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…

“Splendid. This is a splendid play.” That is my date speaking. He is beautiful and smart, but I’m beginning to wonder if he’s not also slightly damaged; twisted in some subtle way that only makes itself known at world premiers of touchy-feely plays about malnourished Russian children and the yuppies…

Golda’s Balcony: In terms of steely resolve, Golda Meir made most great people of the Twentieth Century look meek. Over the years many folks — and especially the blame-Israel-first crowd — have assumed she was either a heartless ideologue or some kind of blood-sucking Zionist vampire (and then, crazily, certain…

Romeo & Juliet has been done and redone in approximately five gazillion different ways. Gounod made it into an opera; Tchaikovsky made it into a noise; Franco Zeffirelli did it as kiddie porn; Baz Luhrman did it with guns. Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers have been used to comment on apartheid, the…

Melt: Some of the finest actors in South Florida (Stuart Meltzer, Sheaun McKinney, et al.) star in this world premiere of a play by one of SoFla’s most beloved theatrical polymaths (Michael McKeever) in one of Miami’s loveliest, most intimate venues (New Theatre). Michael McKeever’s play is an examination of…

By the end of the first act of David Carlson’s new operatic adaptation of Anna Karenina, I couldn’t wait to get home and excoriate the bastard in print. Oh, the nerve of that man, reducing all the subtle shadings of Tolstoy’s novel to this dreary, deadening drone of diminished chords,…

By Any Other Name … Romeo & Juliet: Ballsy as all hell to inaugurate a new theater company with a reworking of Romeo & Juliet, isn’t it? That’s what Antonio Amadeo’s Naked Stage is up to, and bless them for it. The general idea is thus: What makes Romeo &…

A quote from Golda Meir has returned to me often over the last four years: “We can forgive you for killing our sons, but we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” Golda apparently said that to Anwar Saddat midway through her term as Prime Minister of Israel,…

Listen: You really, really need to go see Animals & Plants at Mad Cat Theatre. I’m not kidding. Go. When you do, here’s what will happen: You will enter the theater by walking across the stage itself, and you will be struck by the dirty aesthetic purity of the thing…

Samson et Dalila is Camille Saint-Saens’s most well-loved expression of his wild terror of women. While his other operatic celebrations of misogyny have, for whatever reason, failed the test of time, Samson et Dalila still packs houses with regularity. In the hands of Florida Grand Opera, it is eminently worth…

My beagle died at the end of February. His name was Ricky, and I’d had him for eleven years. He died a terrible death, poisoned by his own dog food. That same month, my basset hound, Toast, acquired a spinal disease that left his hindquarters paralyzed. Now he has been…

La Cage aux Folles: This weirdly resonant story began life as a French play, got reworked as a now-classic French-Italian film, was turned into a Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical that proceeded to win just about every Tony ever invented, and then received a Hollywood face-lift to emerge as The Birdcage,…

The Sty of the Blind Pig: Phillip Hayes Dean’s play, a classic in African-American theater, debuted onstage in 1972 and was made into a movie in 1974. The work explores race, gender, and spirituality, set against a backdrop of the early civil rights movement in Chicago. The work is performed…

Fat Pig: If you are a successful young businessman and you find yourself falling in love with a pretty, witty, engaging girl who just happens to be 80 pounds overweight, do you break up with her when your friends start making fat jokes? That’s the dilemma faced by Fat Pig’s…

La Cage aux Folles is a weirdly resonant story, and that is not just my opinion. It began life as a French play, got reworked as a now-classic French-Italian film, was turned into a Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical that proceeded to win just about every Tony ever invented, and then…

Betrayal: Everything in popular culture can be referred back to Seinfeld, even a major work by a Nobel Prize-winning playwright. Harold Pinter’s 1978 play was the inspiration for what is colloquially referred to as “The Backwards Episode” of Seinfeld, which aired November 20, 1997. The sitcom episode begins with Jerry,…

It was late on a Monday at The Naked Grape in the Wilton Manors neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale, after one of Richard Cortez’s weekly concerts, that I first heard about The Fantasy Party. Richard was packing up his guitar and amps and walking them to his car with a portly,…

Neil Berg’s 100 Years of Broadway: Showman Neil Berg’s salute to the Great White Way’s top-drawer musicals takes the stage for a performance that has been dedicated to the memory of local educator Zelda Glazer. The rip-roaring revue features veteran Broadway actors belting out memorable numbers from Showboat, Chicago, Cabaret,…

GableStage exists mostly to make people squirm. In the last three years, they’ve presented us with goat fuckers, chicken fuckers, child murders, and drug-addicted, child-molesting judges. Somehow, GableStage has made these subjects — which should be grim, numbing, and distancing — funny, poignant, and immediate. Now the company’s producing artistic…

I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given To Me By a Young Lady From Rwanda is a play about a young lady from Rwanda who is trying to write a remarkable document. Good for her! Literature is a high and noble pursuit, and I hope this young Rwandan succeeds…

Early in the day on February 3, 2004, Jaime Rodrigo Gough was murdered in a bathroom on the second floor of Southwood Middle School in Palmetto Bay. Though he’s still awaiting trial, it is almost certain that then-eighth grader Michael Hernandez was responsible for the slaying. The events of that…

Alice Does Wonderland: The Sol Theatre is a dirty place filled with dirty people. In Alice Does Wonderland, you will see a puppet give a man analingus. You will see Alice going down on the Cheshire Cat. You will see the Red Queen deep-throat a light saber, which is dangerous…