Imagine country-western heartthrob Clint Black inhabiting the body of Wagner’s romantic hero Siegfried and you’ll get the spirit of Das Barbecu, the Hee Haw-inspired adaptation of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Yes, that particular Ring cycle. It’s the same nineteenth-century opera series (Die Gotterdammerung, Das Rheingold, Siegfried, and Die Walkurie) that retells…
By June 28, the end of its third season, City Theatre’s Summer Shorts festival will have put on 48 new plays on its main stage, about three times the number of productions from your average professional company. In fact, as you read this, fifteen premieres of black-out sketches, comic monologues,…
There’s nothing like a loud bang at the end of Act One to make you impatient for the end of the intermission so you can scurry back to your seat and find out what happens next. Especially if that bang shreds every notion you had about the play up to…
Of all the theatrical hams that have wandered across the stage of American pop culture, none have endeared themselves as much as the tiny papier-mache morsel that wanders home atop the legs of Scout Finch near the end of To Kill a Mockingbird. She has just appeared in a school…
Roughly the size of a double-wide trailer, the performance space at the Hollywood Boulevard Theatre is so small you can stare into the eyes of the actors, size up their varicose veins, and follow the trajectories of their spit with dumbfounding intimacy. As it happens, intimacy, or the spitting image…
Of the potentially kooky types of people that could be dumped into a play — lawyers, clairvoyants, fast-food servers, and dying parents — the most unwieldy are the clairvoyants. Even if an audience buys the notion of second sight, the playwright is still stuck with a peculiar problem: how to…
If you sat through three hours of the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning, mega-publicity-hyped musical that promised to change the face of Broadway forever only to wonder, “Is that all there is?” — read on. If you heard about the ballyhoo last week at Miami Beach’s Jackie Gleason Theater of…
Antisemitropolis is the city Hitler never built. Blame that on playwright Dan Kagan, who imagines it as the name the Nazis gave their section of Heaven — “a place with only people like them,” explains Jerry, a character in Kagan’s spirited black comedy Antisemitropolis, now getting its world premiere at…
Icebergs figure prominently in Titanic, Christopher Durang’s absurdly wild 1974 deconstruction of family life, but then so do hamsters, marmalade, and tortured slices of Wonder Bread. There’s no Leonardo DiCaprio, but there is a captain. He’s the one sporting the black dildo on the white tennis headband — a getup…
Crack open a playwright whose career has just gotten under way and you’ll more than likely find a dreamer wrestling with the ghost of Anton Chekhov. American theater festivals are littered with reworkings of The Three Sisters, the Chekhov classic in which characters saddled with longing speak of the day…
Moments after the legendary showboat Cotton Blossom pulls up to its Natchez, Mississippi, berth, skipper-cum-thespian Cap’n Andy, declares, “You’ve never seen a show like this before.” Chances are, though, you’ve seen many shows like this before. Indeed, you may have even performed in a show like this. Show Boat –…
When Seinfeld fans joke ad nauseum that the popular TV show is “about nothing,” they mean that the sitcom doesn’t have a traditional story hook. There’s no overarching premise along the lines of, say, “Widowed dad raises three kids with help from Japanese housekeeper.” But even when a script offers…
Valentine’s Day is long gone, but the utterly charming revival of the 1963 musical She Loves Me at the Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables proves that romance is lasting. Certainly the story of feuding shop clerks who unwittingly fall for each other as pen pals has endured. First presented in…
“A man walks into a bar.” Stand-up comics have launched into routines with that line so often that it’s no surprise comedian-turned-movie actor Steve Martin chose the same setup to fuel the many laughs in his first effort as a playwright. In the case of Picasso at the Lapin Agile,…
Nothing brings theater to life like a little death. Let a doctor say someone has only a few months to live and you’ve got drama. In recent years some of the best productions have posted alarming mortality rates. Gay characters in particular have struggled through the final stages of AIDS…
Having to wait for one month out of the year to buy candy hearts with cute sayings printed on them is no big deal. After all, those hard little wafers have lost much of their appeal now that they’re more likely to break my aging molars than to attract a…
In an example of last-minute housecleaning before the February ratings sweeps began, ABC network executives pulled the plug on the cop drama Cracker. While I liked the few episodes I saw about the raffish psychologist who solves homicides, I’m glad it’s gone. One of the series’s writers, Steven Dietz, doesn’t…
Touted as a comedy-thriller, Corpse! is more accurately a thriller-comedy in which the suspenseful plotting of the first act gives way to farce in the second. Picture a film adaptation of an Agatha Christie mystery starring Benny Hill and you’ll have some idea of the myriad plot twists and loony…
The Othello Project, on-stage at the Florida Shakespeare Theatre in Coral Gables, takes its Deep South setting and part of its title from the Mississippi Project, in which more than 800 college students went down to promote black voter registration in the summer of 1964. Less than two weeks into…
James Joyce’s work is an acquired taste. Whereas the Irishman’s short-story collection Dubliners (1914) is an easy read, his later novels have been banned from my beach bag because of his experiments in style. Not willing to thread my way through the stream-of-consciousness narrative of Portrait of the Artist as…
The recent referendum creating Miami-Dade County is just the latest sign the area is suffering from an identity crisis worse than Sally Fields’s in Sybil. While the county government proffers the moniker as an all-purpose consumer label, many residents would be hard-pressed to describe themselves as typical Miamians. That’s not…
The convoluted political negotiations surrounding Pope John Paul II’s trip to Cuba next week seem facile compared to the grave robbing, relic switching, and sundry other ecumenical dirty tricks attendant to a papal visit in playwright Michael Hollinger’s farce Incorruptible. Even though the play’s setting in France sometime around 1250…
