Qué Pasa, USA? returns – Miami’s Nostalgia for Cuban Nostalgia

Miami’s most culture-defining, groundbreaking TV series is coming back as a stage show. No, not Miami Vice. It’s Qué Pasa, USA?, the bi-lingual story of a multi-generational Cuban immigrant family that made legions of Cuban-Americans – and hyphenated immigrants after them – feel at home in their new country. Now Que Pasa, created and broadcast…

Read More

Passionately local and live – Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami

The two shows Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami present this month feature elements that are already starting to define the ardent year-old Miami troupe: partnerships with local dance artists, pas de deux, Latino character, and live music. Given that DDTM’s founders and directors are married couple and longtime partners Jennifer Kronenberg and Carlos Guerra, who’ve…

Read More

Miami Motel Stories – Wild History in Little Havana

(Actor Charles Sothers hosts Timeline Live 305. Photo Jordan Levin.) Miami Motel Stories, the marvelously inventive blend of theater, history, and neighborhood invocation running in Little Havana’s deliciously dilapidated Tower Hotel, is a hit. Good reviews and lots of buzz mean that tickets to the second floor, and its intimate room by room scenes, are…

Read More

An Our Town for our town.

The moment during Saturday night’s opening of Miami New Drama’s rendition of Our Town, the quintessentially American Thornton Wilder play, that felt most familiar was the one you might have expected to be the most “foreign.” Mrs. Gibbs (the charismatic and marvelously vital Chantal Jean-Pierre) and Mrs. Webb (the formidable Carlotta Sosa), stood side by…

Read More

Despacito Broke New Ground for Latin Pop – and for its Female Songwriter

Despacito has been steamrolling records – most streamed song of all time, most played song on Youtube, most weeks topping Billboard’s Hot 100 (in the version featuring Justin Beiber with original singers Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee), most popular song in Spanish. On a more subjective metric, it may be the most pegajoso earworm ever…

Read More

Miami’s Cultural Godmother is Leaving

(Photo – Mary Luft performing in 1979) Performance art? We got that. Contemporary dance? Check. Musical experiments? Yup. Shows in warehouses and other non-theater spaces? Absolutely. A spot on the U.S. cultural map? Sure. That we do owes much to Mary Luft, Miami’s cultural godmother. In 1979 she launched Tigertail Productions to present the radical,…

Read More

The French singer Edith Piaf owes much of her iconic status to having endured and triumphed despite her brutal upbringing – abandoned by her mother, raised in a brothel – and terrible losses throughout her short life. She transmuted her pain and strength into her music, creating a cathartic passage through heartache and beyond. The…

Read More

Invented Icons – Irene Williams, the Queen of Lincoln Road

(Eric Smith next to the Annie Leibovitz photo of his adored Irene Williams, the “Queen of Lincoln Road,” at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU. Photo by Jordan Levin.) Irene Williams, the fierce, elderly fashion iconoclast being celebrated in the show Irene Williams: Queen of Lincoln Road at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU this summer, was…

Read More

They’re Hot: Beloved Miami ballet couple keeps dance fever alive

[Carlos Guerra and Jennifer Kronenberg rehearsing “Transparente.” Courtesy Patricia Reagan Photography.]  Animated chatter in Spanish and English. Dancers and dances from Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, and Colombia. Generations of former Miami City Ballet talent. Dancers whipping across the studio to the tortured vocals of Cuban diva La Lupe. A recent rehearsal of the fledgling Dimensions Dance Theatre…

Read More

Bread, Roses, and a Declaration of Joy

[Photo – Jennifer Kronenberg and Carlos Guerra of Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami] This is a cultural blog, but celebrating culture often feels difficult these days. Politics is so enraging and frightening. The abuse, lies, stupidity and nastiness of President Trump; the meanness of politicians who seem determined to decimate support for the environment, health,…

Read More