Milton Berle isn’t actually backstage at The Last Supper, but his voice is, if only on Memorex. The Borscht Belt comedian has loaned his name and endorsement to Artie Butler’s hapless and ambitious new musical about a hapless but ambitious guy trying to sell a musical comedy to a Broadway…
Inside the butterfly house at the Secret Woods Nature Center in Fort Lauderdale, graceful insects flutter among potted flowers and hanging plants. It’s an idyllic scene, one that would satisfy just about any weekend nature-admirer. But because Scott Bryan, a volunteer at the center, is an insect enthusiast, he has…
Lynette Brodeur found inspiration behind the wheel of her car. But it wasn’t the freedom of the road or just a good driving tune that flipped her mental switch. The radio in her car picks up only AM stations, most of which are crammed with talk shows. All of that…
Thursday July 2 When volunteers protested segregation in bus terminals during the 1961 Freedom Rides, he was severely beaten by members of a white mob. In March 1965, on so-called “Bloody Sunday,” his skull was fractured in a melee between state troopers and black protest marchers after he led more…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys (1995) and The Rock (1996) and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon, which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When…
Armed again with the comedy of despair, but with a far sight more focus than last time out (1995’s Kicking and Screaming), director Noah Baumbach takes on perhaps the most coiled and resilient of the seven deadlies in his bright comedy of manners Mr. Jealousy. The affable Lester (Eric Stoltz)…
Since there aren’t many coming-out stories about lesbians in Hoboken, New Jersey, it’s easy to imagine that the folks at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville sat up and took notice when Wendy Hammond sent in the script for Julie Johnson. What made them choose it for…
You won’t find the work of glass artist Jackson Hall in any South Florida gallery or museum — not yet, anyway. A recent transplant from San Francisco, Hall has spent the past two months getting settled in Fort Lauderdale, where he has a small studio in his house in the…
Thursday June 25 Don’t believe the title. Beethoven by the Beach Festival II is taking place in downtown Fort Lauderdale, not on the beach. And do yourself a favor: Skip the movie being shown for the kids. Beethoven has nothing to do with the 19th-century German composer otherwise known as…
Drinking high-octane Japanese rice wine while using knives sounds dangerous. But a shot of sake is part of the fun at the Making Sushi at Home Workshop. Sushi traditionalists, who know that the Japanese raw-fish fare is prepared by specially trained chefs, would be appalled by the informality of the…
I always thought my fancy writing — like the wiggly letters I drew in crayon on homemade Mother’s Day cards and birthday messages — was lovely. Recently, though, I was humbled. Sitting at a dining room table in Plantation with four calligraphers, I was thinking, “How difficult can this be?”…
There will always be a Britain, and very likely there will always be movies about the pluck and sacrifice demonstrated by the little people during World War II. Not Billy Barty-type little people — though surely there must have been a few of them involved — but the simple, salt-of-the-earth…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
The 1967 screen musical Doctor Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, 20th Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the original film — its disasters are more mundane. It’s a kiddie comedy that really…
There’s only one genuinely dramatic moment in Cloud Tectonics, but, boy, is it a doozy. A man leaves a room and enters it moments later. His clothes are different. He’s carrying letters written while he was away. To him, two years have unfolded in the interim. To the characters on…
Historical legends and theories are fine, but Jerry Wilkinson wants to know the real deal. Wherever he’s lived, he’s tried to find out as much as he can about the history of the place, and right now that place happens to be Tavernier, a tiny burg on Key Largo. The…
Thursday June 18 Walking outside? In South Florida? At this time of year? Whew! Just thinking about it is enough to make you sweat. But chill out. In the slide lecture “Traveling Through Florida’s Past,” South Florida author Roberta Sandler takes audiences on an air-conditioned tour of Florida’s historic spots…
Their curiosity peaked, a mom and a daughter in-line skating through Tradewinds Park in Coconut Creek stopped to watch. I had just stepped onto the tee pad for Hole 8 at the park’s disc golf course, and the rectangular slab of cement faces a small lake. With a streamlined version…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
The X-Files is a movie that answers questions…. No, wait a minute: The X-Files is a movie that asks questions…. All right, The X-Files is a movie that makes me wanna ask some questions, like: What the hell does “Fight the future” mean? Look, I can understand “The truth is…
Imagine country-western heartthrob Clint Black inhabiting the body of Wagner’s romantic hero Siegfried and you’ll get the spirit of Das Barbecu, the Hee-Haw-inspired adaptation of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Yes, that Ring cycle. It’s the same nineteenth-century opera series — Das Rheingold, Die Walkurie, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung — that retells the…
Art sometimes turns up in the most improbable places, manifesting itself in the most surprising ways. 9Muses Art Center is located in a nondescript strip mall in Lauderhill, and the artworks on display in the one-room gallery there, as well as those being worked on in the center’s adjacent studio…
