Cue the giant whooshing sound. Add a bombastic voice-over, a flashing graphic, some dynamic music. Cut to a man and a woman sitting behind a curved gray desk inside a vast room. In the background: video monitors, red railings, the bobbing heads of lackeys answering telephones. Dark-haired female: Good evening,...
Be honest. If someone told you ahead of time that you were going to see a play that depicts the coming of age of a young black girl somewhere in the South during the mid-'60s, you might want to respond, "What a shame! I have a root canal to attend...
A young man can learn plenty about himself and the world by taking the type of coming-of-age odyssey John Kretschmer undertook at age 25. Oddly enough, one of his lessons was that second-tier celebrities can be unkind. It was 1984, and the sailor had just logged 16,000 miles from New...
Calling the subject matter of Errol Morris' latest documentary, Mr. Death, "unpleasant" is like referring to the lavatory on a tuna boat as "lightly scented." The director who brought us the zany Americana of Fast, Cheap and Out of Control and the lukewarm Stephen Hawking snoozer, A Brief History of...
Juan Jose Reyes sits quietly in a conference room on the first floor of A.G. Holley State Hospital in Lantana with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes cast down. His gaunt face, partially hidden by a baseball cap, is expressionless. When he does speak, his voice is...
Aside from left to right and up to down, when it comes to reading menus and deciding what you want to eat in a restaurant, you have two choices. You can set your mind before you even glance at the bill of fare, going on what type of cuisine the...
It's OK. You can say it. Just five little words. Don't be shy. "I… am… a… wrestling fan." You certainly wouldn't be alone if you said it. Recent surveys show that as many as one in four Americans watches professional wrestling, and the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) routinely has the...
Clinton Disco and the Halfway to Discontent (Astralwerks) A Cornershop side project seems almost unnecessary. The British band -- best known for its hit "Brimful of Asha" -- merges Indian melodies and instrumentation with Western rock, folk, punk, and dance music. The Cornershop banner, in other words, covers a lot...
Alexandre Pires does not want to talk about the days when he played at weddings and wakes. Looking back over his career during a recent stop in South Florida to promote his latest CD, Juegos de Amor (Games of Love), the Brazilian singing sensation prefers to recall the time troubled...
Wearing a metallic red spandex top with holes that show off her melon-size breasts, a matching skirt slit to the top of her model-long legs, and silver lace-up go-go boots with four-inch stiletto heels, Leslie Glass is dressed for work. Writhing on stage and then pirouetting around a brass pole,...
Sometimes music doesn't need to be art. Just give the folks psychotic hillbilly gee-tar, lyrics celebrating an unholy alliance between food and sex, and throw some fried chicken around. That's the way Southern Culture on the Skids (or SCOTS, for short) does it. The Chapel Hill quartet is renowned for...
I write a lot about what diners should and can expect from restaurants. Most of the qualifications are givens: decent fare at reasonable prices in inviting surroundings. And when an eatery fails to live up to my, and subsequently your, expectations, I make sure to let readers (and restaurateurs) know...
Garry Shandling does not have a face for the big screen. He has a mug that seems to spread to the edges of the theater; it's like an approaching storm front, a sky full of billowing clouds roaring in from the north. And it's a face built for two emotions:...
"Too much of a good thing," Mae West once quipped, "can be wonderful." That's pretty much the position we're in this season in South Florida. Two weeks ago I wrote about the embarrassment of riches on display at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in "Paris 1860-1930: Birthplace of European...
They can snap off close-call medical emergency stories like cards from a deck, but the four gray-haired men lunching at Charley's Crab aren't playing cards. They're playing politics and telling stories. They figure their efforts could save the lives of the condo dwellers who populate the barrier island east of...
DMX … And Then There Was X (Def Jam) You'd be hard-pressed to find a hip-hop artist as formidable as DMX. Blessed with a raspy pit bull voice, he delivers his rapid-fire rhymes, which ricochet from the car speakers like a hail of errant bullets. But masterful delivery only partially...
First the good news: GableStage's new production of Killer Joe features smart staging and engaging performances, backed up by a terrific design team. South Florida theatergoers should consider themselves lucky to have this company in their midst. Now the not-so-good news: Despite the merits of this particular production, Killer Joe...
Stores in Miami's Overtown neighborhood were looted and set on fire in January 1989, after a Hispanic police officer fatally shot a black man in the area. Just a week later, a young college student named Eric Kline -- a white kid originally from suburban Boston -- headed into Overtown...
Used to be when you wanted good, cheap eats, you went ethnic: Chinese, Thai, Indian. The problem was that the reasonably priced food was usually accompanied by a distinct lack of décor. The meal might've been tasty, but the experience, for serious diners, wasn't really complete. In recent years, though,...
The roll call is impressive: Paul Cézanne, Giorgio de Chirico, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh. And that's just a dozen names, perhaps the best-known of the more than 75 artists included in the sweeping...
Paul Scott Abbott exhibits remarkable composure when discussing his four-year-old daughter, Ashleigh. Smartly dressed in a pressed shirt and tweedy sports jacket, he crosses one leg loosely over the other and places an open-palmed hand on his right knee. Only the occasional wavering of his voice reveals the strain of...
Ewan McGregor. You can't toss a caber in Scotland these days without toppling a gaggle of blokes who closely resemble him. Yet some magical combination of talent, charm, and shrewd management has thrown wide the gates of choice projects for the young superstar, whose résumé already glows like a career...
