It’s the tail end of the 1996 California primary election campaign, and incumbent Democratic Sen. Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days and famished, he channel-surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office. In a rare moment of lucidity, he has an inspiration: He arranges…
Roughly the size of a doublewide trailer, the performance space at Hollywood Boulevard Theatre is so small you can stare into the eyes of the actors, size up their varicose veins, and follow the trajectories of their spit with dumbfounding intimacy. As it happens, intimacy — or the spitting image…
On my way over to the Gallery Center in Boca Raton, I expected to find a row of quaint little shops side by side in some trendy shopping mall. With any luck one gallery might have some art worth getting excited about. What I found instead was a sprawling, 30,000-square-foot…
Ever since he was a kid, he’s loved the kitchen. The cooking. The baking. Ah, the baking. His mother first let him work with an oven when he was eleven years old. “Before that I was the mixer, egg-cracker, and bowl-licker,” Scott Reeves, age 32, recalls. “Bowl-licking was my favorite…
Thursday May 14 Delray Beach’s main drag, Atlantic Avenue, will be off-limits to cars between 4:30 and 11 p.m. today so that crowds can cruise the strip and check out its shops, art galleries, and restaurants. During Art and Jazz on the Avenue, which the city hosts five times a…
If you’ve seen the movie, you probably didn’t take the time to notice Jack O’Neil. But as Demi Moore struts on stage and takes it all off in Striptease, the Hallandale resident is right there, front and center. During the shoot, he was in the crowd of male admirers at…
The Horse Whisperer, the latest from Robert Redford — and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars — could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst filmmaking tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach, and, most important,…
Hurricane Streets comes on like a tough cookie but ends up just plain stale. First-time writer-director Morgan J. Freeman (no relation to actor Morgan Freeman) plies the kind of beat-up, trash-can naturalism that went out with Sal Mineo films like 1957’s Dino. Set in New York City’s Lower East Side,…
Of the potentially kooky types of people that could be dumped into a play — lawyers, clairvoyants, fast-food servers, and dying parents — the most unwieldy are the clairvoyants. Even if an audience buys the notion of second sight, the playwright is still stuck with a peculiar problem: how to…
Thursday May 7 Communication is key in the Broward County Parks and Recreation Tandem Bike Program for the Visually Impaired. “When two people lean in two different directions, the bike goes down,” explains Beth Bromley, a program instructor. Even riders with perfect vision may mix signals on a bicycle built…
Growing up in the beach town of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, Peter Giovenco was a pretty observant and resourceful kid. He watched in awe one day while a road crew tore up his neighborhood street during a repaving project. “Being a little kid, seeing a machine dig up half of…
Take the accordion out of Cajun or zydeco music, and what’s left is another musical style completely. “Without an accordion, you don’t have a Cajun band,” claims Junior Martin, an accordion builder from Lafayette, Louisiana. “It’s going to be something else. Maybe a country band or a bluegrass band.” It’s…
The flimsiest hustle in movie promotion today is that independent films are starved for mainstream attention. The truth is that such films often have an open field when it comes to big-city media. Major studios are usually unable to deliver a finished print of a would-be blockbuster until two or…
In the production notes for Spike Lee’s new He Got Game, the filmmaker is quoted as saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever done a film that is just about one thing….” That’s true: Usually he’s able to cram in two or three things. In He Got Game, for example, there…
If you sat through three hours of the Tony Award-taking, Pulitzer Prize-winning, mega-publicity-hyped musical that promised to change the face of Broadway forever, only to wonder, “Is that all there is?” — read on. If you heard about the ballyhoo last week at Miami Beach’s Jackie Gleason Theater (the touring…
If you happen to stop by the Schacknow Museum of Fine Art in Coral Springs, resist the urge to take a closer look at the austere, enigmatic sculptures dotting the center of the main gallery when you first enter. They’re worth waiting for. Proceed, instead, to the immediate left, warming…
It’s late — really late — but the all-night crowd at the Copa is eagerly anticipating its weekly lesson. More correctly, patrons of the Fort Lauderdale nightclub are awaiting the appearance of the teacher, Tiffany Arieagus. Her poise and personality drive the entertaining and instructional show Drag 101. Even as…
Thursday April 30 SunFest ’98, which continues through Sunday in West Palm Beach, has been referred to as “Florida’s largest music, art, and waterfront festival.” It draws top music acts, including Paula Cole and Sister Hazel, who perform tonight. Its juried art show includes works by more than 150 national…
In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey, Jr., plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York City actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo that he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic…
Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Miserables, which he began in 1845, runs in most editions to around 1500 pages. The most recent film version — there have been five other adaptations for movies or TV — runs a bit under two-and-a-half hours. It’s an expert piece of pruning. But do…
Antisemitropolis is the city Hitler never built. Blame that on playwright Dan Kagan, who imagines it as the name the Nazis gave their section of heaven — “a place with only people like them,” explains Jerry, a character in Kagan’s spirited black comedy Antisemitropolis, now getting its world premiere at…
How do you tell the difference between a Queen Anne and a Chippendale? Easy — just determine the gender. “Queen Anne was a female, and the chairs have curves, both the legs and the back,” antiques expert Sharon Kerwick explains. “[Thomas] Chippendale retained the same basic design, but chipped away…
