Many of us are misery junkies, pure and simple. We adore the early records of Elvis Costello and think Cormac McCarthy is entirely too cheerful. We distrust happy endings on principle, for we know most happy endings are wholly inappropriate. Life, after all, contains only one real ending, and it…
Strictly speaking, Spam is a cooked-meat product containing bits of many long-dead animals — pigs, chickens, turkeys, clumsy factory workers — jammed together and canned for the gastronomic pleasure of Hawaiians and normal people alike. Spamalot is not a dissimilar product. Part of former Monty Python member Eric Idle’s never-ending…
The Sorrows of Young Werther: Of the many reasons this adaptation of Goethe’s play succeeds, the director’s savvy use of the small venue ranks highest. Jesús Quintero and his upstart troupe recognize that close quarters allow for eye contact with the audience and for the use of nuances that would…
Good things sneak up on you in Miami. Some days you’ll discover that a scurvy-looking takeout window at the wrong end of the Design District is selling the best damn Cuban sandwich you’ve ever eaten. Some days you’ll discover that the drug-addled geek who drew your portrait for a buck…
The Sorrows of Young Werther: Of the many reasons this adaptation of Goethe’s play succeeds, the director’s savvy use of the small venue ranks highest. Jesús Quintero and his upstart troupe recognize that close quarters allow for eye contact with the audience and for the use of nuances that would…
Kenny Carnes’s Last Words wouldn’t play well in the rest of the theatergoing world. A one-man show examining the human side of the death penalty, it simply wouldn’t make sense. Most countries with happening theater scenes don’t kill their prisoners. This one does, though: More than 1,000 people have been…
In a weird and exhilarating election year that’s got even the terminally ambivalent talking about America, history, and the meanings thereof, the University of Miami’s Ring Theatre is the only local playhouse in tune with the Zeitgeist, with two deep and deeply strange plays running from February 19 to March…
Levee James begins as a fond family reminiscence, with a woman visiting her brother-in-law and his children on a cotton farm in rural Georgia. This, the first of four scenes, should be when playwright S.M. Shephard-Massat gets his exposition out of the way: who Levee James is, what has brought…
New Times spoke on the phone last week with the dusky-voiced Elizabeth Blancke-Biggs, who will be portraying Floria Tosca through the majority of Florida Grand Opera’s upcoming production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca. One of the most psychologically dramatic operas — its plot bursts with torture, murder, attempted rape, and suicide…
Altar Boyz: The hit off-Broadway musical about a fictional Catholic boy band brims with delightful sacrilege. The show is set up like a concert, with songs and between-song banter, and is moving in the flashy, exuberant manner of feel-good musical theater. It is the Boyz’ mission to save us all…
Love Is Good: An Evening with Christine Andreas: If it weren’t for the marketeers who fill store aisles with red hearts, we might forget the buy-chocolate-for-the-person-you-sleep-with holiday is approaching! Before cynicism has taken all the fun out of a fancy dinner and a dozen roses, remember that romance and beauty…
The men and women who nominate things for Tony Awards are probably very smart and very, very cultured. These people know why all Playbills look alike. Perhaps they’ve noshed on lobster poached in vanilla cognac at Le Cirque, or truffle risotto at Masa. Maybe they’ve figured out why Bernadette Peters…
Altar Boyz is a hit off-Broadway musical about a fictional Catholic boy band, and it is among the most sacrilegious things I’ve ever seen. To me the sacrilege was both obvious and delightful, but some audience members seemed to feel differently. Our divergent opinions might have had something to do…
The closest George Bizet ever got to Sri Lanka was Rome, where he studied for three years in his twenties. Naturally this didn’t stop him from using it as the locale for his opera, Le Pecheurs de Perles (The Pearl Catchers). Romantic-era European composers loved to write for foreign places…
In a press release, New Theatre has this to say about its new production, Fill Our Mouths: “Gay or straight? Hearing or deaf? Set in Paris, a heterosexual woman’s sexually adventuresome affair with a hard-of-hearing lesbian weaves a sensual fabric of communication and self-realization. As the relationship grows between them,…
Jeffrey Ross is famous for, among other things, posing this question to Courtney Love and a viewing audience of millions in 2005: “How is it possible that Courtney Love looks worse than Kurt Cobain?” Ralphie May is famous for, among other things, making fun of retarded people’s inability to pronounce…
In a few months New Times will roll out its annual “Best Of” issue. Nestled among Best Tattoo Artist, Best Streetside Falafel Stand, and Best Club in Which to Meet a Midget Mutant Amputee Leather Nun, you’ll find theatrical best-ofs: best show, actor, actress, director, and so forth. But there…
Five things you should know before seeing Martha Mitchell Calling: 1. Martha Mitchell Calling is irritating. It’s irritating because Martha Mitchell is irritating, even more so in this production than in life. She was the wife of John Mitchell, attorney general to Richard Nixon until 1972, and in the early…
Cosi Fan Tutte: Lorenzo Da Ponte’s translated libretto of the Mozart opera is bolstered by good comic acting, especially from tenor Brian Anderson and baritone Michael Todd Simpson. Except for Susanne Mentzer (Despina), whose role demands a lot of funnily voiced character singing, there is never a metallic note from…
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea was a last-minute addition to the Alliance Theatre Lab’s season. It was an economics thing, apparently. Danny’s got two actors and almost no set, so it’s easy to produce. Actually it’s probably easy in all respects: easy to direct, easy to star in. John…
At Barry University on a recent evening, Antonio Amadeo was showing signs of strain. “All my writers are leaving,” he said as he watched another top-tier SoFla playwright disappear into the night. He looked like a kid whose best friends had bailed at a slumber party. “My prediction is, in…
After squinting and squinting, picking out maybe one in 10 words of the translated libretto projected above the stage, I was not in a good mood during a recent Carnival Center staging of Cosi Fan Tutte. Which is fine: The music of Mozart was performed during the American Civil War,…
