The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 55

Friday December 20 1985 The Miami Herald Section A Chorus Line lA Chorus kicks off a blockbuster movie weekend brightest boats to float James Taylor sings Sunday 10D By LINDA ROBERTSON Herald Staff Writer While the waterways up North freeze into hockey rinks Fort Lauderdale will celebrate its tropical Christmas with a holiday boat parade down the Intracoastal Waterway About 125 floats propeller-driven will cruise from Port Everglades to Lake Santa Barbara Saturday starting at 6:30 pm in the 14th annual parade Jim Bronstein captain of the flagship Spencer Boat 84-foot wooden yacht Dream-boat plans to blast Teggae Christmas carols from the stereo system lllard ocott Dreamboat will also be festooned with 6000 lights including an illuminated beach-scene mural originally from Minnesota where the only water sport this time of year is Bronstein said heard this is the most beautiful parade in the Among the other lavishly bedecked which pay $1500 to enter and spend up to $10000 on decorations is Am way 134-foot Enterprise III Its illustrious passenger log includes the grand marshals Tonight Show bandleader Doc Severinsen and Today Show weatherman Willard Scott If trademark loud clothes blow a fuse spectators will be able to hear him on trumpet Miss Universe will ride in wake aboard the 114-foot Miss Columbo which is equipped with eight TV sets and seven bathrooms if she gets bored or seasick parade is a great time for boat owners to show off their biggest said Ken Denison vice president of Broward Marine builder of the Miss Columbo The parade route is also the perfect place to throw the annual egg nog and fruitcake soiree as much partying at every waterfront house as there is on the Denison said But for those who receive an invitation the best viewing area is Birch State Park located on Sunrise Boulevard at A1A Another viewing site is the city parking lot on the east side of the Intra- Please turn to PARADE I0D Greet those dancing feet in 442nd By BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic A Chorus Line is overblown and self-conscious a travesty upon its celebrated source material and for a film about dancers much too casual in recording their art It is also one of the singular pleasures of this movie year This is so because movies and plays are not the same thing A movie as opposed to a filmed play cannot afford to ignore the possibilities of itself A movie must move pull back for perspective and just as surely close back in for intimacy to fill the screen with a smile -or a frown or a kiss The ability to do this has long since become a mandate lest moviegoers bolt for And this single distinction one of many between theater and film is profound enough to assure that the two never meet When Richard Attenborough holder of Oscars for Gandhi but not uniquely suited to bring most beloved show to the screen approached A Chorus Line he did so as a conservator of the source He knew he had to some but he did not want to take us home with Zach the choreographer or Cassie his former flame or back into the lives of the 16 auditioning Broadway Attenborough did yield on Zach and Cassie whose romance now looms larger than it did on stage The three flashbacks are quick pops there are Zach and Cassie meeting there they are exchanging glances but they are distracting nonetheless Still they serve to give the movie a second focus for those to whom the travails of the dancers really need this are not quite conventional enough as drama Now A Chorus Line is a specific intimate romance as well as an ode to am- Please turn to CHORUS LINE 8D The Color Purple Spielberg drama tugs at the heartstrings By BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic Steven Spielberg whose name is synonymous with special effects and giddy adventure stories has made a character drama The world waits and wonders: Is The Color Purple lunge for among the Oscar crowd who denied him on ET? Is this Spielberg the big rich kid finally of growing up? Are there any monsters this time? Hollywood does make us silly The Color Purple is a movie about two black women in the rural South early in the century based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker and Spielberg made it because he loved the book There are no monsters though there is a quorum of bad Please turn to PURPLE 9D Meryl Streep and Robert Redford find romance against a vast and ennobling landscape with lions and Cape buffalo and Masai warriors in of Out of Africa Great romance is first-rate entertainment By CHRISTINE ARNOLD Herald Theater Critic Forget the fact that it contains every showbiz cliche since Busby Berkeley was a baby Forgive the one glaring error in casting This time endure the sporadically fuzzy sound and the occasionally ear-piercing voice levels Just come and greet those dancing feet in 42nd Street not supposed to make musicals like this one anymore but in 1980 producer David Merrick and director-choreographer Gower Champion did anyway It opened to acclaim on the day Champion died of cancer and still going strong on Broadway more than five years later Now the road company has arrived to begin Zev season at the Miami Beach Theater of the Performing Arts and a flashy beginning it is 42nd Street is a terrific tap dance treat Based on the 1933 Berkeley movie musical 42nd Street tells the story of the naive yet amazingly talented Peggy Sawyer (Gail Benedict) an aspiring chorine from Allentown She has come to audition for Pretty Lady a reputation-saving show for embattled director Julian Marsh (Barry Nelson) Almost immediately Peggy runs afoul of the Please turn to 42ND STREET 20D By BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic Isak Dinesen had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills She also had a ear and an eye After the farm had failed and she had returned to her native Denmark Dinesen created a body of work on her experiences that is among the most luminous and buoyant in contemporary literature Out of Africa was the big one Shadows on the Grass a collection of stories smaller but no less beautiful They are principal sources for Out of Africa Sydney large and exquisitely crafted attempt to bring words to the screen And just as surely as Out of Africa is an adulteration of the source so is it a piece of first-rate entertainment an Oscar-bringer Converting writing which works not by dramatic device but the steady accumulation of rich meticulously wrought detail to the screen is at least as chancy a project as Richard dance with A Chorus Line And that presumably is why Pollack turned to supplementary sources including a collection of letters and several biographies for the focus book was a hymn to Africa with coy references to her long romance with the rogue aristocrat Denys Finch Hatton movie unsurprisingly is a grand romance with coy references to the early 1900s Africa that Dinesen knew And all Out of Africa is at its heart: a romance against a vast and ennobling landscape with lions and Cape buffalo and Masai warriors and Kikuyu servants each having a moment or two in the glow of the great romance But it is still a movie of a scale and tone uncommon to Hollywood films It has the Hollywood dress: Pollack the quintessential Hollywood director working with stars of the first magnitude Meryl Streep and Robert Redford who are so much larger than the material that Out of Africa very well have been anything but a star-borne weeper No matter that the stars seem actually more engrossed in the fact of their starring than anything else Redford walks through but how could he do otherwise? The part calls for a dashing handsome loner master of all he surveys save his Please turn to AFRICA 6D Whoopi Goldberg excels as Celie who rises above years of mistreatment in Color A -V ft to- INSIDE The irreverent Motley Crue 18D Art 22D Concerts 20D Dining 141621D Movies 4D20D Nightlife 21D On the Town 15D Potpourri 22D Theater 20D DIFFERENT BUT STILL WET Six Flags Atlantis reopens this Saturday after an eight-week cosmetic overhaul Park guests will notice flowers and bushes throughout the park more shady spots more paddleboats and warmer colors See Potpourri 22D WINTERFEST WARMS TO A BIG FINALE this weekend The Beach Ball has triple-stage entertainment artists crafts and food on A1A Sunday The Christmas Boat Parade Saturday answers the burning question: the current current used to conduct 125 yachts down the Intracoastal at the speed of Willard Scott and Doc Severinsen? See Potpourri 22D THE FOR VERSATILE the for energetic the for respiratory readiness and the ready to hang on the marquee Ben Vereen the song-and-dance dynamo headlined Broadway TV and movies will be starring at the Diplomat in Hollywood from Christmas through New See Concerts 20D TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH feature And You Knew Susie Like I Knew probably enjoy a trip to a new vaudeville cabaret revue opening at the Sans Souci Hotel in Miami Beach Get ready to sing along with great hits from the era of Fanny Brice and Eddie Cantor See Nightlife 21 SEPARATED TWINS a young woman disguised as a boy love with the improper stranger who else but William Shakespeare could craft exquisite comedy from those complications? Canada's Stratford Festival brings Twelfth Night to Palm Beach's Royal Poinciana Playhouse on Christmas night for a run in repertory with King Lear See Theater 20D Vereen.