwright Richard Nelson’s take on that oft-told subject is Madame Melville, an intriguing wisp of a tale now playing at the New Theatre in Coral Gables. In it, Nelson depicts the coming of age of an awkward American 15-year-old…
“They get in their motorhomes and tour-bus coaches, and they follow the tour from city to city, like the Grateful Dead. It’s staggering,” says Paul Emery, coproducer of one of the highest-grossing tours in the country. “We were in Pittsburgh on December 14, the last Christmas show of the season,…
Other films have dealt with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland — some very well — but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best. Of course, it starts out with a huge advantage: The 69-year-old Polanski is probably the only working filmmaker…
Nothing is inevitable,” goes the old saying, “except death and taxes.” In Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, playwright Israel Horovitz begs to differ, or at least, amend: add “regret” to that short list. In the freezing gloom of a New England winter, an imperious old man, Jacob Brackish, shuffles…
“Hopefully the economy will start to be on the upside a little bit,” Christopher Makos says in a slow, deliberate tone. “Soon as we go to war… so that Americans can drive their big, gas-guzzling SUVs so they can protect their princesses and their children. Those are really good things…
Those who seek a polar opposite to Michael Caine’s kind-but-firm patriarch Dr. Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules will find it in Jim Broadbent’s horrid, one-eyed headmaster, Wackford Squeers, in the new adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Author John Irving cribbed extensively from Charles Dickens to create his delightful (and…
Strange how the cultural currents in Broward County shift. Not so long ago, Fort Lauderdale’s Museum of Art (MoA) went from being reliable, mainstream, even conservative — the place you’d go to see solid if fairly predictable big shows — to exploring quirkier waters. The museum dabbled in interactive and…
About a millennium and a half ago, Buddhist teachings from India began seeping over the Himalayas and into China. Yuan Hong, an emperor of the Wei dynasty, had a Buddhist monastic institution set up for an Indian scholar monk known as Bhadur. The temple, built in the forest at the…
Former Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach has no trouble finding parallels between his experiences as a heavy-metal rock star and his role as the Son of God in Jesus Christ Superstar, playing at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. As a rock star, he says, “They treat you as…
It’s easy to presume About Schmidt isn’t much of a movie, since its protagonist, Warren Schmidt, isn’t much of anything. He’s portrayed by Jack Nicholson, but the actor is actually someone who looks like he used to be Jack Nicholson. This Warren, this rinky-dink actuary banished to the wasteland of…
Here’s a tricky little movie to review, as it’s going to divide audiences fairly drastically. Conservatives, especially black ones like Larry Elder and Ken Hamblin, will likely laud Antwone Fisher as a heroic story of a triumphant black man who conquers all of his inner demons and outer obstacles (of…
