Few people come to Miami in search of history. If anything, people flock here to escape the past. They flee oppressive political regimes, depressed economic conditions, and brutal weather. Retirees trade in work for golf and a poolside seat. Families relocate for the promise of jobs. Artists and entertainers leave…

When Juan Cejas resigned as artistic director of ACME Acting Company in November 1994, the innovative — yet struggling — theater group seemed to be facing its last stand. Sure, the troupe had an eight-year history of acclaimed productions, from 1978’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea through 1994’s Jeffrey…

On January 3, 1956, the Coconut Grove Playhouse opened its doors for the first time with a European tragicomedy, overzealously billed by its American producer as the “laugh sensation of two continents.” Tennessee Williams and Walter Winchell attended the premiere. Actors Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell were on-stage. And two-thirds…

At first glance the premise of Jane Martin’s bizarre 1993 play Keely and Du seems to be the product of a hot-wired, somewhat paranoid imagination: A group of extremists abducts a young woman from an abortion clinic, spirits her away to an underground cell, and keeps her there against her…

Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to appreciate the nuances of a culture in ways that the members of the culture itself cannot appreciate. That certainly seems to be the case with the magnificent revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1945 American masterpiece, Carousel, in its current production by…

The first time I saw the feisty Pajama Game, I was prompting my high school’s early-Seventies production of the show, almost twenty years after its 1954 debut on Broadway. I sat through scores of rehearsals until I could recite the book and the lyrics blind. I remember the musical as…

If British playwright Rod Dungate’s 1992 Playing by the Rules has an intelligible point of view, a consistent focus, or even a story worth telling, it’s impossible to discern from its current production at Edge/Theatre on Miami Beach. Adapted for the American stage (reconstituted into a South Beach version) and…

Last fall Coconut Grove Playhouse was all set to conclude its 1995-96 season with Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. But at the last minute the show’s New York City-based producers booked the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama on a 1996-97 national tour, precluding its being presented at regional theaters such as the…

David French’s two-character gem Salt-Water Moon contains few dramatic revelations. Less than one-third of the way into the 90-minute one-act, the author has already played out most of his narrative hand: Boy loves girl; boy leaves girl; girl gets engaged to another boy; first boy returns and attempts to win…

When Hermann Goering met Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1922, he pledged a lifetime of service to the future German fhrer. Goering worked tirelessly within the German political system to ensure that Hitler gained absolute power in 1933. Serving as Hitler’s second in command, Goering headed the formidable Luftwaffe (the…

The innovative and provocative choreography performed by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was stirring up debate long before dance critic Arlene Croce denounced the troupe’s most recent — and most ambitious — work. “I have not seen [choreographer] Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here and have no plans to review…

In Herb Gardner’s 1962 A Thousand Clowns, dogged nonconformist Murray Burns divides the human race into two categories: those who love pastrami and those who don’t. Inspired by Murray, I’m moved to classify humanity in another way: those who love Herb Gardner and those who don’t. Members of the group…

You read the play in high school. You sat through a version trotted out by a community theater group. Perhaps you saw Dustin Hoffman portray Willy Loman in the 1984 revival on Broadway, or watched Hoffman in the made-for-television edition. If you’ve been going to the theater long enough, you…

From 1915 through 1923, one and a half million Christian Armenians died at the hands of their Muslim Turkish neighbors as part of a holy war declared by the Turkish government. Entire families were wiped out; whole communities were brutally destroyed. Like so many other people turned into refugees by…

It’s two weeks before Stewie’s bar mitzvah and his family is having a collective breakdown. Doris, his mother, sits on the couch transforming her wedding gown into a Bride of Frankenstein costume for Halloween. Herbie, his father, shuffles home after work and refuses to talk to anyone. Younger brother Mitchell…

The mark of a superb theatrical production lies in its ability to astonish us even after we’ve been saturated with reports of its power. News of an audacious version of J.B. Priestley’s 1945 An Inspector Calls reached these shores soon after director Stephen Daldry revived it in London in 1992…

Penis envy may be ludicrous. The analyst’s couch may be passe. Still, there’s no eradicating the imprint Sigmund Freud’s theories of personality have left on our collective psyche in the last 100 years. Through his writing and research, Freud popularized dream interpretation, recognized infant sexuality, and acknowledged the wounds we…

Stand-up comic Jeff Garlin learned how to make people laugh from the bathtub. As a toddler, he cracked up his parents by filling a plastic toy with water and announcing that it was “concentrated.” He garnered even more chuckles with words such as girdle and Jamaica. A shtick that only…

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde touched a collective nerve when it was first published in 1886. The provocative story of a scientist who unleashes the darkest parts of his nature by drinking an elixir spawned its first staged version the following year,…

Imagine an ethnically mixed inner-city neighborhood devoid of drug deals and drive-by shootings. Older residents leave their apartments without fear of getting mugged. Young black men are not harassed by police. And every morning in this urban enclave a Jew, a Chicano, and a black man gather in a corner…

You may not know that the 1966 musical Man of La Mancha takes place in a prison cell during the Spanish Inquisition. You may not know that the play’s main character is Miguel de Cervantes, the sixteenth-century Spanish author who wrote the masterpiece novel Don Quixote. And you may not…

In his elegantly directed production of A.R. Gurney’s Later Life, director Rafael de Acha tellingly gives Cole Porter the last word. As the lights dim at the end of this wistful comedy, “Begin the Beguine” drifts over the sound system at New Theatre in Coral Gables. Porter’s rhapsody to romantic…