We’re about two weeks away from the start of the new season at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County — and I’m not exactly counting down the days. Not that this looks to be a bad season. Oh, no. There is absolutely, 100 percent, no risk that this season will […]

We take so many things for granted. Like the Spam Allstars. The local Latin funk jam outfit has been playing among us so often for so long, it’s easy to forget how damn good the band is. And like Cuban music. It’s everywhere, with more killer musicians arriving from the island seemingly everyday. So big […]

Mia Leonin searches for her fairy tale origins Ever feel like you’re a minor character in someone else’s story? That’s exactly how I felt reading Mia Leonin‘s new memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press, 2009). Because that’s exactly what I am, a bystander and at times an enabler in the author’s […]

Lush Loggia to Vizcaya Museum No history, no problem. That’s always been the approach to the past in the Magic City. Just 20 years after the founding of the city in 1893, International Harvester vice president James Deering dreamed up a bayside palace that would look like it had been built in the days of […]

If you had asked me before last Friday night what other woman, living or dead, I would like to be, I would have been at a loss: Joan of Arc? Too crispy. Mother Theresa? No fashion sense. Billie Holiday? Too blue. But now, after watching the autobiographical documentary “The Beaches of Agnes” at the Bill […]

Forget about models and designers. The most fascinating figures in fashion are the editors of Vogue. That’s the premise of The September Issue, a new documentary from the team that produced The War Room — and the backroom brokering behind the magazine’s monster fall issue is every bit as riveting as the backstabbing of presidential […]

This has been an inspired season for adaptations: Madcat’s Elvis meets Moliere; Havanafama’s gay Bernarda Alba; and from New Theatre, a version of The Taming of the Shrew as Commedia dell’Arte. The style was wildly popular in Italy during Shakespeare’s lifetime, so it was not much of a leap to revamp the bard’s earliest comedy […]

Of course, nobody needs to queer up Federico García Lorca. Though the great Spanish poet and playwright struggled mightily to keep his homosexuality a secret during his lifetime, we now know that he had heartbreaking affairs with men, including the surrealist Salvador Dalí and sculptor Emilio Aladrén, both of whom left him for their future […]

The much anticipated opening of the TM Sisters installation/performance piece Whirl, Crash, GO! at Locust Projects drew a huge and creative crowd — so creative that the line outside made for a more interesting show than the performance inside. The jockeying for position was cut-throat as would-be patrons fought for the pink wrist bands that […]

Ever since I first saw the poster for The Harder They Come outside the Arsht Center early this summer, I’ve been eager to see what happens when Broadway meets reggae (well, okay, when reggae meets London’s Theatre Royal Stratford East). Could the ultimate slack of Jimmy Cliff’s performance in the 1972 movie survive the cheery lights […]

At first the idea of  “sweatin’ it” at Sweat Records was fun. But that was back in March, when the A/C at the record store-come-hipster meet-up-come cupcake and coffee shop had just gone on the fritz. Plus, the weather was still kind of cool. Six months on, the joke is beginning to wilt in the […]