The talents of Maya Angelou — she is or has been a teacher, memoirist, prize-winning poet, actress, civil rights activist, editor, playwright, composer, dancer, producer, theater and TV director, and advisor to three Presidents — range so far and deep that no feat she accomplishes could come as a surprise…
In the second half of Steve Dietz’s new play, Rocket Man, time moves backward in an enchanting fashion. The elderly are the newest people on Earth. Teenagers, veterans by comparison, choose the parents who will care for them as they grow younger and more dependent. And on one character’s sweet-16…
A faint but unmistakable electrical hum was in the air when I stepped into the Boca Raton Museum of Art to see “Richard Anuszkiewicz: Retrospective.” The buzz no doubt came from the air conditioning or lighting system, but it could just as easily have been generated by Anuszkiewicz’s work, which…
Thursday December 17 If you’re an opera lover, you must be into the costumes, pageantry, and glass-shattering voices as much as the stories themselves. After all, with the lyrics being sung in German or Italian, how do you really know what’s going on? At least the story behind Die Zauberflste…
Sergio Curbelo’s Spanish accent is barely discernible, both because it isn’t very thick in the first place and because he’s talking on a crackly cell phone while bumping along a freeway leading into Boston. “We’ll be there in about seven minutes,” Curbelo predicts through the static, noting that he and…
Throughout history dogs and cats have survived just fine in their standard-issue fur, but some people insist on accessorizing their animal companions, especially during the holidays. For example, at the Humane Society of Broward County’s Pet Boutique, strands of pearls adorned with silver charms are selling like hotcakes. They’re marketed…
DreamWorks’ grandiose attempt at an animated feature for adults is a flimsy musical about Moses — a Sunday-school filmstrip written ultralarge and decked out with the spectacle of Hollywood Bible epics. Slender sermons nestle among flashy action sequences and diaphanous fashion statements from the more tasteful pages of the Nefertiti’s…
Old-fashioned romantic comedies are an endangered species, and in these generally unromantic days it’s always a pleasant surprise to find a decent one like Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail. Ephron, of course, made her bones five and a half years ago with the huge hit Sleepless in Seattle, but since…
Gavin MacLeod, erstwhile captain of the Love Boat, sails blithely through Moon Over Buffalo with an erect rubber nose. He’s playing Cyrano de Bergerac. Or rather he’s playing an actor playing Cyrano in Ken Ludwig’s 1995 Broadway hit Moon Over Buffalo, a comedy about a troupe of washed-up actors in…
Visitors seem a little perplexed when they encounter the jaboticaba trees in Gene Joyner’s yard. As if its name weren’t confusing enough, the Brazilian tree produces its purple, grapelike fruit in a rather odd fashion. “It looks like someone has glued grapes up and down the trunk and branches,” explains…
Thursday December 10 A hang glider has to haul one of those big nylon sets of wings to a cliff. And a parasailor’s rig includes boat, parachute, and of course a large body of water. Making use of a flying inflatable boat sounds not nearly as complicated. The two-seat pontoon…
“When the doctor said I couldn’t play volleyball anymore, I had to decide what I was going to do with my life,” explains Tiziana Zanelli of Fort Lauderdale. The Italian native played professional volleyball for three years before bad knees forced her to quit. So, at age 21, she turned…
Ultratough guy Jesse “The Body” Ventura says he means business as the new governor of Minnesota. But for now the nasty crime wave in that state continues unchecked — in the movies anyway. Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a psychological thriller that shows us how dangerous life can get after…
Of all the repertory programs ever devised, the double bill playing this month at the New Theatre has got to be one of the most delightfully odd. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is bound to pop up somewhere this time of year, of course, but would you expect to find…
The centerpiece of “Red Grooms: Moby Dick Meets the New York Public Library,” now on view at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, is so dauntingly enormous that I couldn’t help thinking of the line used to promote this past summer’s flop Godzilla: “Size matters.” Just how…
According to the sparse information available in standard reference books, Chilean expatriate director Raœl Ruiz, still in his late fifties, has made more than 100 films since 1960; apparently only 50 or so are features, but that’s still an impressive stat. He’s been a staple on the festival circuit for…
When Amos ‘n’ Andy debuted on TV in 1951, the portrayal of the fast-talking, unscrupulous lawyer Algonquin J. Calhoun by veteran black actor Johnny Lee wasn’t offensive just to blacks. It was an affront to lawyers. After complaints from the NAACP, CBS took the sitcom off the air in 1953,…
Thomas Nast, the father of American political cartooning, popularized images of Americana such as Uncle Sam and skewered corrupt politicians. His drawings were so influential, in fact, that they helped bring down the infamous New York City politician William “Boss” Tweed, who defrauded the city of millions during the 1860s…
Thursday 3 For a while there it seemed like another bad ’70s trend had been laid to rest. But fondue — the ridiculously tedious and fattening method of frying individual bites of food in scalding oil — has resurfaced on the wave of nostalgia for the decade. During fondue class…
A third of the way through Home Fries, you may begin wondering if the filmmakers haven’t outsmarted themselves. Overloaded with oddities but a bit short on horse sense, this is one of those stubbornly defiant, attitude-driven movies that’s so busy scrambling genres, breaking rules, and dashing expectations on the road…
If a cat and a bird can get along, can’t we all? People who once watched X the Owl and Henrietta Pussycat live peacefully in their thick-trunked tree on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood probably didn’t realize that the puppets were teaching tolerance. The fact is, most adults age 40 and younger…
Michal Rovner couldn’t control the chaos and strife she grew up with in Israel: terrorist attacks, Arab-Israeli warfare, the detachment of a people living among enemies. Born in Tel Aviv in 1957, the 41-year-old artist eventually turned that sense of powerlessness and displacement into the driving force of her career…
