What’s a nice socialist playwright like Naomi Wallace doing in Coral Gables? Getting a crackerjack production of her play at the New Theatre, that’s what. Wallace’s 1996-97 Obie-winning play One Flea Spare, is about class struggle, bubonic plague, and biting poetry, hardly the usual ingredients of polite Sunday matinees or…
It’s almost always funnier when men dress up as women than the other way around. Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli are drag standbys in theaters and cabarets around the world. Elizabeth Dole and Hillary Clinton are routinely skewered on Saturday Night Live and in improv clubs. But where are the…
Playwright John Patrick Shanley once told the New York Times that he bought a copy of Krafft-Ebing’s nineteenth-century textbook Psychopathia Sexualis because “I have an unhealthy interest in sex and eccentric German people.” (Well, who doesn’t?) It might stand to reason then that he named his 1997 comedy Psychopathia Sexualis…
Mixed Emotions! is the name of Richard Baer’s astoundingly popular comedy about two golden agers who fall in love. Since its February opening, the show has been a hit for the Broward Stage Door Theatre, which has extended it through late July. Mixed emotions might also describe a demanding theatergoer’s…
Like the old adage about good campers who can start a fire with only three matchsticks, the M Ensemble Company, Inc., has struck a full blaze with Home, a production crackling with inventiveness that defies its low-budget parameters with combustible theater talent. Samm-Art Williams’s drama-in-poetry about a young Southern farmer…
Info: Much Ado About Sonnets By Robin Dougherty The two-year-old Actors’ Project Theatre Company is the first to admit that with Love’s Fire, it’s shamelessly cashing in on the current cachet of William Shakespeare. “He’s hip and young, but older crowds recognize him, too” says Irene Adjan, the company’s cofounder…
If memory serves, Archie Bunker never ranted about brilliant country and western stars who experienced rapid career trajectories and died tragic deaths, possibly because none ever crossed his path. So it’s difficult to imagine what he’d think of daughter Gloria losing her head over Patsy Cline. Of course more than…
Suicide, abortion, death by torture, and plagiarism of an obscure British novelist are an awful lot to cram into a single play. In fact just one of these topics would be a challenge for the best of playwrights. Shakespeare’s potboiler, Titus Andronicus, for example, contains rape, mutilation, and family squabbling,…
In the GableStage production of Full Gallop, actress Judith Delgado reaches out and grabs the audience by their lapels. It’s a performance that would simply thrill Diana Vreeland, whose obsession with clothing infuses this one-woman show just as her hyperbole-driven fashion sensibility filled the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue…
Early in Tom Stoppard’s comedy Rough Crossing, a character refers to the Irish policeman named Murphy who makes an entrance at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice. Don’t remember Murphy? You’re not alone. Never heard of Rough Crossing? You’re also in good company. The 1984 play by the coauthor…
When I asked the four-year-old next to me to explain the appeal of Snow White, she replied, “Seven beds. Seven bowls. Seven everything.” This little theatergoer has probably never heard of Bruno Bettelheim, who deconstructed the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm some twenty years ago. She was entirely oblivious…
If Sid Caesar had ever performed a sketch about Henry VIII, it might have resembled the hilarious second act of The King’s Mare, Oscar E. Moore’s bio-comedy about the Tudor monarch and his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. The entire play is now enjoying a high-spirited world premiere at Boca…
Ariel Dorfman’s political potboiler opens like the creaky thrillers from which it’s descended — on the proverbial dark and stormy night. Paulina is alone, waiting for her husband to arrive at their desolate beach house. It’s raining. There’s no phone. A stranger enters. Well, maybe not a stranger. As Death…
“It sure was a beautiful night,” says Jamie Tyrone, one of the two survivors in American theater’s most famous morning-after scene. “I’ll never forget it,” this drunk says to Josie Hogan, the woman who has given him the only respite from misery he’s likely to get in this life. But…
William Mastrosimone’s Tamer of Horses takes place in a universe in which a kid named Hector wanders into the lives of two frustrated classics professors. You might surmise a coincidence like this is at hand from the title, a reference to Hector, the warrior hero of the Iliad. But would…
David Mamet’s war-between-the-sexes conundrum is nothing if not a tense night out at the theater. That’s true if you’re male, female, a college student, a professor, or merely an innocent bystander trying to figure out whether there actually is a watertight argument inside this situation tragedy. Oleanna is about a…
The “dinner party for dead people” play, in which an author gathers people who may or may not have met in real life and plops them into the same room for supper, isn’t officially recognized as a dramatic genre. But it’s so popular that maybe it ought to be. Few…
Imagine a brainy spider battling cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn and you’ll get some idea of the shenanigans onstage in the National Actors Theatre touring production of The Gin Game, starring Julie Harris and Charles Durning. The Tony Randall-produced revival, which just left the Royal Poinciana Playhouse to take up residence…
Li’l Bit, the haunted protagonist of How I Learned to Drive, compares her Uncle Peck to the Flying Dutchman, the legendary figure condemned to travel the Earth until a maiden loves him of her own free will. The play, which won author Paula Vogel the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for drama,…
At the center of Taking Sides is a rube, a crass insurance salesman to be exact. A guy who doesn’t know Toscanini from teriyaki. A man who sleeps through Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “because Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony bores me shitless,” as he explains to his secretary. Bored or just a bore,…
A movie, a novel, a Broadway musical, and a stage play. The only popular dramatic form Kiss of the Spider Woman hasn’t conquered is the TV sitcom. Given its high-concept idea (a fussy homosexual and an idealistic politico sharing a small space and becoming the best of friends), can its…
After the priest has cut out the tongue of the Marquis de Sade, he presents the meaty organ, encased in a black box, to the asylum’s caretaker. Handing it over he comments, “It was so long and serpentlike that I had to wrap it around a dowel.” Well, I bet…
