Legend has it that at the end of Edwin S. Porter’s pioneering 1903 short film The Great Train Robbery, when an actor playing a bandit points his gun directly into the camera and fires, many moviegoers were scared out of their wits. The medium was too new for a camera…
A household name in the Spanish-speaking cultural world, Mario Vargas Llosa is a novelist, journalist, and playwright who has won a Nobel Prize in Literature, run for the presidency of Peru under the Democratic Front ticket, and seen his works translated into 30 languages in a career spanning some 50…
Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Nabucco is set in Biblical times, but its inciting incident suggests nothing less than a Liam Neeson thriller with swords and sandals: Nabucco, the king of Babylon, is plotting an assault on the high priest of Israel’s Temple of Solomon, who holds Nabucco’s daughter hostage. The trailer…
When you think of self-destructive entertainers who died before their time, which names come to mind? Jim Morrison? Jimi Hendrix? Kurt Cobain? Amy Winehouse? We don’t really think of Judy Garland in this capacity — at least I never did — because she lived 20 years longer than these fatalistic…
When you think of self-destructive entertainers who died before their time, which names come to mind? Jim Morrison? Jimi Hendrix? Kurt Cobain? Amy Winehouse? We don’t really think of Judy Garland in this capacity — at least I never did — because she lived 20 years longer than these fatalistic…
Of all the historic masterworks in the Shakespeare canon, Antony and Cleopatra might be the least likely play to appear in a given company’s season, for a simple reason: It’s really hard to do. The play, written in 1606, dramatizes nothing less than the collapse of Rome’s triumvirate and the…
Of all the historic masterworks in the Shakespeare canon, Antony and Cleopatra might be the least likely play to appear in a given company’s season, for a simple reason: It’s really hard to do. The play, written in 1606, dramatizes nothing less than the collapse of Rome’s triumvirate and the…
The elasticity of William Shakespeare’s words — the way they can be stretched to anywhere, anytime, and still resonate universal truths — will once again be put to the test by GableStage and wunderkind Tarell Alvin McCraney, a year after their radical truncation of Hamlet into a 90-minute barnburner. This…
Judy Garland mania continues. Less than a year after The Wizard of Oz opened in 3-D IMAX theaters nationwide and Delray Beach’s Arts Garage opened its sold-out run of Beyond the Rainbow — a musical biography of Garland’s life — Actors’ Playhouse is getting in on the action. The company…
The elasticity of William Shakespeare’s words — the way they can be stretched to anywhere, anytime, and still resonate universal truths — will be put to the test this Friday by GableStage and wunderkind Tarell Alvin McCraney. A year after McCraney and the area’s premier theater company put together a…
The elasticity of William Shakespeare’s words — the way they can be stretched to anywhere, anytime, and still resonate universal truths — will be put to the test this Friday by GableStage and wunderkind Tarell Alvin McCraney. A year after McCraney and the area’s premier theater company put together a…
As a form of peer-to-peer musical transaction, the mixtape was already sputtering toward obsolescence in 2008, with the internet and iPods making it all too easy to discover new music and mash it together in creative segues. So it was only fitting that Mad Cat Theatre Company’s own Mixtape —…
Sometimes it seems like every other show to hit Miami is Cirque This or Cirque That. You might think you’ve seen enough cirque shows in Miami, but until you’ve witnesses a grown man squeeze his entire body through a hollowed-out tennis racket, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Mind-blowing contortionism is…
When looking back at the past year in theater, there’s no escaping the void. Companies that had become staples at awards shows and in best-of tallies were nowhere to be found, having vanished like the bee population. We got the proverbial goose egg from the Naked Stage. Its sole contribution…
Broadway talent Matt Kopec has big, green, jingly, pointy shoes to fill. He’s the actor who’s been selected to portray Buddy in the touring musical adaptation of Elf, in a role that has become synonymous with Will Ferrell. Much of the show’s success will depend on his performance; if he…
When looking back at the past year in theater, there’s no escaping the void. Companies that had become staples at awards shows and in best-of tallies were nowhere to be found, having vanished like the bee population. We got the proverbial goose egg from the Naked Stage. Its sole contribution…
For its December production of one-act plays, Miami’s new kid on the beachside block — the hardworking Collins Avenue hot spot Storycrafter Studio — is transporting audiences to a Noh man’s land before settling them into more familiar and modern territory. The first of the two plays, Music of Broken…
This past year saw a decline in the number of productions mounted by small and mid-sized troupes, so it’s only natural that our countdown of 2013’s best regional productions is dominated by three of our most consistently rewarding companies. Here it is:…
In 1994, the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City opened a customarily controversial exhibition titled “The Black Male,” which analyzed visual representation of black men at a time when color was on everybody’s mind. Trials and scandals involving O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, and Clarence Thomas were stoking racial…
“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality… One can’t possess reality, one can possess images — one can’t possess the present, but one can possess the past.” — Susan Sontag Each of the four scenes in Sean Grennan’s play Making God Laugh ends in a family photograph that’s meant to…
Attempting to do for rock ’n’ roll music what Fahrenheit 451 did for books, the hit musical We Will Rock You imagines a futuristic dystopia where musical instruments and composers are forbidden and where freethinkers are forced underground in a mechanized Stepford society of computer-generated music. It’s up to a…
The last time we left The House of Bernarda Alba — Federico Lorca’s haunting 1936 tragedy about a domineering Spanish mother and her five daughters — one of Bernarda’s offspring was dead by a self-inflicted hanging. The saga lives on, more than 70 years later, in the form of Megan…
