CONTACT

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Bouncing Inferno to Disco Fever Miami Turns Up the Heat

Miami Herald Photo Gallery

After three months of intense coverage of the white hot Miami Heat Champions, with the Three Kings including LeBron James, my last two weeks of photography assignments have been extremely mundane.

No moving subjects. I’m typically greeted at the door of my next assignment with, “OK we’re here, what do you want us to do? Another, I have to create something out of nothing for a section front display, urgh!

Covering Wednesday’s press conference with NBA Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis was a good break when the Heat signed two players who have made a career out of spreading the floor and knocking down 3-pointers.

“You’ve got to double-team LeBron. You have to double-team Dwyane Wade. You’ve got to double-team Chris Bosh. And then you think they’re going to leave Ray Allen open?” 
Lewis said. 
Heat welcomes Ray Allen, Rashard Lewis
Next season will be phenomenal but in the meantime back to reality with an assignment from fellow staff photographer Carl Juste who’s on rotation working the desk. Shoot the dress rehearsal of a theater performance at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, no flash allowed.

My expectations are low until I walk into - THE DONKEY SHOW – a spectacular phenomenon that blends a crazy circus of disco music hits, go-go dancers, roller skaters, feathered divas and a full active bar becoming the ultimate party extravaganza! The floor show is inspired by William Shakespeare’s classic comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

It’s New York’s Studio 54 set in a club on the Ziff Ballet Opera House stage; the piece lets theatergoers get their groove on as the story unfolds in scenes all around them.

Well I’m a disco baby from the seventies so this was a blast from the past. Even Harry Wayne "K.C." Casey of the KC Sunshine Band, joined the audience on the dance floor.

Guests can live their own fabulous disco fantasy as the opera house stage is transformed into a mirror ball dance floor starting July 13 in Miami.
Miami Herald Photo Gallery

‘Donkey show’: Shakespeare + disco

The big event of the Arsht’s summer season is a wild immersive theater experience.  

BY CHRISTINE DOLEN 
CDOLEN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Diane Paulus is a hot director with a prodigious imagination, creativity she has brought to her work on pieces about war-protesting hippies, the beauty and pain of life on Catfish Row, and a dazzlingly transformed Shakespearean romantic comedy.

Her 40th anniversary reinterpretation of Hair for the Public Theater, her first stab at Broadway, won the 2009 Tony Award as best musical revival. Last month, her reworking of a towering American opera classic — dubbed The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess — won the 2012 best musical revival Tony. She has staged the new touring Cirque du Soleil show Amaluna and is working on a fresh production of Stephen Schwartz’s Pippin for the new season at the Harvard-based American Repertory Theater (ART), where she has been artistic director since 2008.

But in 1999, a decade before the fame and greater visibility of the past few years, Paulus and her playwright-husband, Randy Weiner, generated theater world buzz with a wild immersive theater experience called The Donkey Show. Read More Here