When High Button Shoes premiered on Broadway in 1947, its name and 1913 setting conjured nostalgic images of more carefree days. Its title still brings to mind visions of a bygone era, and one yearns for the golden age of musical comedy when boy wooed girl through exhilarating dance numbers…
Coming hard on the heels of New Theatre’s stylistically impressive but emotionally aloof Angels in America Part I: Millennium Approaches, the playhouse’s humanizing production of Tony Kushner’s challenging sequel, the three-hour Part II: Perestroika, unearths the soul in the play’s characters. The stirring performances are enhanced by the complexity and…
A confession: Before the curtain goes up on any musical production, I check out the number of songs in each act; if the show turns out to be a turkey I can start the countdown till the final curtain. During the intermission to Little Shop of Horrors, now at Boca…
Even though he was actually born on July 3, legendary Broadway showman George M. Cohan (1878-1942) didn’t let the matter of a few hours stop him from proclaiming Independence Day his birthday. Immortalized by Hollywood’s Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and Broadway’s George M!(1968), the theatrical producer/actor/playwright/songwriter fostered America’s growing nationalism…
The sky was as dark as an actress’s roots when I pulled into the lot of Fort Lauderdale’s Studio Theatre, where the newly formed Actors’ Project has set up shop. For its first move on the local scene, the company is flexing its muscles with the musical Song of Singapore,…
Looking for something different, I turned to the movie listings. Bad idea. Speed 2, Batman and Robin, George of the Jungle: a bevy of tired sequels and spinoffs that sent me fleeing back to the theater capsules, where I opted for Shakespeare. Ahhhh, why bother with Hollywood hacks when the…
With an ad in the New York Times that reads “Never out of style … but heading out of town,” Full Gallop is just one of the Big Apple’s current hits now packing its trunk for a road tour that will include a stop in South Florida. During a recent…
For decades, when theater folk used the word angels, they were referring to those rare investors who could miraculously save productions with their financial backing, but whose good will proved to be as difficult to attain as divine providence. In 1993, Angels with a capital a became the theatrical buzzword,…
In a variation on the St. Patrick’s Day saying about the Irish, in South Florida theater these days there are two types of shows: those that are Jewish and those that wish they were. Eager to reach the vast numbers of ticket buyers among the region’s sizable Jewish population, producers…
It’s been said that all you need to create theater is two planks and a passion. With its basic platform stage, South Beach’s EDGE/Theatre comes raggedly close to meeting the first criterion. As for the second, Jim Tommaney, the company’s artistic director and general manager, supplies the requisite passion in…
When the producers at Miami Beach’s Area Stage and Coral Gables’s Florida Shakespeare Theatre discovered several weeks ago both troupes had scheduled a South Florida premiere of a work by the same playwright, they decided to join forces and create what they’re calling the Nicky Silver Play Festival. During the…
A shipwrecked young woman who protects herself in a strange city by masquerading as a man; an orphaned teenage girl who dons men’s clothing in defiance of Jewish laws that forbid the education of women; a tortured man who stops numbing his pain with alcohol long enough to confront his…
Info: Rodgers and Hart Failure By Savannah Whaley With the exception of a few years in the early Thirties spent toiling in Hollywood’s movie factory, lyricist Lorenz Hart and composer Richard Rodgers held sway for nearly a quarter of a century on Broadway. Between 1919 and 1942, the pair defied…
Despite its man-eating tigers, ferocious lions, and thundering elephants, the circus never frightens me. Not surprising, really — it’s merely theater where I can watch brave acts of skill from my comfortable seat (although I sometimes have trouble applauding with my hands glued together by cotton candy). Carnivals are another…
Producing only once a year, City Theatre sets the theatrical dog days of summer howling with Summer Shorts ’97, a festival of fifteen short plays ranging in length from two to fifteen minutes. Now at the University of Miami’s Jerry Herman Ring Theatre, the company brings more local talent to…
I spent the Eighties on the subway, commuting from my what-I-could-afford studio apartment in Brooklyn to a series of all-we-can-offer-to-pay-you theater jobs in Manhattan. Which is how I became acquainted with the ranter. A large Jamaican woman in a pink raincoat and matching hat, she would take her customary place…
Many of my friends recently opened their mailboxes to discover something more hideous than notification of an IRS audit, more depressing than an ex-lover’s wedding invitation, and more frightening than a postcard proclaiming the impending arrival of freeloading friends: a class reunion announcement. At age 44, playwright Benjie Aerenson can…
In the spring of 1977, Broadway fell in love with Little Orphan Annie and her cheery, the-sun-will-come-out-tomorrow philosophy. Had the comic strip inspiration for Annie been able to stroll the eight blocks downtown from the Alvin Theatre to take a seat in the Belasco, she would have had the pupils…
Although the ancient Egyptians probably had some form of theater as early as 4000 B.C., most of our information about drama’s origins comes from the Greeks. I once knew an uproarious stage manager who, disillusioned by countless tours with theatrical turkeys, insisted that an important part of theater history had…
My earliest impressions of the American judicial system came from listening to earnest civics teachers and from watching reruns of Perry Mason; combined, they convinced me that courtrooms hold more drama than any Broadway stage, with lawyers playing for life-and-death stakes as they heroically defended the nation’s civil liberties (this…
Humorist Russell Baker once wrote that he wished he could travel through time whenever he slogs through a Henry James novel — that way he could determine if the book offered any plot development that would make it worth finishing. Having waded through several of James’s 112 short stories and…
The title track of Jimmy Buffett’s 1980 Coconut Telegraph album busts gossips who “can’t keep nothin’ under their hat/You can hear ’em on the coconut telegraph sayin’ who did dis and dat.” Last September when Coconut Grove Playhouse producing artistic director Arnold Mittelman announced that he would present a world…
