Stage Capsules

Triptych: Edna O’Brien’s story tells of three women (a mistress, a wife, and a daughter) who plot against one another for the affection of one man, dissolve when that affection is withheld, and generally make asses out of themselves. Maybe their behavior is excusable, maybe not; since the man himself…

Might as Well Be Driving Jitneys

The M Ensemble is one of South Florida’s longest-extant pro theater companies, and I like it a lot. It has a refreshing DIY vibe that is matched in Miami only by the fuck-it-all punk aesthetic of Mad Cat, over on Biscayne Boulevard. But M is cozier. Check out the photos…

The Return of the Great Ginger Blooze

Rolling Stone’s Elysa Gardner has praised her “feisty courage.” That same magazine’s Greg Kot has said she “glowed with a hard-won grace.” Robert Christgau, late of the Village Voice, has called her “boring.” Alack, Bonnie Raitt is probably worthy of all these comments and more. She has been a barefoot…

Stage Capsules

Little Shop of Horrors: Huge carnivorous plants from outer space really capture the imagination. Witness how Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s Little Shop was launched twice in SoFla in the past month — once in a very amateur production in Hollywood, and now here, at much-less amateur (though still nonprofessional)…

Stage Capsules

Little Shop of Horrors: Huge carnivorous plants from outer space really capture the imagination. Witness how Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s Little Shop was launched twice in SoFla in the past month — once in a very amateur production in Hollywood, and now here, at much-less amateur (though still nonprofessional)…

Reality Bites

Let’s talk about race. There is a tendency among white folks (and I am a very white folk) to lavish uncritical praise upon any piece of sensitive-looking art that comes from the black community, so long as the art in question somehow affirms the nobility of any white people who…

Taking the Piss

Worldwide ecological disaster has a way of changing a man. So says Caldwell B. Cladwell, and he’s probably right — but not too right, because there is nothing remotely unfamiliar about the denizens of “The Poorest, Filthiest Urinal in Town,” where Act I, Scene 1 of Urinetown takes place. “It’s…

The Grand

“Poker is a cosmic metaphor,” Woody Harrelson explains early in The Grand. “No matter how the cards fall, you think you can still beat them.” This apparently is the film’s guiding philosophy, for if the advance press is telling the truth, The Grand was largely improvised. As Harrelson (“One-Eyed” Jack…

Harlem-upon-Avon

Shakespeare and Melvin Van Peebles are not generally mentioned in the same breath, though soon they’ll be sharing the same stage. This is thanks to the touring wing of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, which will open its production of Romeo & Juliet this week in the Studio Theater at…

Stage Capsules

Talk Radio: Eric Bogosian’s play (which was filmed by Oliver Stone in 1988) about radio host Barry Champlain, once a small-time Akron DJ blessed with the gift of gab, incorporates elements of radio host Alan Berg’s murder at the hands of neo-Nazis. — Brandon K. Thorp Through October 7. Mosaic…

Painting Portraits

Edmund Farraday will not sell out. He refuses. He’s young, he’s an artist, he has long hair, and he likes Rousseau. He is a free spirit, the kind of guy who would break ties with his daddy if daddy tried to make him go into the family business. He would…

Stage Capsules

Live from the Edge: Presented by the Miami Light Project is fusion theater from the New York-based Universes ensemble. The show is the culmination of the fifth annual Miami/Project Hip Hop, in which artists, activists, and educators from all over the United States convene for a weekend of dialogue and…

Two Scenes

Act One: AmericanAirlines Arena, Wednesday, August 22. Big steps covered with darting humanity. Camera crews, journos, fast-moving people wearing color-coded shirts and performing mysterious functions. And kids — thousands of them, some heading into the arena and some heading out, some scared or grim and others bursting out of their…

Sacred Screwball

So: last show of the Shakespeare Festival — now “Shakespeare & Friends” — at New Theatre. Crippling fear gripped this reviewer prior to the event. I had been studiously avoiding the place after a run of ghastly reviews, because you can publish horrible things about a person only so many…

Good Cop, Mad Cop

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a lighthearted political satire prominently featuring four murders, two toenail-pullings, one near-miss nipple amputation, two cats’ brains, six punctured eyeballs, many severed limbs, and something like nine gallons of blood. It is a Grand Guignol explosion of death, violence, and bodily fluids that fuses big…

Too Cruel for School

Everything Will Be Different: A Brief History of Helen of Troy is a lot like The Passion of the Christ. It’s torture-porn, a slow-motion snuff film that gains momentum by playing on the same febrile masochistic streak that powers all such voluntary journeys into the darker wilds of human entertainment…

Laugh Back in Anger

TomFoolery was first produced by the Actors’ Playhouse in 1989, when the troupe was operating out of Kendall. They did it there again in 1992 and again in 1996, at the current location on Miracle Mile. Now they’re doing it once more. All four actors involved in this musical revue…

Snoozing Through Sex

Smut is either the least sexy show about sex in the history of theater, or theater’s most subversive pro-abstinence statement. These things are always fifty-fifty, and Joseph Adler is usually at his best when he’s courting ambiguity. Intentionally, I mean. Neither Adler nor anybody else is at his or her…

God Hates You

New Birth Baptist Church members are noticeably excited when they get their first look at the sign resting on Marge Phelps’s right shoulder: YOUR PASTOR IS A WHORE. Their reactions tend toward the unsubtle. Cars pull to a stop at NW 135th Street and 23rd Avenue, and Opa-lockans dressed in…

Do Y’all Ever Need an Editor?

Not every trip to the theater needs to end with an earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting, consciousness-expanding lesson, but Summer Shorts does. And here it is: Paul Tei is far and away the most exciting director in South Florida. Summer Shorts allows folks the rare opportunity to see a very great many artists’…

Summer Shorts

“It’s astounding,” says Stuart Meltzer. “When I first started working in this region, you couldn’t get a new play down here. Nobody wanted to touch new work. It was, Sorry, this isn’t Gypsy, this isn’t Neil Simon, and we don’t want to go near it.’ It’s interesting how much this…

Stage Capsules

The Boy from Russia: What begins as an icky feelings-fest ends as a smart meditation on suburban values, parental instinct, and the way privilege or deprivation can twist a person’s sensibilities. The new, semiautobiographical play by South Floridian Susan J. Westfall follows yuppies Beth Marshall and Jack Goldman (Sandy Ives…