Most of the theater productions I’ve seen in South Florida over the years, from Palm Beach to South Dade, can be classified as “pleasant.” Bearable to sit through, they didn’t offend, irritate, or prompt me to leave during intermission. They proffered moments of dramatic tension, provided the occasional insight, featured…
Journalists and movie stars circle each other warily, in an uneasy dance born of need and skepticism. On one level, they are interdependent: Stars rely on journalists to promote them, while journalists use celebrity escapades as story fodder. On another level, they never know how much to trust one another:…
From the moment Richard Jay-Alexander saw his first musical he was hooked. “When I was in the fourth grade my dad took me to see Bye Bye Birdie, and I went nuts,” recalls the executive producer and associate director of the long-running Broadway mega-hit Les Miserables. “It was a bad…
As anyone who has relied on canine companionship to get through a difficult time can attest, a faithful dog more than deserves the moniker “man’s best friend.” Few species on Earth offer such undying devotion, unconditional love, reliable warmth, cuddly coats to snuggle up to, and homing instincts for returning…
Set against the backdrops of ghostly castles, lonely heaths, magical forests, and islands inhabited by spirits, the plays of William Shakespeare have been offering us insights into the human condition for four hundred years. Complex characters, from Hamlet to Lear to Prospero, from Lady Macbeth to Desdemona to Cleopatra, have…
This past January, artistic director Rafael de Acha proudly announced that the Coral Gables-based New Theatre had secured the rights to present an August 1996 production of Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! to be directed by company member Bill Yule. De Acha knew that the Caldwell Theatre Company was planning…
Naysayers have been tolling theater’s death knell since the development of motion pictures more than a century ago. The sound has grown louder with each new technological threat to live performance, from television to VCR to CD-ROM to virtual reality. Audiences, the theater world bemoans, have also been lured away…
If exuberant performances were the only criteria for judging good theater, two musicals playing in Miami this summer would earn unequivocally high marks. At Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables, a quartet of veteran musical theater artists have an infectiously good time singing, dancing and mugging their way through Tom Lehrer’s…
At the heart of the provocative 1992 drama The Twilight of the Golds lies a hypothetical medical and moral dilemmma: If you are pregnant and find out, through a futuristic prenatal genetic test, that your child is going to be gay, what do you do? For some of us, if…
In the musical comedy Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down, currently playing at Hollywood Boulevard Theatre, three actors with energy to burn work admirably hard. Dan Kelley, Terrell Hardcastle, and Kevin Bogan sing, dance, and sweat their way through two acts and twenty-four musical numbers about a trio of…
A pink neon sculpture of a hooker beckons from just inside the glass front doors of ART-ACT, the gallery-cum-theater tucked into a corner of the Design District. A sprawling, eclectic space, ART-ACT features a coffee bar at the far end of one side of the huge room, while folding chairs…
The logistics of Summer Shorts seem to require a calculator and slide rule to figure out what’s going on. An invigorating festival of eighteen one-act plays (each fifteen minutes long or less) that features a twelve-member acting company and eleven different directors, it runs through the end of this weekend…
Eight gay friends gather together during one summer in an idyllic spot outside New York City and learn poignant lessons about love, commitment, and terminal illness. Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, right? If the 1994-95 Tony Award-winning Broadway show about gay men — some of whom are HIV-positive — springs…
Rafael de Acha says he’s taking a risk. Rather than launch the eleventh season of his Coral Gables-based New Theatre with a classic from the dramatic canon, a piece of proven contemporary theater, or a crowd-pleasing musical, instead, early this month, he debuted the New Plays Project, a showcase of…
On-stage a man straddles a tire covered with netting, and then ties the side of a wooden ladder to the tire with a rope. Under cover of night, accompanied only by the sound of crickets, he swiftly constructs a raft. Once, twice, he hears a sound and looks up, panic…
In Eric Overmyer’s jaunty two-act brainteaser On the Verge, the leisurely pace of the nineteenth century collides with the speed-addicted tempo of twentieth-century life. Three Victorian lady travelers set out in 1888 to explore an uncharted region known as Terra Incognita. Faster than you can say paradigm shift, the feisty…
Take the agitprop politics and innovative acting techniques of German theater genius Bertolt Brecht. Pour in an equal measure of melodrama from Fifties Hollywood soapmeister Douglas Sirk, director of infamous weep fests such as Imitation of Life, All That Heaven Allows, and Written on the Wind. Shake. Then serve up…
I confess. I went to see the Hollywood Boulevard Theatre’s revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s 1977 Uncommon Women and Others with an attitude. True, any production of a play written by a woman and directed by a woman (in this case, Amy London Tarallo) and featuring an all-woman cast is cause…
Albert Schweitzer arrived in French Equatorial Africa, now known as Gabon, in 1913 and spent the better part of the next 50 years there treating the sick and supervising the building of medical facilities. Although the doctor worked in obscurity at first, his dedication and success eventually sparked the curiosity…
The murder mystery may be the bastard progeny of drama and fiction, and the finest of this breed sure knows how to entertain. At its strongest, a mystery, a thriller, a detective story, a tale of suspense will seize you from the first plot twist and not once let go…
In a recent essay in the New York Times, writer Larry Gelbart traced the roots of modern comedy to ancient Rome. Gelbart, creator of the television series M*A*S*H and coauthor of the 1962 musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, now in revival on Broadway,…
Go ahead, try to run from them. I guarantee, however, that if you go to the theater on a regular basis, you will not be able to hide from the contemporary phenomenon known as the one-person show. In the past two decades solo shows have proliferated at an exponential rate…
