<span class="italic">The Real Housewives of Miami</span> is being given a second chance.

Proving yet again that Nostradamus may not have been so far off about 2012, Bravo is going forward with a second season of <span class="italic">The Real Housewives of Miami</span>, but, like many of its cast members, it’s going to be a retweaked version of the hideous, poorly rated original. Hollywood Reporter confirmed this, and then Bravo finally did too, late Thursday afternoon.

No artist owned 2011 quite like Adele, and she’s poised to sweep the major awards at the Grammys on Sunday night. If she does, she would become the first performer since the Dixie Chicks in 2007 to win awards for album, song and record of the year.

Some board members, major donors and dancers are questioning the earlier-than-expected retirement of Edward Villella, artistic director of the Miami City Ballet.

&bull;&nbsp;  <span class="bold">ROCK</span>

A look at the week ahead in the movies

Smash. 10-11 p.m. Monday. WTVJ-NBC 6.

I almost smiled during that Super Bowl ad where the dog goes on a diet so he can slip out his pet door and chase a Volkswagen. <span class="italic">Almost.</span> And if I hadn’t already seen it 30 times on the Internet...

With his deep voice, his sharp suits, his aviator glasses and the stage presence of a grown-up music fan, Don Cornelius was every bit the smooth TV personality on <span class="italic">Soul Train</span>, the nationally syndicated Saturday-morning show he created, produced, wrote and hosted from 1971 to 1993. Behind his blend of suavity and enthusiasm, and what he called “the hippest trip in America,” was a cultural mission.

Pop sensation Justin Bieber is in Miami-Dade and hundreds of teenage girls camped outside The Hit Factory recording studio in North Miami Beach.

The Latin rocker ventures into new territory with his first acoustic recording, an MTV project at the New World Symphony’s concert hall

Ben Gazzara, whose powerful dramatic performances brought an intensity to a variety of roles and made him a memorable presence in such iconic productions over the decades as the original "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" on Broadway and the film "The Big Lebowski," has died at age 81.

The four offerings at this year’s Here & Now Festival, Miami Light Project’s annual showcase of adventurous local performer/creators, are vivid and theatrical, if not always well-thought-out or deeply original. But helping artists develop under the spotlight of live performance is what this festival is all about.

"Soul Train" host Don Cornelius was the arbiter of cool, a brilliant TV showman who used his purring, baritone voice to seduce mainstream America into embracing black music and artists.

Spanish-language astrologer Walter Mercado is back at his home in Puerto Rico, where he continues recovering from surgery he underwent last week in Cleveland after he suffered a mild heart attack, his publicist said.

Though Miami’s Here & Now Festival has been going for a dozen years, there’s still a sense of excitement each time it rolls around. Will another performance art star emerge? Will a charismatic dancer we’ve admired turn out to be a better choreographer than the people she’s danced with?

The mind-bending duo is about to become a regular Miami presence.

A look at the week ahead in movies:

Silence was sort of fun for <span class="bold">Adele.</span> The British singer told <span class="bold">Anderson Cooper</span> in an upcoming <span class="italic">60 Minutes </span>interview (7 p.m. Sunday on CBS) that she was under orders to be silent for weeks after throat surgery but found an app that would allow her phone to do the cursing for her.

“I always say I’m responsible for the wedding, not the marriage.’’ That’s <span class="bold">Mindy Weiss</span>’ motto. The Los Angeles-based wedding planner to the stars has seen her fair share of happy endings — and ugly divorces.

Could this actually be a PR stunt? Or was it just a coincidence that <span class="bold">Arnold Schwarzenegger</span> and <span class="bold">Sylvester Stallone</span> were in the same pre-op room awaiting shoulder surgery? The former California governor posted a picture on his Whosay blog of the two action stars with IVs, waiting to get cut open. Arnold, 64, and Sly, 65, costar in the upcoming <span class="italic">The Tomb.</span> “After all the action, stunts & physical abuse shooting <span class="italic">The Expendables 2</span> and <span class="italic">The Last Stand</span>, it was time for a little tune up on my shoulder. Look who was coincidentally waiting in line behind me for his shoulder surgery.’’

Now we know why <span class="bold">Gary Busey</span> didn’t win <span class="italic">Celebrity Apprentice</span>. The actor, 67, isn’t too great handling his money. Court records show Busey filed for bankruptcy and is listing more than $500,000 in estimated personal debts and less than $50,000 in personal assets. The filing in Los Angeles provides few details but includes more than a dozen potential creditors. Gary’s manager <span class="bold">Ron Sampson</span> wrote in a statement that his client is on “a new and clear path’’ to personal and career success.

News correspondent <span class="bold">Roger Mudd</span> is 84. Actress-turned-politician <span class="bold">Sheila James Kuehl</span> (“The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” ) is 71. Singer <span class="bold">Carole King</span> is 70. Actor <span class="bold">Joe Pesci </span>is 69. Author <span class="bold">Alice Walker</span> (“The Color Purple”) is 68. Actress <span class="bold">Mia Farrow</span> is 67. Singer <span class="bold">Joe Ely</span> is 65. Actress <span class="bold">Judith Light</span> (“Ugly Betty”) is 63. Country singer <span class="bold">Travis Tritt</span> is 49. Actor <span class="bold">A.J. Buckley</span> (“CSI: NY” ) is 35. Actor <span class="bold">David Gallagher</span> (“Seventh Heaven” ) is 27. Actress <span class="bold">Camille Winbush</span> (“The Bernie Mac Show” ) is 22.

In case you were wondering: the war between <span class="bold">Brangelina</span> and <span class="bold"> Jennifer Aniston</span> is pure fabrication. And that’s coming from one of the horse’s mouths: Aniston, who is on the cover of InStyle’s March issue, comes clean about the issue once and for all and says the press has it all wrong.

<span class="bold">Raúl Esparza</span> has come a long way since making his professional debut in the 1989 premiere of <span class="bold">Luis Santeiro</span>’s <span class="italic">Mixed Blessings </span>at the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

<span class="bold">Chris Harrison</span> feels like a hero after outing <span class="italic">Bachelor </span>contestant <span class="bold">Casey Shteamer </span>for having feelings for her on again, off again beau back home. “In the end it was right for Casey to leave the show,’’ the show’s host blogged on EW.com.” Whether she’s in love with her old boyfriend or not is and was irrelevant. It’s very clear she isn’t in the right state of mind to find love with <span class="bold"> Ben Flajnik </span>right now. I’m glad I stepped in and talked to her.’’

Ronnie Smith, a Miami horn player who spent five booty-shaking years with K.C. and the Sunshine Band, then wrote Jimmie “Bo’’ Horne’s 1978 disco smash, Spank, has died at age 59.

Whether you’re dining in, eating out or taking out, we’ve got you covered for Valentine’s Day

<span class="bold">The goods:</span> Expect over-the-top parties and high-rolling meals at the Delano’s new restaurant, Bianca, managed by Las Vegas’ Light Group.

I am afraid that Havana 1957 is best known for its overpriced mojitos and sunburned tourists. If you want to stay on South Beach, you can go classic grunge with the iconic <span class="bold">Puerto Sagua</span> (700 Collins Ave., Miami Beach; 305-673-1115) or, a few blocks away, the recently renovated <span class="bold">David’s Cafe</span> (1058 Collins Ave.; 305-534-8736, www.davidscafe.com), which also has a location just off Lincoln Road. Either would work for affordable, authentic and delicious Cuban basics. My favorite dish is rope vieja (“old clothes”), a great shredded beef stew. Both have beer and wine and menus in English.

Give your game-day buffet a Mexican accent with recipes from the Cantina Beach chef

The first Shula Burger opens in the Keys, making the legendary Miami Dolphins coach’s empire even meatier

<span class="bold">The goods:</span> The revamped Surfcomber Hotel channels Southeast Asia with Lantao Kitchen + Cocktails, a stylish noodles and ribs joint named for an island in Hong Kong.

<span class="bold">Jean-Georges Vongerichten </span>has arrived in the Magic City. The acclaimed French chef delivers a “comfortable yet elegant hideaway” to the sparkling new <span class="bold">St. Regis Bal Harbour</span>, 9703 Collins Ave. <span class="bold">J&G Grill </span>promises a “curated selection” of Vongerichten’s greatest appetizers, sides and accompaniments paired with high-quality meats and seafood. Sweeping floor-to-ceiling windows and a muted zen vibe pair with a menu blending American, French and Asian influences. Look for cucumber martinis, Florida hearts of palm salad, Peekytoe crab cake, black truffle pizzas, roasted grouper, grilled veal chop, black truffle cheese fritters and kumquat mojitos. This is Jean-Georges’ second J&G Grill, following a 2009 opening in Park City, Utah.

Leave it to a country suffering from massive debt to give us a restaurant that understands our household austerity budgets.

Cupcakes capped with swirls of French buttercream lightened with egg whites sit beneath glass domes on a counter that also displays house-made granola, cookies and crackers at Bryan in the Kitchen, a bakery-cafe with a gourmet touch in downtown Miami.

What is it with New York water?

&bull;&nbsp;  <span class="bold">ROCK</span>

The Latin rocker ventures into new territory with his first acoustic recording, an MTV project at the New World Symphony’s concert hall

Production boasts brilliant performances, stirring orchestra, assured direction and opulent sets.

The New World Symphony’s audience — formally dressed inside and wearing T-shirts and shorts outside for the Wallcast — enjoyed a first-class evening of music at the Dance of Devotion program Saturday night. Mark Wigglesworth displayed prodigious musicality as the English conductor led the orchestra through Michael Tippett’s demanding <span class="italic">Ritual Dances</span> and Maurice Ravel’s epic ballet <span class="italic">Daphnis et Chloë.</span>

A high-spirited, sell-out crowd of 25,000 filled C.B. Smith Park for the 27th annual Kiss Country Chili Cook-off.

Etta James was remembered at a service Saturday attended by hundreds of friends, family and fans as a woman who triumphed against all odds to break down cultural and musical barriers in a style that was unfailingly honest.

&bull;&nbsp;  <span class="bold">COUNTRY</span>

New World’s Pulse and other experiments aim to infuse classical music’s aging audience with fresh blood

Poland’s Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra, which opens a 14-city U.S. tour this week with concerts in South Florida, is worth catching Friday night in Miami for as fine a performance as you’re ever likely to hear of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Read the review here: <a href ="http://southfloridaclassicalreview.com/2012/02/ohlsson-and-the-wroclaw-philharmonic-serve-up-inspired-chopin/" target="_blank">http://southfloridaclassicalreview.com/2012/02/ohlsson-and-the-wroclaw-philharmonic-serve-up-inspired-chopin/</a>

The watershed moment in Garrick Ohlsson’s career is often taken to be his 1970 victory in the International Frédéric Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, where he became the first American to take the gold medal. Read the story here: <a href ="http://southfloridaclassicalreview.com/2012/02/garrick-ohlsson-a-chopin-player-for-all-seasons/" target="_blank">http://southfloridaclassicalreview.com/2012/02/garrick-ohlsson-a-chopin-player-for-all-seasons/</a>

This week, students at Miami Northwestern Senior High are learning the choreography of Revelations in a workshop with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Director Michael Leeds and an artful cast deliver a richer take on a Neil Simon classic.

Some board members, major donors and dancers are questioning the earlier-than-expected retirement of Edward Villella, artistic director of the Miami City Ballet.

Individual tickets go on sale Saturday for the May 15-June 10 Miami debut of Disney’s megahit <span class="italic">The Lion King, </span>and the <span class="bold">Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts</span> is making sure folks notice.

Robert Caisley’s new play focuses on battling, self-absorbed twins.

A new musical about mental illness at Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables melds the arts with medicine

The four offerings at this year’s Here & Now Festival, Miami Light Project’s annual showcase of adventurous local performer/creators, are vivid and theatrical, if not always well-thought-out or deeply original. But helping artists develop under the spotlight of live performance is what this festival is all about.

Playwright Robert Caisley concocts a witty family feud in ‘Winter,’ which gets its New Theatre world premiere this weekend. Annemaria Rajala and Scott Douglas Wilson (center) play fraternal twins who have grave problems with their late mother’s assistant as they’re trying to arrange the funeral service. Barbara Sloan (left) and Nicole Quintana (right) are also featured in the play, which runs through Feb. 19 at the Roxy Performing Arts Center, 1645 SW 107th Ave., Miami. Performances are 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 1 p.m. Sunday (additional 5:30 p.m. shows Feb. 12 and Feb. 19). Tickets are $40 ($35 Thursday and Sunday evenings, $15 student rush tickets). Call 305-443-5909 or visit www.new-theatre.org.

Just as the <a href="http://www.beachedmiami.com/art-basel-miami-beach/">Art Basel</a> hangover is wearing off, galleries in <a href="http://www.beachedmiami.com//wynwood/">Wynwood</a> and the <a href="http://www.beachedmiami.com//design-district/">Design District</a> are ramping up for Art Wynwood, a fair that will feature more than 50 exhibitors during President's Day weekend. While certain galleries seem to be holding off their new exhibitions until closer to the fair, which is based in <a href="http://www.beachedmiami.com//midtown/">Midtown</a> (<a href="http://www.beachedmiami.com//2012/02/06/midtown-walmart-art-fairs/">for now</a>), there are plenty of new shows opening this week in time for <a href="http://www.beachedmiami.com//miami-art-walk/">Art Walk</a> on Saturday. Below are all the new exhibitions on our radar.

On most days, the vacant lot at 44 NE. 29 St. next to Morgan’s restaurant in Midtown is nothing more than a patch of grassy land with an abandoned old rusty trailer.

Miami-Dade’s oldest art museum celebrates a milestone as it seeks to make its wide-ranging collection better known.

Two exhibitions by women painters celebrate the human figure in unconventional ways.

A Fort Lauderdale artist has produced more than a thousand paintings and collages about the joys, hopes and horrors of the apocalypse.

To assemble an exhibition marking 60 years of history at the Lowe Art Museum, director and chief curator Brian Dursum turned to pieces that in some cases have never before been displayed.

These walls around me can talk and they have a heck of a story to tell — our history, Miami’s history.

In a pair of Bass Museum exhibits, creativity takes divergent forms

A photo gallery

An exhibit at Miami’s Bakehouse translates complex relationships into photographs, installations and poetry — and all the artists are female

<span class="italic">The Real Housewives of Miami</span> is being given a second chance.

You can’t hurry love. Nor, according to the producer of <span class="italic">Live! With Kelly</span>, can you hurry up selection of a TV co-host.

ABC’s paranormal thriller <span class="italic">The River</span> sinks some genuinely creepy moments into a muddy pool of tired scare tactics.

Television already has <span class="italic">The Biggest Loser</span>. Dr. Mehmet Oz is looking for the biggest number of losers.

Smash. 10-11 p.m. Monday. WTVJ-NBC 6.

I almost smiled during that Super Bowl ad where the dog goes on a diet so he can slip out his pet door and chase a Volkswagen. <span class="italic">Almost.</span> And if I hadn’t already seen it 30 times on the Internet...

Author and activist Maya Angelou hopes for a time when Black History Month will no longer be needed to explain the contributions of African-Americans.

The mysteries that surround the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” extend to co-creator Craig Thomas’ office on the Fox studio lot.

According to his A&E biography, “since the age of 15, Barry has made a name for himself as an antique collector.” He told AOL TV last year that he was also “in the produce business for 20-25 years, and I retired about four years ago. I just was traveling around the world and enjoying life, really. The way this opportunity came along was a close friend of mine, Thom Beers, who is the creator of the show, was over one night. I don’t know, we were having a few drinks. He said he was working on something with these storage lockers, and would I like to be a part of it? And basically that’s sort of how things unfolded.”

Eleanor Brown finds

An author has to be bold to write a book from the perspective of God. Even from theoretical physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, who first achieved literary success with 1993’s novel <span class="italic">Einstein’s Dreams, </span>it’s still a plucky gamble. In his new novel, Lightman again explores the creative scientific mind, here via the grandest of narratives — the creation of our universe from spur of the moment start to bittersweet end. It’s a literary experiment as heavy and airy as the Void in which the narrator Mr. g and his disapproving Aunt Penelope and steady Uncle Deva sleep and stroll.

Twenty years later, Barry Unsworth’s follow-up to ‘Sacred Hunger’ explores morality and history.

Volkswagen’s Beetle is an icon of two very different utopias.

“I’m reading <span class="italic">Mile Marker Zero</span> by William McKeen, which chronicles the Paris-like confluence of writers and artists in Key West in the 1970s. Makes you immediately want to buy a plane ticket south — and a time-machine.”

Compared with James Wolcott, most literary journalists write like Amish farmers, their sentences plain as bib overalls. Not so this longtime columnist for Vanity Fair. Wolcott’s prose is high-maintenance, bangled with astonishing similes and metaphors, oiled to a high gloss. This is language on parade, as restless as the hopped-up patter of a carnival pitchman, as zingy as H.L. Mencken mocking a revivalist tent show. Admittedly, some slower readers might be overwhelmed by all the action on the page, and yearn for the more sedate pace and gentler irony of what Wolcott calls “the E.B. White elf academy.” But if you can surrender to the rush of this swooping carnival ride of a book, you’ll have a wonderful time with <span class="italic">Lucking Out</span>. Memoirs don’t come more entertaining than this.

At this point in Tim Dorsey’s comic series about a serial killer who wreaks havoc on those who don’t respect Florida or its history, the Tampa author could easily give up any pretense of a plot.

Are we in need of a new <span class="italic">Jane Eyre</span>? Charlotte Bronte’s classic about a resourceful orphan — often called the first feminist novel — still holds up just fine, thank you. It benefits from a timeless story, unforgettable characters, thwarted romance, desolate settings, shocking tragedy and a mad wife in the attic. Who doesn’t love a mad wife in the attic? A recent film version featured rising ultra-hot stars Mia Wasikowska as Jane and Michael Fassbender as Mr. Rochester. No further proof is required of the book’s appeal.

Jan. 25 marked the one-year anniversary of Egypt’s “Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption and Unemployment,” so named by Wael Ghonim, the creator of a Facebook page that played a leading role in organizing the movement that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak and dissolved his ruling National Democratic Party.

An unearthed secret forces a family to confront their past.

In his prime, Gil Scott-Heron was a modern-day Harlem Renaissance man. Poet, novelist, musician, teacher, activist: When this rangy figure with a crooked grin burst onto the scene in the early 1970s, his inimitable mix of empathetic observation, sly humor and trenchant political commentary helped many understand — and even dream of solutions to — urban decay and government corruption. <span class="italic">The Revolution Will Not Be Televised</span>, an anthem for the era, today retains every drop of its insightful wit, and few songwriters have matched Scott-Heron’s perceptive takes on substance abuse. It is the bitterest of ironies that the artist himself succumbed to addiction to crack cocaine. He died last year at age 62.

Adele is the rare star who doesn't need multiple magazine covers, a cosmetics contract or a clothing line to sell albums. She does it all based on the strength of that sumptuous voice and those stirring songs.

"Stick Fly" won't be sticking around too much longer.

All your favorites

Crossword, Sudoku, Jumble & more

Today's winning numbers

Know before you go out today.