By Myles Ludwig Since mid-April to today, Big Media has submerged us in a swamp of the sensational and salacious, holding our heads down in one hot mess after another. We can barely come up for a breath before another epic wave knocks us over again: Boston bombers; Jodi Arias; the Cleveland 3.1; the Bangladeshi building collapse (bad news for WalMart Nation); military rape; … [Read more...]
Unsettling thriller ‘The Silence’ is impressive directorial debut
There’s something to be said for a well-done, straightforward thriller – the kind that doesn’t treat its audience like Silly Putty to be shaped and reshaped on a twisty roller coaster. Danny Boyle’s dreadful, masturbatory Trance contains a narrative puzzle so dense and disconnected that its logic doesn’t hold up to the most generous scrutiny. But, as simple marionettes in … [Read more...]
Sundays: The objects of all (teen) men’s desires
By Myles Ludwig We learn a lot early in our lives, even when we don’t know we’re learning. Those early impressions of childhood set the standards that accompany us for the rest of our lives, for better or worse. We don’t understand them then, and if you’re at all sensitive to the sashaying vagaries of your moods, you can choose to remain a prisoner in the cellular structure … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: Terrific ‘Millie’; sensational ‘In the Heights’
The musical theater, that uniquely American invention, has come a long way in the past 90 years. But if you yearn for the good old days when musicals made little sense and their cartoonish plots were little more than excuses to get from one production number to the next, then, boy, has the Maltz Jupiter Theatre got a show for you. It is Thoroughly Modern Millie, based on the … [Read more...]
Sundays: A wound that may never heal
By Myles Ludwig The earthquake and tsunami that hit the Solomon Islands hard has a personal meaning for me. I have lived and traveled in the region and experienced typhoons, hurricanes and tsunamis, and I know how devastating those experiences can be for anyone who survives. For weeks later, imagined sounds of winds and waves disturbed my sleep. I have a particular interest … [Read more...]
Heat and chill trade places in MCB’s first program
In its first program of the season, Fire and Ice, Miami City Ballet brought the work of three very different choreographers to bear, and with surprising results. The “ice” part of the program was Sir Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs, a light-hearted winter wonderland of skaters on a frozen pond that was reminiscent of a Hallmark Christmas card. Les Patineurs, set to music by … [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...]
Weekend arts picks: July 27-30
Theater: Musicals rarely attract the major money they need for full production these days without developmental workshops and staged readings. This Monday evening or Tuesday afternoon at The Plaza Theatre in Manalapan, a new show called Borscht Belt Bistro (music and lyrics by Ken Mazur) gets a tryout, prior to what playwright Carrol Mendelson hopes will be a production here, … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 7-12
Theater: In its 22 years of existence, Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival has already performed the Bard’s Twelfth Night twice, but it is going back to that well again, now that plans to tackle Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning have fallen through. Guest artist director Kevin Crawford was in the previous two production of the comedy about twins separated by a shipwreck, … [Read more...]
It’s hippie, dippy and substantial as pot smoke
Bruce Beresford, the Aussie director behind such gems as Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies, has become only the latest director of commercial cinema who has been relegated to indiedom – in turn suffering the limited distribution and paucity of TV ads that accompany the transition. But unlike a Jonathan Demme or William Friedkin, whose art has become too renegade for the … [Read more...]