By Dale King Delray Beach Playhouse continues to hitch its wagon to Neil Simon’s star as it opens its 69th season with the famed playwright’s first Broadway comedy hit, Come Blow Your Horn. It closes with a matinee Sunday. The Playhouse closed its 2014-2015 season with back-to-back Simon works: They’re Playing our Song, the Marvin Hamlisch-Carol Bayer Sager collaboration … [Read more...]
Sundays: King Tut’s coup
By Myles Ludwig To coup or not to coup, that has been the question in Egypt. Lots of money rides on the answer. Billions, in fact. Up until the sad, chaotic violence of recent days there, the galumphing of government, citizenry and military has often seemed to me like a Facebook War. Semantic shots were being traded between opposing forces, both of which were claiming … [Read more...]
Festival makes case for enduring power of poetry
By Tom Tracy Miles Coon is aware that some people’s attitude toward poetry is less than welcoming. Perhaps they have indelible memories of having to recite a bit of rhyme in front of their eighth-grade class, something about “gate” and “fate” that they could never quite memorize. Maybe they were confused and baffled by a first encounter with Walt Whitman, singing endlessly … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: ‘Birds’ compels without avians; ‘Venus’ actress captivates
When Alfred Hitchcock turned Daphne du Maurier’s apocalyptic novella The Birds into a movie in 1963, it became a visually literal thriller of avian menace instead of a character-based psychological tale. Now comes Irish yarn-spinner Conor McPherson (The Seafarer, The Weir) to translate the story to the stage, suggesting that man may have less to fear from feathered creatures … [Read more...]
The View From Home 34: New DVD releases, Jan. 10-31
As Brian De Palma and Stanley Donen understand all too well, there can come a time in every reverential filmmaker’s oeuvre when loving homage devolves into shameless mimicry. For these aforementioned filmmakers, features such as Dressed to Kill and Charade followed various Hitchcock blueprints so faithfully that the directors’ own voices risked being swallowed in a quicksand … [Read more...]
Rockers come and go, but The Dillengers stay on rootsy road
If history dictates one fact of musical life, it's that most bands are too big not to fail. That's because they're formed through relationships between three or more people, which makes them even more complex than romances. Most will therefore crumble within a year, and even successful ones are lucky to last for five. But 20 years? It's a mark only a few South Florida groups … [Read more...]
Psychedelic Furs let strong catalog speak for itself
The best furs don’t come from dead animals: they come with guitars, they jump and down, and they sing songs with a distinctive raw voice. British rockers The Psychedelic Furs are very much alive and still on the run, and they proved it song after song Friday night at Fort Lauderdale’s Culture Room. A simple stage, with no other adornment but the music, accompanied the band … [Read more...]