The PlayGround Theatre’s name may have changed to Miami Theater Center, but the mission, in part, remains the same: the production of intelligent, sophisticated, uncompromising children’s theater that adults can appreciate too. With this MO in mind, the PlayGround Theatre in 2011 premiered The Red Thread, a motley and artful…
My Name Is Asher Lev is a memory play about religious orthodoxy, modern art, and the incompatibility of these two concepts, adapted by Aaron Posner from a best-selling tome by the author and rabbi Chaim Potok. Asher (Etai BenShlomo) narrates the action from his perch as a young artist from…
As children grow into adults, move away from home, and retreat into their independent silos of career and relationships, family dinners with mom and dad grow more infrequent. So when families do come together again, under the auspices of holiday celebrations, it’s easy for tensions to flare and repressed emotions…
Nobody, apparently, is too big for Kickstarter. Public figures such as Spike Lee, Zach Braff, and Marina Abramovic have all taken to the crowdfunding website recently, where they’ve raised up to $3 million for their offbeat artistic ventures. But the site wasn’t exactly created with the whims of eccentric millionaires…
If GableStage’s production of My Name is Asher Lev is a triumph – and this weekend’s opening-night reaction seemed to suggest it is – then it’s a subtle victory, a slow creep toward transcendence. The atmosphere is often low-lit and lugubrious. There are occasional moments of levity, but the tone…
When we think of great artists, we often think of the struggle that informs their work — their lives filled with repressed Sturm und Drang that arises whenever brush strokes canvas. Much of this inner torment comes from an abstract, undefinable place, but for the aspiring painter in Chaim Potok’s…
Eleven years after it world-premiered at New Theatre, Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics remains one of the tallest feathers in the company’s historical cap. The play, about Cuban immigrant cigar rollers suffering the onslaught of mechanized industry in early-20th-century Ybor City, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for…
The name may have changed, but the mission, in part, remains the same: the production of intelligent, sophisticated, uncompromising children’s theater that adults can appreciate too. With this MO in mind, the PlayGround Theatre in 2011 premiered The Red Thread, a motley and artful adaptation of the Chinese folktale “The…
The setting of John Patrick Shanley’s Savage in Limbo is a seedy bar in the Bronx, circa 1986. As interpreted by the Alliance Theatre Lab’s set designer, Adalberto Acevedo, we’ve all seen this bar before, usually when we’ve had nowhere else to go. It’s not a place of entertainment —…
The setting of John Patrick Shanley’s Savage in Limbo is a seedy bar in the Bronx, circa 1986. As interpreted by the Alliance Theatre Lab’s set designer, Dennis Lysniak, we’ve all seen this bar before, usually when we’ve had nowhere else to go. It’s not a place of entertainment –…
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 after a self-inflicted hanging. The saga lives on, more than 70 years later, in the form of Megan…
The opening scene of Fear Up Harsh may be the closest a theater audience can get to the bowels of a war zone. It’s set in Muqdadiyah, a hellhole that American soldiers affectionately called “the nastiest town in Iraq” during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Marines and Army corporals are battling a…
The opening scene of Fear Up Harsh may be the closest a theater audience can get to the bowels of a war zone. It’s set in Muqdadiyah, a hellhole that American soldiers affectionately called “the nastiest town in Iraq” during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Marines and Army corporals are battling a…
A 2009 blog post about actor/director/playwright/wunderkind Theo Reyna described him as a “suitably bohemian… bearded 30-something.” Certainly his writing sensibilities have the artsy existentialism of a classic chronicler of la vie bohème: His 2009 play, Couch Trip, which had its U.S. premiere at what would become the Miami Theater Center…
By many accounts, Troy Maxson, the 53-year-old protagonist of August Wilson’s Fences, is a loser. He’s the bitter breadwinner of a small Pittsburgh family who lives in the thwarted pipe dreams of his past as a once-promising baseball player. And he operates with such blinding resentment — brought on, in…
August Wilson is arguably the most important African-American playwright of the second half of the 20th Century, and Miami is blessed with not one but two black-centric theater companies that regularly present his work. Anyone lucky enough to catch the M Ensemble’s intensive and immersive production of Wilson’s King Hedley…
Some of the pictures show beautiful, half-naked people wearing billowing white togas while lounging around Greek columns or descending stone steps. Other images depict the same crew positioned underwater, frolicking in an aquamarine paradise, like performers in a mermaid show without the fins. These promotional photos for the Adrienne Arsht…
Some of the pictures show beautiful, half-naked people wearing billowing white togas while lounging around Greek columns or descending stone steps. Other images depict the same crew positioned underwater, frolicking in an aquamarine paradise, like performers in a mermaid show without the fins. These promotional photos for the Adrienne Arsht…
Paley, the writer and lyricist of this 1992 off-Broadway comedy, could not have foreseen YouTube, Toddlers & Tiaras, or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo more than a decade later. Or maybe he could — that would explain the uncanny prescience of his durable showbiz satire about an 8-year-old diva who…
Joel Paley, the writer and lyricist of the 1992 off-Broadway comedy Ruthless! The Musical, could not have foreseen YouTube, Toddlers & Tiaras, and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo more than a decade later. Or maybe he could — that would explain the uncanny prescience of his durable showbiz satire about…
The Marvelous Wonderettes at Main Street Playhouse Through October 27
According to Carol Burnett’s oft-quoted epigram, comedy is tragedy plus time. That witticism has held up for more than 20 years, though today I would excise the “plus time” part. In the age of Twitter, tragedy instantaneously becomes comedy. “Too soon” is too quaint a complaint: Comedy and tragedy always…
