Lourdes Lopez received a call this past Labor Day weekend asking her to come into work early. Eight months early, to be precise. As the newly appointed artistic director of Miami City Ballet, she expected to start work in May 2013. That would have given her lots of time to…
Local actor Mark Della Ventura’s year of firsts continues. A few months after premiering his debut solo play, Small Membership — a comic, confessional run through 20-some years of love and loss and coming up short — Della Ventura is back at his home base of Alliance Theatre Lab (6766…
GableStage’s Venus in Fur Powerfully Explores Degradation and Desire
If you’re just learning how to cook, it might make more sense to start with a simple pasta and not, say, a four-course dinner featuring coq au vin and foie gras. But former PlayGround Theatre artistic director Stephanie Ansin doesn’t subscribe to that philosophy. For her very first production under…
In Venus in Fur at GableStage, even the weather is choreographed. The play opens with a bracing thunderclap, one of many meteorological intrusions from sound designer Matt Corey. There’s no storm outside, at least not one we can see or hear battering the windows of the set. But, like brief…
They say white men can’t jump, and soon they might also amend that statement to say white men can’t play Tower of Power hits in drum lines at football halftime shows either. That talent should be reserved for the extraordinary musicians redefining marching bands across America’s HBCUs — historically black…
The Hectic Lives of Antonio and Katie Amadeo
A Man Puts on a Play Antonio and Katie Amadeo
South Florida Haunted Houses: From House of Horror to Fright Nights
Has George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion influenced more writers than Gutenberg’s printing press? The worlds of theater and film would certainly be less vibrant without it. The play, about an upper-crust phonetics professor who turns a Cockney flower girl into an elegant duchess, has yielded countless adaptations and variations for the…
Tweenaged visitors at Miami’s House of Horror Amusement Park in Doral were having a rough time last weekend. It was long before they plunged into claustrophobic darkness of a cemetery littered with chainsaw-wielding psycho killers. The curtain was just rising on the 25-room haunted mansion, and already a girl clutched…
Ian Bagg: Meeting Presidents and Sucking Balls
If the original authors of the Bible were around today, in this tough publishing market, they could always design for Broadway as a fallback plan. The books are nothing if not theatrical — large-cast, challengingly choreographed, creatively set-designed, multi-act epics with resounding messages. It’s why their texts have inspired so…
Vaudeville entertainers have gone the way of the dinosaurs, the Polaroid instant camera, and America Online. But in the world of live theater, their influence is still felt by nostalgists who miss the variety, camaraderie, and nonthreatening slapstick of the vaudeville show. Proof: Of the 34 plays Neil Simon has…
Ian Bagg has performed stand-up comedy for terminal cancer patients, for troops in Afghanistan, and for audiences in far-flung places such as South Africa, China, and Dubai. He has been interviewed by the History Channel for a special on the history of the joke, and he’s known to fly 100,000…
I Am My Own Wife, which opened this past weekend at the Arsht Center, is playwright Doug Wright’s attempt to explain, and come to terms with, “the single most eccentric individual the world has ever birthed” — that being Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a Berlin transvestite who survived Nazi and Communist…
South Florida has a rich history of bringing same-sex plays to the stage, but theater about the transgendered? Their glass ceiling has yet to be fully broken. Which is why a play like Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife, which will be presented by Zoetic Stage this…
OK, so this summer’s film version of Rock of Ages was pretty much a bomb — a star-studded, $75-million quagmire that, if it’s lucky, might receive a consolation-prize Oscar nomination for costumes or sound mixing. It’s unfortunate that this messy adaptation was most audience members’ introduction to the otherwise winning…
Carrying Water in a Sieve at Ring Theater Through September 22
Stepping into the role of Billie Holiday is a bit like attempting to portray Jesus: Get it wrong, and you’re committing blasphemy; get it right, and you’re fomenting an evangelical fervor in faithful followers. And anyone whose admiration for Lady Day borders on the religious can do no better than…
Alliance Theater Does Death With Home Sweet Funeral Home
Penned by local playwright David Michael Sirois and first presented by Alliance Theatre Lab in March 2011, Brothers Beckett earned three Carbonell nominations — a major achievement for a new work. This funny, sensitive, authentic and occasionally heartbreaking examination of the bloodlines and love lives of 20-something college graduates was…
There are ambitious ballets, and then there is Ballet Austin’s Light/The Holocaust and Humanity Project. This epic work in five sections begins at the dawn of time, diagnoses decades of exploitation, bigotry, and internment, and finally suggests hope for the triumph of the human spirit. A passionate plea for human…
