No Child… Through May 17 at GableStage at the Biltmore, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables; 307-446-1116; gablestage.com Here’s an original story idea: An idealistic teacher goes to an inner-city school and teaches a bunch of toughs about the beauty of learning and art, and gives them an inkling of their…
Mauritius By Theresa Rebeck Through May 17 New Theatre 4120 Laguna St., Coral Gables 305-443-5909 new-theatre.org Mauritius is a play about overvalued bits of paper and the way people screw each other over in order to get them. We’re talking about stamps, but also money — both figure heavily in…
The Odd Magic of New Theatre’s Mauritius
Mauritius is the best play ever written about stamps. Well, it’s not really about stamps (though philatelists will probably get a giddy jolt from its characters’ learned discourse on all things stampy). Like Terrence McNally’s The Lisbon Traviata, Mauritius uses the quirky passions of a small group of people as…
The story is this: A woman is hired to teach theater to a bunch of tenth-graders in the Bronx. They jeer at her. They test her. But she challenges them and, against long, long odds, wins them over. Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. To say that No Child… bears an unfortunate…
Too much has been said about Lela Elam for this statement to make much of an impact, but here it goes: Lela Elam is a great actress. And though her current play, No Child…, probably has a profound message to share — something about hopes and dreams and the innate…
Broadsword, a new play showing at the Mad Cat Theatre Company, is the story of a fictional New Jersey metal band that never went anywhere. The guys broke up 19 years ago. Their former lead guitarist, a reclusive genius named Richie, has disappeared. He had spent his life in his…
Mad Cat Theatre Dabbles in Diabolism with Broadsword
Truly, the secret to Les Misérables’ stunning success is its target demographic. This is theater for people who do not like theater, a musical filled with characters you don’t have to get to know, espousing a message you don’t have to think about (indeed, which crumbles on contact with anything…
Les Misérables By Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil. Directed by David Arisco. Through April 5. Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables; 305-444-9293; actorsplayhouse.org Truly, the secret to Les Misérables’ stunning success is its target demographic. This is theater for people who do not like theater,…
The Glass Menagerie By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Ricky J. Martinez. Through March 29. New Theatre, 4130 Laguna St., Coral Gables; 305-443-5909, new-theatre.org Where the hell is Tennessee? You’ll never miss Mr. Williams more than when exiting the tiny auditorium at The New Theatre, fresh from a new production of…
The amazing thing about Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, now playing at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, is the way it keeps telling you things, no matter how many times you’ve seen it. After Saturday’s opening-night production, Carbonell voter Marzi Kaplan rose from her seat and said, “I didn’t…
There are at least two men hiding in John Patrick Shanley’s 59-year-old corpus: Shanley The Pedant and Shanley The Unsure. The former is a long-winded brat who writes plays such as the unwatchable Dirty Story, which presumed to tell us what, when, and how to think about geopolitics in the…
A Woman Called Truth By Sandra Fenichel Asher. Directed by Jerry Maple. Through March 1. The M Ensemble, 12320 W. Dixie Hwy., North Miami; 305-895-8945, themensemble.com A new play at The M Ensemble, A Woman Called Truth, isn’t your typical bioplay. It’s a haunting, surrealistic exploration of the young-womanhood of…
The M Ensemble, the nation’s oldest black theater company, produces many biopics like A Woman Called Truth and knows how to choose the good ones. Like the best of them, Truth never tries contorting itself into a neat dramatic arc; it shows Sojourner’s life as the chaotic, tragicomic jumble that…
In the world of American theater, it’s difficult to imagine more dramatically fertile subject matter than our history of slavery. It is terrifying even in theory, but Americans can’t think about it theoretically. It was here; it happened. Slavery hits close to the bone: You never know if the ground…
Kissing, a brand-new play now making its world premiere at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, is so precious it ought to trigger your gag reflex. It doesn’t. It bypasses the alimentary canal altogether and burrows straight to the heart. Cynics and hipsters might feel annoyed, but they shouldn’t. Kissing…
What happened to Downtown At The Gardens? What was once a lovely dining destination is rapidly becoming a restaurant graveyard, staffed by people with bad attitudes and bunker mentalities. We called and spoke to someone in The Gardens’ marketing department about a wild rumor about the fact that four –…
A shell-shocked silence filled the GableStage auditorium in Coral Gables Saturday night. The ensemble had just finished a hugely complicated musical number, and from the audience: nothing. Maybe they wanted to applaud, but something in the crowd’s vibe warned against it. Theirs was a silence that communicated not disinterest, not…
This Friday at 7:30, a legion of card-carrying Republican white men shall descend on the Bank Atlantic Center to see a 31-year-old former bodybuilder named John Cena beat the shit out of a guy who catastrophically broke his collarbone last June (that’d be “Legend Killer” Randy Orton). And for the…
The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged By The Reduced Shakespeare Company. Through January 16 at the Adrienne Arsht Center, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami; 305-949-6722, www.arshtenter.org According to the advertisement, those who like Shakespeare will like Shakespeare (Abridged), and those who hate Shakespeare will love this version of his plays. And…
The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged By The Reduced Shakespeare Company. Through January 16 at the Adrienne Arsht Center, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami; 305-949-6722, www.arshtenter.org According to the advertisement, those who like Shakespeare will like Shakespeare (Abridged), and those who hate Shakespeare will love this version of his plays. And…
