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…
Launching yourself off the lip of one 220-foot-tall water slide is all kinds of slippin’, slidin’, splashin’ fun. And at Coconut Cove Waterpark, you can double your adrenaline rush. The five-acre aquatic fun zone in South County Regional Park in Boca Raton features not one but two of the four-story-tall…
Almost Famous is the movie Cameron Crowe always wanted to make–and the movie he tried to keep from making as long as he could. The writer-director insists he didn’t want to make a film about his wonder years as a Rolling Stone writer in the 1970s, because he didn’t want…
As a neo-Nazi recruiter, Tom “T.J.” Leyden used a classic military tactic to woo racists. “We’d plaster schools with hate literature and let the black and Hispanic kids think that the Anglos had done it,” he says. “As soon as the first white kid got beat down, every white kid…
Botanical artist Mary Ruden has never lost a body part while traipsing through dense swampland deep in the Everglades’ Fakahatchee Strand to hunt for orchids, but many of her colleagues have come close. “One of the men I go there with was bitten by an alligator three inches away from…
There are so many intense themes running rampant in Joe Charbanic’s debut feature, The Watcher, that it’s tricky to keep up. For instance there’s the ominous notion that a young lady who lives alone with her cat is pretty much doomed. Then there’s the gripping premise that borrowing from nihilistic…
By day they drive their rippling torsos beneath the blinding desert sun, pausing intermittently to gaze sexily into the distance. By night they head for the open-air discos of Djibouti to get squiffy with the locals. When time allows they wash their socks, shave, and wander around in cylindrical white…
Live theater has never been a big draw in South Florida, an area not usually recognized as a center for first-class theatrical performances. Independent arts organizations in general have a hard time just staying afloat — witness the shuttering of the Alliance Cinema’s doors last week. Yet several nonprofit local…
As a child growing up in New York City, artist Anita Giteck Drujon was mesmerized by the mummies in the basement of the Museum of Natural History. Many years later she was exposed to the medium of encaustic, in which heat is applied to pigment mixed with wax. An artist…
A month ago, R.J. Cutler thought he found a home for his child, one that would coddle and nurture his baby until it was ready to stand on its own two legs without wobbling or falling. A month ago, it all seemed so simple to the Oscar-nominated producer-director, who was…
Architect and designer Abby Suckle sounds a tad jealous as she talks about “Against Design,” the furniture-as-art exhibition on view through this weekend at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (PBICA). She says the show’s artists were allowed the opportunity to create in a vacuum, a luxury she didn’t…
It was the weekend of Judy Garland’s death, and emotions were running high. On Friday, June 27, 1969, the New York City police conducted what was a regular occurrence. Raids of gay bars and harassment of gays and lesbians were facts of life in America, and the persecuted put up…
Humans and their stories, my oh my. Somehow the familiar themes just keep coming around ad infinitum. Of course most of them have already been captured and processed by Shakespeare. From the bitter young man to the crazy old king, from the flirty young thing to the malicious old crone,…
This is the beginning of The Way of the Gun you will not see, because it was written but never filmed: Two men, Parker and Longbaugh, urinate in an open grave in front of mourners, beat up a priest, steal organs meant for transplant, and shoot a dog. The introduction,…
You could say Shirley Richardson has a theatrical heritage. Growing up in Miami in the ’50s and ’60s, her entire family worked for the Coconut Grove Playhouse, either as domestic or manual laborers. Her mother, Bennie Mae, was a cleaning woman at the playhouse from 1954 to 1964 and often…
Success is relative in Hollywood, like a third cousin twice-removed who doesn’t recognize you at family reunions, and doesn’t care to. Fame is so fleeting it has a month-by-month lease. Six years ago, Christopher McQuarrie was as famous as any screenwriter on the backlot known as Los Angeles. He had…
Fort Lauderdale art students, arise! Well, not too early, of course, but try to roust yourself out of bed for Rockin’ the Guild, a fundraiser/membership drive/12-hour-long musical bash September 3. Local artists Jeffrey Holmes and David Diaz have organized the Broward Art Guild benefit, putting together a flock of local…
“Our purpose is to get people high,” offers Dorothy Tanner, pausing for effect before adding, “… without drugs.” High. Relaxed. Mellow. Whatever you want to call it, visiting Lumonics will induce in viewers an altered state of some sort. Tanner and her late husband, Mel, opened the “light and sound”…
Turns out that, when goodfellas don’t die (when they don’t get shot or blown up in a car or beaten to death with a baseball bat), they move to South Beach. They drive tour buses for the elderly, take orders at Burger King, give dime-a-dance lessons to old women in…
Too often baseball players are reduced to statistics, hollow numbers that resonate with the fetishist who drifts off to sleep counting home runs and career batting averages. Baseball demands such precision: It’s a team sport, yes, but ultimately it’s man against man, record against record, history against history. Look no…
Paper elephants and donkeys; red, white, and blue banners; and two video screens — one posted in either of the far corners of the space — set the scene for George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing, one of Broadway’s first political satires. We are quickly reminded that successful…
