There have been so many recent movies about modern gay teenage life that one would think a filmmaker would be hard-pressed to find a new wrinkle on what has become an increasingly familiar tale. But Head On isn't a pro forma drama of self-discovery and self-acceptance. As directed by Ana...
Like most people at a recent performance of Arje Shaw's powerful work The Gathering, I had tears in my eyes by the end of the two-hour drama. And like many around me, I suspect, I found the plight of Gabe, the Holocaust survivor at its center, imperiously heart-wrenching. All the...
Like most sons, Rich Cohen loved to hear his father tell stories, but his pop's yarns happened to be true stories about Jewish gangsters in Brooklyn instead of make-believe fairy tales. Cohen, age 31, grew up in suburban Chicago, where his dad recounted being an adolescent in Brooklyn during the...
Bill Wetzel fidgeted in the waiting room of the Repository, a Fort Lauderdale sperm bank, while a technician retrieved his seed from the stainless steel vessel where it had languished in deep freeze for six years. In a scene straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the technician, garbed in...
Even before its release earlier this year, George Jones' Cold Hard Truth was already the most hugely hyped album in a recording career that has spanned the last 45 years. Why the hype? Two reasons: An alcohol-induced auto crash in March damn near killed the honky-tonk hero, which would have...
On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, while the rest of Broward County was frolicking in the surf or paying homage to mammon at one of our many temples of consumerism, six men gather in a sterile back room at the Imperial Point branch library on Federal Highway. Some are wearing...
Like her contemporary, the movie star James Dean, Patsy Cline arrived in pop-culture heaven prematurely, the result of a tragedy. She died in a plane crash in 1963 at the age of 30, leaving behind two small children and the work that resulted from 12 recording sessions, not to mention...
Bordered by plywood and chainlink fences and occupied by a large trailer, the heart of the Deerfield Beach Middle School campus might seem like a construction site. But it's really a destruction site. While the school is packed with 1500 seventh and eighth graders, it's undergoing what the School Board...
Hyman Kantofsky knew he was going to die. At 84 years old, the Deerfield Beach retiree was already in the advanced stages of pancreatic cancer and getting sicker every day. Kantofsky knew about the tolls of a prolonged death -- he'd cared for his own dying mother and father --...
Karen Stephens is such an appealing performer that I wish her one-person show were as compelling as she is. Called Out of the Box, the show is billed as a multimedia event that looks at "societal and racial parameters through the life experiences of a black American female and her...
Heather Duby Post to Wire (Sub Pop) Singer Heather Duby has one of those haunting, ethereal voices that makes everything she sings just a little bit melodramatic. On Post to Wire, Duby's debut longplayer, love and loss are frequent topics. The accompanying music, however -- cowritten with producer Steve Fisk...
Lou Bega A Little Bit of Mambo (Unicade/RCA) Mambo has always been a mongrelized genre -- a kind of catchall style that incorporates aspects of son, salsa, and danzón -- the primary goal of which is to get bodies onto the dance floor. But the label, elastic though it may...
Somewhere between the club crowd and the couch potato set lies a group that doesn't mind going out late -- as long as the effort results in some form of "cultured" entertainment, according to Cody Thomas. And Thomas, an actor and stage manager at the Academy Theatre in Fort Lauderdale,...
Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity, and half-baked scheming on the treacherous L.A. music scene. They know the territory. In 1988 the ex-UCLA Film School classmates wrote and directed Border Radio, one...
Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional, and The Fifth Element is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he's French, and sure, most of his films have a woman or girl as protagonist or savior; but...
Approaching Belle Glade on County Road 880 on Friday evening, the muck is all around you. The rich, sugar cane-yielding soil is closer to coal in color than most dirt. A sign along the side of the road welcoming you to town lays it all out: "Her soil is her...
I've always believed you can't go wrong with bread and salad. No matter how much of a failure a meal might be -- whether it's served in a restaurant or in someone's house -- guests won't leave a table hungry if they're supplied with plenty of crusty bread and fresh,...
Glen Berger's new play, Great Men of Science, Nos. 21 & 22, is a disaster of such epic proportions that it practically begs comparison to the Titanic and the Hindenberg. Indeed, ten minutes after it leaves port, so to speak, this world premiere by the author of A Suit to...
Andre Fladell is losing, and he doesn't like it at all. Under the hot midday sun, two lean twentysomethings, sporting tattoos and earrings, are pounding the middle-aged chiropractor and his partner, Bruno Garozzo, in a game of doubles volleyball on the sand in Delray Beach. Fladell and Garozzo keep making...
For the past 15 years, record producer Nick Funk has been on a self-imposed mission to document the creative talent of some of South Florida's best jazz musicians. He has done well, having recorded such locally based luminaries as multi-instrumentalist Ira Sullivan, tenor saxophonist Turk Mauro, drummer Duffy Jackson, and...
The premise is preposterous, the final score inevitable, and the record reading on the feel-good-ometer is totally predictable. But Mystery, Alaska comes furnished with some winning quirks and charms -- including a very funny bit concerning premature ejaculation at 20 degrees below zero. So even if you don't really believe...
For the past six years, Bobby Zapata has suffered from frequent seizures, possibly due to a childhood head injury, and can't work or drive. Even walking around the block is chancy. Depressed about his condition and inability to work, the stocky, wiry-haired 37-year-old recently started going for weekly counseling. Zapata,...
