Area Stage has given tomorrow’s theater professionals a bloody good challenge with its summer’s conservatory production of Sweeney Todd. High school and college students spent all of 25 hours over three weeks preparing for this morbidly beautiful warhorse whose operatic musical style and complex orchestrations have proved formidable to even the…
This year marks the 80th birthday of famed Argentine playwright Roberto Cossa. The writer-director’s current status of cultural privilege — numerous theater awards, a presidential post in the General Society of Argentine Authors — belies a time when making theater in Argentina was truly dangerous, a vital affront to a…
The liquid onslaught poured forth long before audiences entered the Arsht Center for H2Ombre this past weekend. Torrential rains slowed the flow of spectators into this undeniably unique prooduction. But they finally arrived to find a combination platter that’s equal parts rave, 3D movie, and modern dance show. After passing…
Captain Ahab may have spent his entire grizzled career searching for an elusive white whale, but the “whale” in Samuel D. Hunter’s award-winning play is always vividly, uncomfortably present. The Whale, which premieres Saturday at GableStage (1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables), is about Charlie, a morbidly obese gay man —…
The Arsht Center’s Ziff Ballet Opera House is about to get wet. Very wet. The sort of wet that if the water were the result of natural causes, it would require extra flood insurance. Nightly Wednesdays through Sundays — and three times Saturdays — more than 6,000 gallons of water…
The Arsht Center’s Ziff Ballet Opera House is about to get wet. Very wet. The sort of wet that if the water were the result of natural causes, it would require extra flood insurance. Nightly Wednesdays through Sundays — and three times Saturdays — more than 6,000 gallons of water…
As one character in Bill Cain’s sobering, antiwar psychodrama 9 Circles puts it, “terrible things happen” in war. It’s the sort of indisputable, politely hollow phrase that says nothing — one of those euphemisms civilians use to accept the unspeakable. That old chestnut “mistakes were made,” with its general admission…
As one character in Bill Cain’s sobering, antiwar psychodrama 9 Circles puts it, “terrible things happen” in war. It’s the sort of indisputable, politely hollow phrase that says nothing — one of those euphemisms civilians use to accept the unspeakable. That old chestnut “mistakes were made,” with its general admission…
In the fraught process toward acceptance and equality, some members of the LGBTQ community can turn their battle into art, drawing inspiration from adversity or otherness. Out in the Tropics, FUNDarte’s annual five-day performance festival dedicated to art of the nonhetero persuasion, has been celebrating these sorts of provocative, insightful,…
Rather than construct a standard-issue theater review for an evening of mirth and brevity that is always anything but standard-issue, I decided to trek through City Theatre’s 19th edition of Summer Shorts play by play, in the order in which they are presented. Liberated from the need to excavate overlapping…
Bourbon is on the rocks, and so, apparently, is a marriage in James McLure’s Laundry and Bourbon and Lone Star, two interlocked one-act plays. Both include the same array of characters: two close companions and one intruder bearing a sordid secret. Both end in revelations, vomit, and toppled props. And…
Now in its 19th year, City Theatre’s annual Summer Shorts festival of ten-minute plays has shed any pretense of gravitas. No more, it seems, will cerebral tragedies sneak into its calibrated mix of quick-witted, sketch-like shorts: The festival is billing itself as a producer of “the funniest short comedies in…
Bourbon is on the rocks, and so, apparently, is a marriage in James McLure’s Laundry and Bourbon and Lone Star, two interlocked one-act plays. Both include the same array of characters: two close companions and one intruder bearing a sordid secret. Both end in revelations, vomit, and toppled props. And…
August Strindberg’s 1888 masterpiece chronicles an eventful Saturday night and Sunday morning in the servants’ quarters of the estate of a Swedish count. Miss Julie (Katherine Amadeo), a flighty noblewoman, escapes her upper-class trappings for a midsummer’s eve of frivolity with educated valet Jean (Matthew William Chizever). Their actions, fueled…
Like the author who writes a story about his inability to write a story, or the filmmaker who directs a film about his struggle to conjure anything worth filming, the self-reflexive meta-work is an inevitable rite for any artist at a creative loss. But few examples of this narcissistic genre…
As soon as Google realizes you’re searching for “Fidel Castro,” it suggests the term “Fidel Castro dead.” For Cubans and the country’s diaspora of exiles, that’s wishful thinking; the old man has cheated death so many times that he’s starting to feel immortal. But Punto X, a provocative play by…
Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan borrows its name from a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning titled “A Musical Instrument.” It concerns the Greek god Pan, part-man and part-goat, ransacking a river to build a reed instrument. Intimations of hedonistic darkness, particularly regarding Pan’s specialty — sexuality — burble beneath…
Of the six plays in GableStage’s 2013-14 season, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike was its most anticipated production for hard-core theatergoers — and not just because the play won just about every award for which it was nominated in 2013, including the Tony for best play…
Of the six plays in GableStage’s 2013-14 season, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike was its most anticipated production for hard-core theatergoers — and not just because the play won just about every award for which it was nominated in 2013, including the Tony for best play…
The Main Street Players, Miami Lakes’ resident community theater company, departs from its tradition of producing Broadway or off-Broadway hits to mount the world premiere of an early work by one of South Florida’s best playwrights, David Michael Sirois. A two-time Carbonell Award nominee for his plays Brothers Beckett and…
Kevin Spacey’s bad-assery is apparent in nearly every role he plays. But one of the most enjoyable examples comes not from any of his acerbic, acidic movie characters but from his lesser-known career in live theater. Lesser-known, that is, until he broke the fourth wall in a 2011 production of Richard…
My favorite instance of Kevin Spacey’s bad-assery comes not from any of his acerbic, acidic movie characters, but from his lesser-known career in live theater. Lesser-known, that is, until he started to break the fourth wall in a 2011 production of Richard III, courtesy his own London theater company, The…
