This past weekend, Miami Theater Center opened Everybody Drinks the Same Water, a decorous world premiere written by MTC artistic director Stephanie Ansin and resident artist Fernando Calzadilla. It’s set in 13th century Cordoba, Spain, a fractious cauldron of faiths and cultures lorded over by a bigoted Christian queen (Barbara…
As the citizens of nine counties in West Virginia discovered this past January, there’s nothing quite like a poisoned water supply to bring disparate denizens together, united for a common cause. Arriving just a few months after 10,000 gallons of the toxic chemical methylcyclohexane methanol leaked into that state’s water…
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…
The House Theatre of Chicago has little interest in producing traditional plays. The previous productions it has taken to the Adrienne Arsht Center — such as The Sparrow, about a girl who develops special powers after surviving a tragic bus accident, and the sold-out engagements of Death and Harry Houdini,…
The House Theatre of Chicago has little interest in producing traditional plays. The previous productions it has taken to the Adrienne Arsht Center — such as The Sparrow, about a girl who develops special powers after surviving a tragic bus accident, and the sold-out engagements of Death and Harry Houdini,…
The temperature outside the Adrienne Arsht Center (1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami) may be warm, but for a few weeks, expect the weather inside its Carnival Studio Theatre to be frightful. In Rose and the Rime, an inventive play by Nathan Allen, Jake Minton, and Chris Mathews, the fictional town of…
Thanks to the 17th-century Spanish novel Don Quixote, the English lexicon gained a word beloved by spelling bee directors and Scrabble players everywhere: “quixotic,” which means, per Merriam-Webster, “foolishly impractical, especially in the pursuit of ideals.” For many ballet companies, attempting to stage Marius Petipa and Alexander Gorsky’s ambitious, daring…
One of the first lines in Not Ready for Primetime, a patchy chronicle of the tumultuous inception of Saturday Night Live, is a pithy mission statement delivered by its creator, Lorne Michaels. He says his new variety show will be “absurd, young, and hip — and if you don’t like…
One of the first lines in Not Ready for Primetime, a patchy chronicle of the tumultuous inception of Saturday Night Live, is a pithy mission statement delivered by its creator, Lorne Michaels. He says his new variety show will be “absurd, young, and hip — and if you don’t like…
In Zoetic Stage’s Clark Gable Slept Here, the mystery begins before the show starts. Amateur sleuths in the audience may spend the moments before the curtain drawing their own conclusions about Robert F. Wolin’s lavish, symmetrical set design — a penthouse suite in a posh Hollywood hotel, its color palette…
In Zoetic Stage’s Clark Gable Slept Here, the mystery begins before the show starts. Amateur sleuths in the audience may spend the moments before the curtain drawing their own conclusions about Robert F. Wolin’s lavish, symmetrical set design — a penthouse suite in a posh Hollywood hotel, its color palette…
Hollywood lore is chockablock with scandals: stories either apocryphal or verified that speak to the decadence, the secrets, the untoward desires and unfulfilled longings of a class of deified beings living one life on the screen and quite another off it. Errol Flynn was arrested for the sexual assault of…
Martin Luther King Jr.’s feet stank. At least they did April 3, 1968, in playwright Katori Hall’s imagined scenario of the night before the great leader was assassinated. It makes sense. Yours might stink too after trudging back to your motel room in a torrential storm while wearing the same…
Martin Luther King Jr.’s feet stank. At least they did April 3, 1968, in playwright Katori Hall’s imagined scenario of the night before the great leader was assassinated. It makes sense. Yours might stink too after trudging back to your motel room in a torrential storm while wearing the same…
In 1890, Italian composer Pietro Mascagni turned the opera world on its head with Cavalleria Rusticana, a one-act opera so violently frenetic and emotionally overstated that critics had to develop a new term for it: “verismo.” As if to acknowledge his frenzied approach was too ahead of its time, he…
What did Martin Luther King Jr. do the night before he was assassinated? Did he have a drink, pick up a girl, pray, cogitate, read, write, practice his next speech, hit the pillow early? Whatever activities occupied his time in room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April…
Spamalot, Eric Idle’s delirious farrago based on his own Monty Python oeuvre, has the reputation, like Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, of being musical theater for people who don’t necessarily attend musical theater. This assessment sidesteps the clever parodies of musicals ranging from Phantom of the Opera and…
The love story between Psyche and Cupid is one of the most durable myths of all time; with appearances by Zeus, Venus, Zephyr, Pan, Ceres, and the oracle of Apollo, it’s pretty close to a greatest-hits collection of Greek mythology. At its most basic, it’s about two beings who will…
Thaddeus Phillips hails from Denver, but it’s fair to say he’s a citizen of the world. His work takes you to places. Under the auspices of his theater company, Lucidity Suitcase International, Phillips has become a deft travel monologist, his stage projects feeding into his journeys and vice versa. In…
What’s most surprising about Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare’s 16th-century treatment of the Roman general, statesman, and author, is the short amount of time Caesar appears. He speaks in only five scenes and is, of course, slain before his time. Marcus Brutus is Julius Caesar’s lead role. Nevertheless, among Caesar, Brutus,…
127 Hours was a fine film, but now try to imagine it with singing and choreography. That might give you some insight into the blazing originality of Adam Guettel’s fact-based musical Floyd Collins, dramatizing the last days of its titular cave explorer. While scoping out Kentucky’s Sand Cave, the real…
If it seems like New Theatre’s latest production has an extra spring in its step — if the set design, lighting, and actors appear unusually dynamic — it might be because the peripatetic company has finally found a decent home. More than decent, in fact. Since 2012, with the razing…
