Murder-mystery writing is done backward. “You start with the murderee and work your way forward,” says Marcia Rankin of Mirthful Mysteries, an Orlando-based mystery-writing team. Beginning with the end of the plot, she and her partner, Mario Santangelo, develop whimsical whodunits, like the one for this year’s ClueLess on Las…
Thursday April 22 England’s King Henry VIII wasn’t taking chances with wife number four. The Catholic Church had banned divorce, so he created the Church of England in order to legally unload Catherine of Aragon, his first wife. Displeased with wife number two, Anne Boleyn, he had her beheaded. His…
Just as David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) came off as an organic reaction to a terrible new wasting disease, his new movie crystallizes the confusions of an epoch that can’t decide whether it’s the Entertainment Era, the Information Age, or the Digital Millennium. Named for a fictional “game system,” eXistenZ…
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she’s trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chill dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the burden…
Ariel Dorfman’s political potboiler opens like the creaky thrillers from which it’s descended — on the proverbial dark and stormy night. Paulina is alone, waiting for her husband to arrive at their desolate beach house. It’s raining. There’s no phone. A stranger enters. Well, maybe not a stranger. As Death…
To some folks a Volkswagen isn’t a VW unless the engine’s in back, emitting that telltale chirp with each burst of acceleration. Old-schoolers, explains VW enthusiast Sandi Barrett, think the German cars were at their best when Beetles, Karmann Ghias, and buses were propelled by air-cooled engines mounted in what…
Thursday April 15 Talk to imaginary friends, and you’ll be viewed as wacky. Actor John Davidson, however, is winning accolades for such behavior. Only he’s talking to fake friends and family members on stage as the 26th President of the United States. In Bully! An Adventure With Teddy Roosevelt, Davidson…
Some adventurous souls are more adventurous than others. So are some boat cruises. When a recent cold front sent 20-knot winds whipping across the Atlantic Ocean, Capt. Tom Tiernan and his wife and first mate, Cathie, canceled a catamaran trip. The winds weren’t too strong for the 53-foot, double-hulled sailboat,…
Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal, and you have pretty much described Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted Demme from…
“It sure was a beautiful night,” says Jamie Tyrone, one of the two survivors in American theater’s most famous morning-after scene. “I’ll never forget it,” this drunk says to Josie Hogan, the woman who’s given him the only respite from misery he’s likely to get in this life. But, as…
What’s most striking about “The Water’s Edge: A Painting Installation by Margaret Ross Tolbert” when you first view it is not so much the content of the exhibition as the way it’s displayed. The nearly 150 six-by-eight-inch panels that make up the show, now at the Art and Culture Center…
He’s been toasted by Vogue and Wom-en’s Wear Daily and creates clothes worn by Madonna, Mary K. Blige, and Erikah Badu. The latest kid to flick the fickle Bic of the fashion world is Anand Jon, a graduate of the Art Institute of Fort Laud-erdale. The 24-year-old is returning on…
As the protege of George Balanchine, dancer Edward Villella followed the path of the great ballet choreographer in one unfortunate way, albeit one that turned out great for South Florida dance. Balanchine (1904-1983), who began dancing at age nine in his native Russia, hurt his knee in the mid-’20s, shifting…
Thursday April 8 If you’re going to do a musical, focus on the music. Writer and lyricist Dean Pitchford learned that lesson with the movie Footloose. He wrote the screenplay and collaborated on the nine-song soundtrack, which was the real star of the film about a town where dancing is…
Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late ’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After…
Everybody in this walk-in closet of an editing room at the A.W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach is talking at once: Daniel Thomas, who’s queuing up Thicker Than Water, a ten-minute video, for viewing; Justin Connelly, the video’s writer, who says Thicker was originally inspired by…
William Mastrosimone’s Tamer of Horses takes place in a universe in which a kid named Hector wanders into the lives of two frustrated classics professors. You might surmise a coincidence like this is at hand from the title, a reference to Hector, the warrior hero of Homer’s Iliad. But would…
Thursday April 1 Here’s a twist. For ten years Suzanne Miller of Fort Lauderdale was known as Vivian Saint John, professional wrestler. But then she quit the ring and became a student at the New York School of Occult Arts and Sciences. She’s now known as Lady Suzanne Miller, teller…
“Hemp Factory. Be hemp,” says a cheerful female clerk answering the phone in the Boca Raton boutique. Or was that, “Buy hemp”? It doesn’t matter, really. In the shop, everything in sight — hemp-seed-oil shampoo, hemp-fiber clothing, hemp-flour tortilla chips — is made from marijuana’s impotent cousin. So in order…
Back in 1993 Disney released Swing Kids, a dead-earnest portrait of rebellious German jazz fans during the Third Reich. This bizarre hybrid — a blend of Footloose and Schindler’s List, of Dead Poets Society and The Diary of Anne Frank — pitted big bands versus arm bands; it was a…
Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action, and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must — that is, to create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes…
David Mamet’s war-between-the-sexes conundrum is nothing if not a tense night out at the theater. That’s true if you’re male, female, a college student, a professor, or merely an innocent bystander trying to figure out whether there actually is a watertight argument inside this situation tragedy. Oleanna is about a…
