Oni, explains Naomi Parker, is “a Nigerian word that means “ruler woman.'” The term sure fits Parker herself: The organizer of the Oni 2000 Women’s Conference managed to browbeat a couple of sponsors into putting up the money she needed to make the day of discussion, workshops, and music available…
For decades the ultimate “head movies” included Disney’s animated Fantasia and Stanley Kubrick’s special effectsladen 2001: A Space Odyssey, so it’s only fitting that cinematic psychedelia be dramatically brought up to date for the brave new world of the 21st Century — via computer, of course. The recipe sounds simple:…
Five Southern women, some hard liquor, and about two and a half bolts of lilac-colored taffeta. If we threw in Julia Roberts and a walk-on by Tommy Lee Jones, would we have another Steel Magnolias? Happily, no. Where that film drowned in a cloying syrup of bathos and fake accents,…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and the recent Autumn in New York…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, the story of a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat, brick row houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the…
John Wesley Hall believes justice is a myth taught in classrooms, a fable found in law books, as imaginary as the unicorn and the mermaid. The Arkansas attorney mentions case after case in which he represented an innocent who wound up imprisoned or, worse, executed; in the course of a…
Dreaming of a weekend getaway? Yearning to stretch out on your bedroll under the stars and be lulled to sleep by a crackling campfire, maybe even a folksy serenade? If you’re up for a little road trip across the peninsula this weekend, you’re covered. The Southwest Florida Folk and Blues…
Emily Dickinson may be long dead, but Peggy Martin doesn’t let such pesky details stand in the way of a modern-day Dickinson reading — by Dickinson herself. Donning a costume a full three weeks before Halloween, Martin becomes the famous lyric poet this weekend for An Afternoon With Emily Dickinson:…
Meet the Parentshas just enough class to make for Prestige Pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as a crowd pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before setting…
With global overpopulation neatly intertwining with the advent of the home video camera, we have been afforded, as a species, several near-miracles. For instance, when supersonic jets explode or when mobs impolitely loot and riot in urban centers, the common consumer can now document the event and sell it to…
“Junior officers quickly become disoriented in the Orient,” Navy wife Julia Anderson warns newly arrived officer “Sparky” Watts in A.R. Gurney’s play Far East. Indeed the New Theatre’s production of this work seems to offer a heady brew of scandal, sex, and unrequited love, promising to leave the audience pleasantly…
A few months ago, the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (PBICA) in Lake Worth featured an exhibition called “Against Design,” which presented items that would normally be considered functional — furniture, appliances, fashion — redefined in the context of art. Now the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami…
Limestone islands off the coast of Thailand look like nothing more than hunks of rock to the untrained eye. Lucky for the rest of us, Bill Hutchins has a trained eye, a camera, and an adventurous spirit. Some of the rock formations are hollow mountains called hong, which means “room”…
Could it be that we now have sunshine, sand, and the cream of the NYC theater scene? Broward Center For the Performing Arts CEO and president Mark Nerenhausen seems to think so. He hasn’t merely scheduled crowd-pleasing Broadway hits like Cabaret and Godspell at the Broward Center this season, he’s…
It takes a special kind of mindset to celebrate castration, and audiences confusing feminine empowerment with the crude hacking off of seemingly oppressive huevos are certain to get a bang out of Girlfight, the gritty debut feature from writer-director Karyn Kusama. Metaphoric or otherwise, there’s already a movie about deballing…
It’s a sorry fact that what everybody in Hollywood — writer, actor, best boy, and caterer alike — really wants to do is direct. This has led, over the years, to some embarrassing debuts and some unexpected triumphs. For many the notion that Sally Field — after Gidget and Sister…
The literary canon is spinning, the hyphen that binds so-called multicultural fiction — Asian-American, Hispanic-American, African-American fiction — will not hold. Nor should it. Any thought-provoking work on ethnic identity must offer audiences a real look at the themes young playwrights are likely to undertake. In its inaugural performance, Miami’s…
At first, you don’t want to admit it, because it seems somehow wrong–just too easy. After all, the woman on the other end of the phone line is not that woman seen every Sunday night on HBO, lamenting the sad, sorry state of her love affairs. She’s not an actress…
Sophia Letourneau is a pagan, which means she regularly participates in the most important pagan ritual: explaining what a pagan is not. Among her least favorite misconceptions are that pagans worship the devil, use black magic, and engage in animal sacrifice. In reality pagans are far more likely to be…
This song explains why I’m leaving home and becoming a stewardess,” says Anita Miller (Zooey Deschanel) to her well-meaning, overbearing mother, as the soundtrack begins to swell with the low hums of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Just a few seconds earlier, Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) had insisted she wouldn’t…
I had this idea that these ritual pubic-hair shavings which take place in the play could be made into murders, so I called up Charles, and we had a meeting of the minds and worked out the story of the film.” This is the sort of answer you get when…
The logistic, aesthetic, and emotional challenges of keeping a small arts organization afloat would flummox the savviest CEO. Why do artistic directors struggle to bring live theater to South Florida stages when they could spend half the energy and earn six figures directing deodorant commercials? In the second part of…
