The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 169

Art: DeStaebler show 5L Music: Classical recordings 6L Movie Times: 7L The reel fest: Few thrills some revelations Dill Cosford Cannes Film Festival t- only five of the official selections have been rated Nonetheless there have been some revelations Two of the selections are likely to be talked about for a long time Kiss of the Spider Woman made in English by Brazilian director Hector Babenco (he made the startling and quite popular Pixote of several years back) is easily the most polished film from Brazil in memory It looks and moves like a Hollywood drama but it is driven by fantasy sequences that mark it as something quite different William Hurt and Raul Julia play inmates in a Brazilian jail a prototypical hellhole character a homosexual imprisoned on a child-molestation charge fills his days recounting the plots of his favorite movies fantasies that he embel delayed by the war until 1946 was begun as an antidote to the original European film festival at Venice which was launched by Benito Mussolini and used by him to glorify whatever support for fascism could be found in European movies The notorious film market did not come until 13 years after Cannes began and the full spectacle of dueling moguls and corporate money scrambles is an even more recent phenomenon So Cannes culls hundreds of films officially selects a couple of dozen and honors only a few dozen more in such sidebar events as the Fortnight and A Certain Look Cannes often uncovers new talent even new national cinemas (the New Wave Germans got their first big exposure here) before anyone else the New CANNES France And then there were movies Along with the other things it is famous for Cannes does 'actually introduce new films from strange lands and equally strange filmmakers There is art here even if you do have to dig for it (usually under piles of promises andor money) easy to forget that less elevated event the circus of promotional activity that rarely touches art but does graze vulgarity is second to the festival itself is only indirectly supported by it in many cases and came well after Cannes was established as a showplace for ambitious films from Hollywood and Other lands The first Cannes planned for 1939 but lishes richly a political prisoner undergoing periodic torture is an idealist but also enough of a realist to scorn retreat into fantasy and self-reinvention Sonia Braga plays the Spider Woman herself appearing only in the fantasy scenes which are dazzling and frequently quite funny a lot going on in Kiss of the Spider Woman and though at bottom it is little more than a variant of two-guys-in-stir it is so well made and ultimately so tender that it is likely to find a large American audience (at least by the box-office standards of foreign films) It also has splendid performances this may be the best of career and if Kiss of the Please turn to COSFORD 4L York Film Festival which does the same thing five months later in turn often skims the best of Cannes This Cannes has not stirrecl the blood of the assembled critics in Screen daily survey of critics from 12 countries (the United States is represented by Dave Kehr of The Chicago Reader) Black theater: The plot thickens By VICKI SANDERS Herald Theater Critic Examine the Upgrove Theatre five-year history and you see it in a hall of mirrors: looking every which way for audiences money hands-on support finding mostly illusion' Five years ago Jon Morgan then a 27-year-old dreamer with some arts management experience and a community-college education in theater made what he has sometimes since considered a ridiculous decision to form a blapk theater company in Miami where actors technicians directors and designers could get experience and prepare for careers as they simultaneously filled a cultural gap in the community The reality has been much harsher no permanent home no staff minimal community support from blacks or whites accumulating debts hard feelings among the artists when money runs short Even the artistic achievements particularly For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide at the Caleb Center in 1980 Runaways at the Victor Hotel on Miami Beach in 1981 Black Nativity at Caleb in 1982 and An Evening With Langston Hughes at The Place at Palm Bay this year have not been able to halt the erosive effects of a deficit now at $30000 "He has zeal going for good productions he recognizes the difference between doing it and doing it says former Metro Commissioner Ruth Shack who lent political and moral support to enterprise in its early years But she adds shortcomings have always been in business and that has chipped away at his Arts activists credit tremendous enthusiasm persuasiveness and artistic integrity with keeping Upgrove alive But the near-fatal flaw they contend has been his lack of administrative and fund-raising skills Morgan concedes he has tunnel vision at times but defines the problem differently: weakness is not having had the proper tools to work with effectiveness and I think that often appears as in over his says Shack had precious little support from the people around board of directors has for years shown more good intentions than results It is currently revitalizing itself with new and more active members needs workers and names a strong board willing to get its hands says Philip Church associate director of the theater department at Florida International University Church was to have directed Athol in Please turn to UPGROVE f3L The troubling transition are under way and there are another half-dozen in the planning stages Where once there were cute little cottages now there are five-story office buildings brick or concrete edifices with grandiose aspirations Inevitably inexorably Coconut Grove is becoming a town of deluxe destinations: boutiques cafes offices apartments and hotel suites and all very elegant all very upscale Gone are the Martinburgers dispensed from a truck on an empty corner lot Gone are the wooden shacks where wind chimes or plants or stained glass were sold Gone is the tawdry old Winn-Dixie that often had as many shoppbrs arrive by bicycle as by automobile Coconut Grove never had much in the way of illustrious architecture a faintly pleasing facade here a charming old cottage there Even in the neighborhoods the architecture was fairly erratic and seldom grandiose But the absence of architecture in its dogmatic sense has been a blessing: It Please turn to GROVE 4L By BETH DUNLOP Herald Architecture Critic Goconut Grove has many burdens to bear: It is the quaint village the hip urban gathering place and the chic shopping center for all of South Florida All at once supposed to be Mystic Seaport and Greenwich Village Savannah and Georgetown which is a lot to ask of any little community Really it is simply a 120-year-old seafaring settlement a village that became a town that became a city within a city It has glorious vegetation rather ordinary architecture fairly bedraggled commercial streets and maddening traffic problems A funny kind of urban chemistry is at work in Coconut Grove: not how it looks that makes it special nor there to buy or eat or see Yet Coconut Grove is an utterly appealing place frowzy funky free-wheeling and occasionally even fancy Its allure comes from its human scale its captivating vigor its sometimes jarring juxtaposition of Village of contrasts and target of developers the Grove has a unique appeal that may be its undoing the tawdry and the opulent Contrived and casual bizarre and bustling it all adds up to serendipity adds up to Coconut Grove It is this incredible mixture of urban identities that has made it so very popular among the young the old the offbeat the staid Yet popularity may be its undoing Up and down the main commercial streets developers are coming At least a half-dozen sizable new projects shops apartments hotels offices When too much is not enough Mayfair is the product of architect Kenneth wide-ranging passions Architecture Review TV dinner On fall season menu: More stars sitcoms By STEVE SONSKY Herald Television Writer This fall television will serve up 22 new dishes to be digested over 17 hours of programming The menu includes more sit-" corns more blacks more visually slick musically enhanced shows more recognizable old stars more horror and fantasy more anthologies and more characters you can with Gone by the winter burp maybe all of the above? Analyzing trends of any kind is an imprecise pseudo-science that justifies what is little more than guesswork by a lot of high-paid executives true of the stock market whose path the experts seem to guess wrong at least as often as they guess right true of football where one season the vogue is Redskin-like ball control the next Marino-esque bombs away And probably most true of television where more bombs drop than in any industry this side of the Pentagon where from year to year the poor experts at the networks on Madison Avenue and at newspapers flail away trying to gauge that flimsiest that most fickle of measurable elements public taste What is there to go on? Nothing more than the proverbial worked last the desperate hope that what did just a one-show phenomenon (example: the human cartoon style of The A-Team) but a form with inherent audience appeal that can be replicated to anchor an entire schedule (example: Dallas which begat Knots Please turn to TELEVISION 2L By BETH DUNLOP Herald Architecture Critic No doubt about it Mayfair is an extravaganza From its flowing fountains to its brass-and-glass elevators from its swirled pink stucco to its florid embossed concrete this place is a spectacle It is incessantly lush endlessly lavish By the end it will have cost $100 million and will include 100 shops six restaurants a 185-room hotel a private club and a spa It has hand-crafted mahogany furniture from Guatemala and Honduras stained and etched glass from Miami (and some antique Tiffany stained glass as well) and tiles from Spain and Italy and Tampa Images are everywhere: There are allusions to the past or the exotic references to places far-flung organic shapes and intricate designs in the fountains in the walls in the furniture in the elevators It is a deluge of images and Mayfair virtually reverberates under all of it The first portion Mayfair East opened in late 1979 since then it has been growing consuming ever more of Coconut Grove This month the shops and restaurants of Mayfair West will begin to open Still to come is Mayfair House which is structurally part of Mayfair West a hotel on the top three floors of this sprawling block-big building Officially Mayfair has three owners architect Kenneth Treister developer Joseph Garfield and mall maker Edward DeBartolo and two architects Treister and Antonio Cantillo But this complex which sits on 45 acres 2 Vi blocks of central Coconut Grove is primarily the product of one person Treister himself Treister is inventor he conceived it and evolved it As a designer as a photographer as a writer as a lecturer Treister is obsessed with architecture His fascinations are far-flung but among them: Frank Lloyd Wright Paul Rudolph Charles Rennie Macintosh and Antonio Gaudi art nouveau and the arts and crafts movement the architecture of Greece Italy Spain and Japan indigenous peasant architecture and the architecture of South America Into Mayfair Treister poured this lifetime of learningHe designed it to last 400 years he says with indestructible Brazilian ipe wood and concrete and stone Every curbstone every light fixture ev- Please turn to MAYFAIR 4L Images and textures abound at the Mayfair in Coconut Grove i.