Featured Film and Theatre Articles

West Side Story has been – and continues to be – a musical theater piece that inspires extraordinary work from the creative team at Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables. When the company first tackled the groundbreaking 1957 musical by composer Leonard Bernstein, book writer Arthur Laurents and a young lyricist named Stephen Sondheim, its 1997 production won seven Carbonell Awards, inclu..

Rebecca Joy Fletcher’s one-woman show, Ringing True, is personal, funny and above all intelligent theater. It’s this season’s second performance in Miami Theater Center’s SandBox Series, which offers theater artists the chance to develop and present new work with the assistance of a Knights Arts Challenge grant. The Chicago-based actress and playwright, who has previously performed at the..

The title of Terrence McNally’s It’s Only a Play, which is now getting a deftly fizzy post-Broadway production at GableStage, is meant as a kind of comforting mantra. The characters in McNally’s sometimes-vitriolic Broadway valentine are nervously awaiting reviewers’ verdicts on the new play The Golden Egg. Sure, that title is critical catnip, and everyone knows that the only review t..

It’s been a long time coming. Miami’s Fundarte had planned to bring a searing production of Antigone, or more precisely Antigonon, un Contingente Epico (perhaps best translated as a really big, maybe the biggest Antigone ever) to town last year. Everything was in place. Except visas, for this is a production from Havana. But the visas are here now, and the internationally celebrated El Pu..

In sculpting a life, the choices of the moment pave the road toward the future. The women of Gina Gionfriddo’s smart, funny, sometimes scathing Rapture, Blister, Burn have decided to pursue intellectually rigorous careers (or not), become wives and mothers (or not), settle for what they have (or not) as the clock ticks them into middle age. Gionfriddo’s thought-provoking, cautiona..

When trials and fears beset our lives, we humans find myriad ways to cope: concocting myths and legends, sending entreaties to God or the gods, letting our subconscious do the talking in nightmares. The characters in The Golem of Havana, the absorbing and theatrically savvy debut production from Miami New Drama, experience all of the above as Cuba descends into revolutionary chaos in 1958..

Two grand musicals infused with the sweep of history and a third about a father with a penchant for spinning tall tales lead the race for the 40th annual Carbonell Awards, South Florida theater’s highest honor. Announced on Wednesday, the 100 nominations in 20 categories include a competition-leading 10 for the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s production of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schö..

Featured Dance Articles

Trapped in a shoe store in Buenos Aires during an end-of-world hailstorm in 2001, I gritted it out as ice the size of ball bearings struck the steel roof like shotgun blasts. Later that afternoon it seemed to me someone had shaped a dance from the Southern cone climate when, at a dinner theater in Recoleta, an Indian from Argentina’s pampas (plains) rhythmically pounded the stage floo..

Is it really accurate to say a body dances across a computer screen if we consider the video we stream is nothing but a neat trick pulled off by lines of code and pixels? In her comments to the audience on the opening night of Program II at Miami’s Arsht Center, Miami City Ballet company director Lourdes Lopez asked the audience to reflect on the powerful contrast posed by ballet to our ..

Writer and performer Kristina Wong (kristinawong.com/) has made a career out of fearlessness. She has been a guest commentator for Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore. Her writing has appeared in Playgirl magazine. And lately she’s become a social media sensation, with essays on topics, such as the fetishization of Asian women and her Periscope jaunts through Los Angele..

Dance and film once again collide to create visual and visceral magic during Tigertail Production’s third annual ScreenDance Miami film festival January 21-23. Featuring dance films from all over the world, it opens at the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) on Thursday night with a slate of Dutch films from the famed Cinedans Festival in the Netherlands (tigertail.org/event_screendance1..

Glenn Edgerton is committed to presenting his audiences with the work of some of the best choreographers today. As Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s artistic director, he feels it’s his job to “push dancers to the next level. It’s important to work with emerging as well as established choreographers,” he explained during a phone call from New York, where the company is performing at the Joyc..

On opening night at the Arsht Center, Miami City Ballet’s second program of the season seduced the senses and engaged the mind. While the three featured works demanded regard for different movement styles and music, almost all performances proved equal in full-bodied response to the choreography at hand. The grades of physicality, guarded to unleashed, held us in wonder about dance --..

Miami choreographer and dancer Pioneer Winter knows a thing or two about producing a live performance piece that integrates its surroundings in order for the piece to become fully realized. His Ebb/Flow took place aboard a floating canoe in Biscayne Bay for the SoBay Festival of the Arts in 2012, where Winter along with dancer Marissa Nick, engaged in a dance fight. As integral as the cho..

The personal ad promised “sex that could change the world.” “No strings attached,” it continued. So begins Boom, dramatist Peter Sinn Nachrieb’s much lauded theatrical adventure. After a long list of engagements in avant-garde spaces in New York, San Francisco, Seattle and beyond, Boom will have its South Florida premier on four consecutive January weekends at North Miami’s Museum of Cont..

As many fans of Miami City Ballet know, a new addition to this year’s lineup is principal ballerina, Simone Messmer. Recently Artburst had the chance to sit down with Messmer at La Folie café on Espanola Way. Fresh and animated in white sweat pants and pale blue halter-top, arms crossed as she smoked a cigarette, her posture was so relaxed it was difficult to take in at first that this wa..

I remember the nightmare -- there I was, locked in a row at Chicago’s Auditorium Theater as a six-month old went berserk at the very moment the Joffrey’s Maia Wilkins began the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Now when parents ask me, “Is my child old enough to see the Nutcracker?” part of me wants to say, “Maybe not this year. Take them when they’re 40.” But isn’t the wish for a Nutcr..

Featured Music Articles

Jazz and skateboarding? Sure, why not? Young Arts’ Outside the Box series continues Saturday with a presentation melding the two. Performing will be composer and pianist Jason Moran and his band, skateboarding legend Mark Gonzales, and skaters from the Miami area and beyond. Growing up in the 1980s, Moran, who is artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center and winner of a 201..

Jazz is America’s musical gift to the world, which has seasoned it and given it back in many forms. One of them might be described as “Jewish Jazz.” That would be the contribution of Israeli-born saxophonist and composer Daniel Zamir, who performs in South Florida for the first time on Saturday. His quartet headlines the culminating concert of the Miami Beach Jazz Festival, which has ..

Singer and songwriter Joan Soriano seems to embody the very history of his music. Like bachata, the guitar music from the Dominican Republic he so soulfully interprets and composes, Soriano comes from humble beginnings but has found his way around the world of popular music. On Friday, Soriano will perform at the Koubek Center, presented by MDC Live Arts. Now enormously popul..

This Sunday, January 30th, the Nu Deco Ensemble will make their Miami Beach debut at the historic North Beach Band Shell off 74th Street and Collins. The program will feature the music of Daft Punk, JS Bacj, Andy Akiho, George Bizet, LCD Soundsystem, Greg Simon, Sam Hyken -- and a special collaboration with the Spam All-Stars. A 2014 Knight Arts recipient, the Nu Deco ensemble set ou..

After playing a couple of pieces -- and even with news of a blizzard hitting the East Coast as background -- New York-based trumpeter Christian Scott addressed the still enthusiastic, hardy crowd at the North Beach Bandshell and noted the obvious: “It’s cold. We thought we were escaping the cold coming to Miami, but I see that we didn’t.” The chilly temperatures didn’t seem to affect ..

artículos en español

Comparten historia, elementos de culturas diversas, y sobre todo, pasión. Así, es más lo que une a dos vertientes musicales diferentes como el flamenco, máxima expresión cultural de la región sur de España, y la música ladina, esencia artística de los judíos españoles, o el pueblo sefardí. El domingo 24 de este mes, esa pasión común por la vida se desbordará en un espectáculo llamado ..

El trabajo como pianista y compositor de Chucho Valdés, 74, lo ha establecido hace tiempo como una figura trascendental en la música cubana de los últimos 50 años. Pero más allá de su virtuosismo en su instrumento o sus composiciones, para muchos, su obra más notable ha sido la creación y dirección de Irakere, el excepcional grupo de jazz afrocubano que marcó un hito en la historia del jazz la..

En esa tan españolísima expresión de baile y música que es el flamenco, una mexicana ha venido arrancando aplausos dentro del género, no solo en la propia España, sino más allá. Karen Lugo (https://www.facebook.com/karen.r.lugo.5) es la primera en admitir que le resultó intimidante bailar en casa del trompo, y que su pasión por y la entrega hacia el flamenco llamaron la atención de mu..

El flamenco es música de mezcla y posibilidades. Tiene una historia que se pierde en el tiempo y raíces que se extienden desde la India hasta el sur de España. Es una música prodigiosa, que ha tomado forma absorbiendo y aflamencando a su paso, del Oriente al Mediterráneo, ritmos e instrumentos, culturas e historias. Y en su ida y vuelta a las Américas, el flamenco ha hecho suyos ritmos y ..

El éxodo del Mariel (1980) fue uno de los capítulos más dramáticos en la historia del exilio cubano, inesperada crisis migratoria para los Estados Unidos, y desafío de proporciones colosales para el sur de la Florida. Con el pasar del tiempo, es fácil olvidar y caer en la complacencia. Por ello, muchos cubanos como Neri Torres (https://www.facebook.com/neri.torres.90) consideran imprescind..