In these post-Sondheim, pro-revival days, it’s sometimes difficult to find the why and wherefore of the Broadway musical. On the one hand, Times Square overflows with new productions of Grease and Saturday Night Fever and the self-perpetuating Cats, as though the industry were one gigantic broken record. On the other…
I was ambivalent about going to an exhibition with the prosaic title “The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life,” only to discover a delightfully whimsical, imaginatively assembled show. The exhibition, now midway through its four-month run at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, is essentially one sprawling installation of…
Just as a tornado whisked Dorothy away to the land of Oz, hurricanes help take viewers of Pablo Cano’s works into a world of fantasy. His whimsical marionettes are made from street trash, and the pickings get better right after a big gust of wind blows through. “Hurricane Floyd and…
Two musicals — Sophie: The Red Hot Mama Revusical in West Palm Beach and Sophie, Totie & Belle in Deerfield Beach — celebrate the life and flamboyant times of legendary blues singer Sophie Tucker. What you won’t find reference to in either show is Tucker’s appearance in Dania during the…
After its customary “minifest” screenings of the past couple of weeks in neighboring Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties as well as in Broward, the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival begins the main portion of its 14th season this week. And as I indicated last week, the festival appears to be…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Sorry to crib from that inferior tale of incredible shrinking men (throw a rock at any multiplex marquee this season — please! — and you’ll hit several), but really, avoid that…
Glen Berger’s new play, Great Men of Science, Nos. 21 & 22, is a disaster of such epic proportions that it practically begs comparison to the Titanic and the Hindenberg. Indeed, ten minutes after it leaves port, so to speak, this world premiere by the author of A Suit to…
Bathed in a neon-orange glow, the painting of Jimi Hendrix torching his guitar seems to give off, well, warmth. The man who painted it puts viewers front-row-center at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, a vantage point from which fans no doubt felt the heat. “I was right in the…
As a long-time newspaper reporter and editor who’s worked all over Florida, Tim Dorsey has written and read stories about the most bizarre crimes and stupid human tricks the Sunshine State has to offer. For some reason he still chooses to live here. “You were born here, it’s beautiful, you…
The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival is upon us, once again promising “over 100 films from 30 countries worldwide,” unreeling at venues from Boca Raton to Coconut Grove and, oh yeah, Fort Lauderdale, over a period of three and a half weeks. Most of the movies have multiple showings, and…
Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity, and half-baked scheming on the treacherous L.A. music scene. They know the territory. In 1988 the ex-UCLA Film School classmates wrote and directed Border Radio, one…
Sophie, Totie, and Belle are no longer household names, but you can still draw straight lines from the blues singer Sophie Tucker, the ’60s comedienne Totie Fields, and the borscht belt star Belle Barth to Bette Midler, Roseanne, and Joan Rivers, not to mention the dozens of lesser-known women comics,…
A little more than a year ago, artist William Bock and his wife, Christy, were settling into their new gallery in the Fountains Shoppes of Distinction in Plantation, as well as awaiting the birth of a child. After five years of struggling to survive in the fledgling arts district of…
Pianist Emma Kelly had nothing to do with the murder of bad boy Danny Hansford, but as a well-known figure in the quirky city of Savannah, Georgia, she’s included in the best-selling book about the killing. John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is as much about…
Older MTV fans may remember the Make My Video contest, in which viewers were asked to shoot original footage to accompany the Madonna song “True Blue.” Out of more than 1000 entries, judges picked a grainy, black-and-white piece featuring a lovelorn young woman who has to choose between a cheating…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed sometime in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To” from New Sensations), but as has often been…
Ever since the mid-’80s release of Emir Kusturica’s first two features — Do You Remember Dolly Bell? and When Father Was Away on Business (which was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar) — Kusturica has been the most internationally visible figure in Yugoslavian cinema. (That includes all the former…
Are you going to Europe? South America? Do you need to know how to ask “Where is St. Sophia’s?” in Italian? How about “Where is Sophia Loren?” Both phrases are translated in the snappy musical travel guide, Secrets Every Smart Traveler Should Know. No actual travel advice is provided, but…
It’s not easy to appear menacing in a wheelchair, but David Bernstein is pulling it off as the King of Thebes in the Academy Theatre production of Antigone. In the Greek tragedy, Creon ascends to the throne after his brothers-in-law, the sons of Oedipus, kill each other while battling for…
Cities like Fort Lauderdale and Fort Worth were obviously named after military outposts, but in Fort Lauderdale the question is, To which fort are you referring? Long before the city was incorporated in 1911, a total of three rustic Army bases had been built in the area. Completed in 1838,…
David Fincher needs a hug, the poor bastard. Or possibly a diaper change. Ever since 1992, when he ruined the Alien series with the excrescence of his pointless, senseless third installment, he’s been making the same bratty, obnoxious movie over and over again: gloom, doom, indestructible protagonist, bureaucratic evil, quasi-religious…
Steven Soderbergh may have had some rocky times after his 1989 breakthrough with sex, lies, & videotape, but these days he’s on a roll. Last year he produced Pleasantville and directed Out of Sight, two of the year’s most praised films. This year he has The Limey, a complex, introspective…
