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South Asian Film Festival returns to the Enzian in early October

A demonic rideshare passenger, a washing machine-induced sexual awakening and a decades-long quest for male birth control all share screen time at this year’s South Asian Film Festival. 

The 32nd annual fest returns to the Enzian from Oct. 3-5 with five programs spanning romance, crime drama, documentary and horror that each make quick work of any idea of reducing South Asian cinema to Bollywood alone.
Orlando Weekly •

Brightline files for bankruptcy, secures $490M to keep trains on track in Orlando

Brightline’s parent companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, securing $490 million in new financing. Service between Orlando and South Florida continues.

Brightline Trains Florida LLC, which operates the passenger service, is not part of the bankruptcy filing, and the company says trains will continue running normally throughout the restructuring.

“This is a financial restructuring that is not expected to impact operations,” Nicolas Petrovic, CEO of Brightline Train Deve...
Orlando Weekly •

TouchGrass wants you to log off and go outside (to their music festival)

Step away from your screen and touch grass. No, seriously, there’s a whole festival for it. TouchGrass Music Fest makes its Orlando debut on Saturday, Oct. 3, with the extremely online goal of getting everybody offline for a day.

Created and hosted by streaming collective TouchGrass TV, the fest takes the internet communities built around music, gaming and content creators and drops them into the considerably more tangible environs of the Orlando Amphitheater.
Orlando Weekly •

Low-end maestro Thundercat brings the funk to Orlando

If you’ve been wondering where Thundercat — aka the “goth hoochie daddy,” according to his Instagram — has been for the past six years, well, the best way to describe it is Distracted. Luckily, he made a soundtrack out of it with the same name.

The album brings Stephen Bruner’s wonderfully scattered brain — and the bass playing that made him one of modern funk’s most recognizable low-end weirdos — into another warped jazz-funk playground that wants desperately to stay present in a life that str...
Orlando Weekly •

Melrose Film Festival highlights Orlando filmmakers on the rise

Not a single movie at this year’s Melrose Film Festival will ask for more than 10 minutes of your time, in case your commitment-phobia was already starting to flare up. The Orlando Public Library’s home-grown film fest returns with 31 selections spanning micro shorts, animation, documentaries, traditional shorts and a nine-film block devoted entirely to … AI? (disgruntled spit take) Yes, artificial intelligence gets its own hour on the bill, along with considerably more human-made films from Cen...
Orlando Weekly •

Hit musical 'Hamilton' returns for Orlando run

When Hamilton first hit Broadway in 2015, its vision of America felt almost inseparable from the moment that produced it. Eleven years later, the Founding Fathers are rapping again, but the country listening sounds a little different. Back in 2020, Lin-Manuel Miranda described the musical as “hopeful” to some during the Obama era and “defiant” during the (first) Trump era.

Now, as the United States marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, Hamilton’s arguments over immigration, rev...
Orlando Weekly •

Musical enigma Bonnie 'Prince' Billy back in Orlando this week

Will Oldham, as Bonnie “Prince” Billy (and other monikers), has spent more than three decades proving that a song is never truly finished. Through a long career spent performing as Palace (and all derivatives thereof) and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Oldham has repeatedly pulled his catalog apart and put it back together again in new and vivid forms.





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Orlando Weekly •

Orlando's New Wave Cabaret pays spicy tribute to actor Tim Curry

New Wave Cabaret knew Tim Curry deserved a burlesque show long before they knew it would also become a goodbye. 

The Orlando burlesque and drag production company first conceived of Spicy Curry: A Tim Curry Burlesque Tribute in late 2024, back when its producers were mapping out their first slate of shows. Curry’s body of work seemed tailor-made for their stage, as an actor whose career could jump from camp to horror, fantasy to comedy and still find room to be strange, flamboyant, villainous,...
Orlando Weekly •

Wu-Tang Clan in Orlando on farewell tour

Every kung-fu saga eventually reaches its final battle, and the Wu-Tang Clan have duly entered the chamber for one last time. More than 30 years after turning Staten Island into their own “Land of Shaolin,” the Clan is taking one last swing with Wu-Tang Forever: The Final Chamber.

RZA, the group’s founding member, once described their sound as a “home-cooked meal of hip-hop,” a recipe built from neighborhood rappers and the martial-arts films that helped shape the group’s mythology and sonics....
Orlando Weekly •

Orlando Mural Festival gives downtown a new coat of paint this weekend

Downtown Orlando is getting a very vibrant coat of paint this weekend. The Orlando Mural Festival returns for another year of turning blank walls across our city center into canvases for large-scale local art.

This year’s slate of muralists includes Boy Kong, Christian Stanley, Andrew Spear, Delia Miller and Rebekah Unsworth, among many others. The festivities kick off Thursday at CityArts with a Third Thursday reception featuring art from previous years’ muralists before the paint spills into...
Orlando Weekly •

Indie rockers Modest Mouse 'teleport' to Orlando's House of Blues this week

Modest Mouse returns to Orlando on Friday, just over a year after their last performance at House of Blues, this time behind latest record, An Eraser and a Maze. 

For vocalist and longtime core member Isaac Brock, part of the reward of still being on the road after three decades leading Modest Mouse is looking out at his audience and seeing more than one generation staring back.

“Once you go out there and see that everyone is the same age as you, you’re done! You know, when I was younger, this...
Orlando Weekly •

Comedian Gauri B brings her 'Years in the Breaking' tour to Orlando

There are safer places to sit than the front row of a Gauri B show. The Indian comedian has built a massive online following partly by catching unsuspecting audience members in her lethal crowdwork. But her “Years in the Breaking” Orlando tour stop gives us the chance to see what happens beyond the viral clips.

Gauri’s stand-up uses dark humor and a sharp wit to bring laughs around politics, culture, relationships and social taboos. And remember, laughing at someone else from the audience getti...
Orlando Weekly •

Honorary Orlandoans Arrows in Action play two big gigs at the Social

The gamer-to-musician pipeline exploded after games like 2005’s Guitar Hero and its later cousin, Rock Band, turned living rooms into makeshift stages. For Gainesville’s Arrows in Action, two of the trio’s members found their rhythm about five feet from a TV screen, plastic instruments in hand.

“I got to a level where the notes wouldn’t even show up on the screen anymore, so I basically memorized all of ‘Enter Sandman.’ At that point, I didn’t even play the drums, but I remember thinking, ‘I th...
Orlando Weekly •

Jack Harlow ready to take some musical chances onstage at Orlando's House of Blues

Weekend update: Orlando gets Jack Harlow for his only Florida show this weekend. You might remember SNL poking fun at him earlier this year with a note-perfect imitation (complete with bungled dap) after he said making newest album Monica made him “Blacker.”





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Orlando Weekly •

Bassist and bandleader LaVon Rushing celebrates his birthday with a jam at Judson's Live

What do you suppose a musician does on their birthday? Perform, of course. Orlando bassist, guitarist and bandleader LaVon Rushing spends his at Judson’s Live this week.

Raised in a musical family in Newport News, Virginia, Rushing brings a custom seven-string bass and an impressive  CV that includes sharing stages with Charlie Wilson, Hilary Duff and Yandel, plus international performances from Los Angeles to Egypt.

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Central Florida Sounds of Freedom Band and Color Guard Celebrates 15 Years of LGBTQIA+ Community with ‘Resilience’

Within the walls of First United Church of Christ in Orlando, the team that has made “Resilience” beat its tune for years honors the LGBTQIA+ community with perseverance through music. The sounds of tuning instruments and early rehearsal notes filled the room on Thursday, May 21, as members of the Central Florida Sounds of Freedom Band and Color Guard prepared for their upcoming performance, which will celebrate the organization’s 15th anniversary.

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