Of all the repertory programs ever devised, the double bill playing this month at the New Theatre has got to be one of the most delightfully odd. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is bound to pop up somewhere this time of year, of course, but would you expect to find…
After two decades of directing the annual Miami Christmas Pageant, Chuck Bridwell recalls one particular scene that will forever stick in his memory: the time a camel nearly backed into the orchestra pit. “It came within three feet of the violins,” he says. The camel is just one of some…
A tinsel-decked Christmas tree overwhelms the living room of Atlanta’s upstanding Freitag family. The ceiling-scraping spruce is about to be topped by a star until one of the characters declares that “Jewish Christmas trees don’t have stars.” How the Freitags come to have this gold ornament packed away among their…
Given the vroom-vroom of their current go-round on stage, it’s possible that, even with the theatrical equivalent of a road map, you might not be able to keep track of Kander and Ebb these days. Critically acclaimed revivals of the songwriting team’s biggest hits, Cabaret (1966) and Chicago (1975), are…
When a play’s title is The Adjustment, chances are the playwright will be suggesting a monumental shift in attitude or perspective on the part of one or more characters. In Michael T. Folie’s new work, recently opened at the Florida Stage, tiny adjustments also occur. The play is set in…
If you had a conventional grammar school education and you don’t watch too much Nick at Nite, chances are you don’t think of Sebastian Cabot as the discoverer of the New World. According to The Complete History of America (abridged), however, it was this Englishman — and not the Italian…
From the works of Edgar Allan Poe to Hollywood’s The Fly, classic American horror stories indulge our fascination with the decay of the body. They’re overrun with maggoty cadavers, tell-tale hearts, and monsters that stalk us through dark alleys, graphic reflections of our fear of death. European tales, on the…
Nobody knows if Scott Joplin knew Irving Berlin. In The Tin Pan Alley Rag, Mark Saltzman’s well-meaning musical, however, the two composers not only meet cute (Joplin, disguised as a composer’s agent, appears in the office where Berlin works as a sheet-music publisher), they reminisce, play tunes, and dip together…
Thanks to Robert Pinsky, poet laureate of the United States, thousands of people can experience a fresh taste of Hell. A stage adaptation of the writer’s ambitious 1994 translation of Dante’s Inferno comes to South Florida this week as part of the Miami Book Fair International. Count Ugolino will devour…
Love may indeed be a fragile thing, but its clumsy male and female protagonists can’t help “endlessly crashing into each other like two bumper cars.” That’s the observation of one character in the musical revue I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, an affable if not particularly insightful commentary on…
Nobody who has seen the off-Broadway version of The Fantasticks at New York City’s Sullivan Street Playhouse will recognize the set of the appealing new production at the Hollywood Playhouse. (That’s a lot of us, given the 15,000 or so performances the show has racked up since it opened on…
In 1964, when I was five years old, my father told me that Patty Duke didn’t have a twin. Naturally I recognized this information for what it was: a bald-faced lie. Every week on The Patty Duke Show anyone could see there were two teenage girls, not one actress and…
Twelve years ago Lily Tomlin opened her mouth and launched a thousand monologues. The 1986 Broadway success of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe spawned a generation of self-styled storytellers, from the cutthroat visionary portraits of Eric Bogosian and the neurotic ramblings of Spalding Gray to…
Music, as a theater insider once put it, is the food of love. Opera, on the other hand, is a series of naughty sexual escapades, repeatedly slammed doors, and horny bellhops. At least, those are the elements that drive Lend Me a Tenor, Ken Ludwig’s 1989 Tony Award-winning farce about…
Of all the things your mother specifically told you not to do — talk with your mouth full, go out with married men — chances are she didn’t mention the following: running off into the snow in your wedding dress. But if you did happen to desert your fiance at…
Of all the people you might encounter in a solo drama, John Hinckley is not likely to be anyone’s first choice. Chances are the would-be Reagan assassin won’t be serving tea in the cozy manner of Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst or experiencing high-volume sexual liberation along the…
When you think of Hamlet, Argentina probably doesn’t come to mind. That’s why the folks who include it as part of Inroads: The Americas believe you’ll be surprised when you see the moody, grief-stricken prince transformed, courtesy of the Argentine troupe Teatro del Sur, into the son of a suburban…
Creating theater frequently involves assembling miracles in small spaces. Extremely small spaces, if you happen to be the Florida Playwrights’ Theatre (FPT), which is mounting its Fifth Annual Shakespeare Festival in its postage-stamp Hollywood storefront venue. Squeezing Hamlet and The Tempest — Shakespeare’s most popular play and his most magical…
There’s a moose in the guest bedroom in Michael McKeever’s new comedy 37 Postcards. The animal never makes an appearance onstage (a taxidermist crossed its path long before the play begins), but it does take part in the events that unfold when Avery Sutton, a young man newly returned from…
Actor Peter Haig embraces his role as Vincent Vincent, the pivotal character in the British farce Natural Causes, as though he were gorging on the theatrical equivalent of Thanksgiving dinner. Making his way through each savory episode, Haig samples multiple comic possibilities, devouring each morsel served up by playwright Eric…
If you were to turn Jim Tommaney upside down, chances are a play would fall out of his head. The prolific South Beach multihypenate — who has written, produced, directed, and acted in “five or six” of his own plays since opening EDGE/Theatre in early 1995 — gives birth to…
Hollywood is openly neurotic about its hatred of psychotherapy. Witness, most recently, Barbra Streisand’s ridiculous Dr. Susan Lowenstein in The Prince of Tides who aggressively mischaracterizes the entire profession with each flick of her nails. In the theater, however, obnoxious psychotherapists tend to appear when a playwright is trying to…
