When I was a teenager, my widowed grandmother left Vermont to live with my family in Florida, where, separated from her friends and other family, she turned to television for companionship. Unfathomable to me, her favorite hour each week was spent watching Lawrence Welk and his clean-cut cast stroll down…

From P.T. Barnum hustling naive ticket holders out of his New York City museum with exit signs that promised “This Way to the Egress” to trailers for upcoming summer movies, misrepresentation stands as one of show business’s few enduring traditions. Proud of their command of illusion, theater folk have been…

Not long after the MGM lion roars, the camera pans over a group of young Broadway hopefuls. Sure of their talent, these would-be stars nonetheless worry they’ll never get their big break. “Gosh, if they’d just give us a chance,” one begins, only to be drowned out by the swelling…

One of the biggest recent stories on the entertainment scene concerns the biographical portrayal of a historical enigma: a woman whose life was clouded by controversy, a woman whom millions of adoring followers elevated from obscure nobody to near goddess. Fueling the buzz is the starring actress, a charismatic performer…

It doesn’t require great acting to get a laugh from a Neil Simon comedy or to touch emotions while performing Tennessee Williams. On the other hand, a few extraordinary actors have the innate ability to combine talent, stage presence, and exceptional skills to create spellbinding performances regardless of the quality…

Since 1986, when it was founded, Coral Gables’s New Theatre has presented Southeast and world premieres, filling its eclectic seasons with local rarities — classics by Ibsen, Chekhov, O’Neill, and Williams — as well as signature works by Mamet, Gurney, McNally, and other contemporary playwrights, including Manhattan-based Tina Howe. Now,…

The audience for the original opening night of Brigadoon — March 13, 1947 — passed by glittering Broadway marquees beckoning everyone to see Oklahoma!, Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Mister, Street Scene, and Finian’s Rainbow. Entering its golden age, the American musical theater offered postwar crowds intoxicating experiences…

Originally opened in 1956 as a lavish restaurant, the Coconut Grove Playhouse’s Encore Room was reborn in the early Eighties as a jazz hot spot with its own house band, attracting the young and the hip to the Grove years before CocoWalk was built. Converted into a 130-seat cabaret theater…