In New Theatre’s nearly flawless production of Terrence McNally’s recent off-Broadway hit, A Perfect Ganesh, actor extraordinaire Bill Yule portrays Lord Ganesha, Hindu God of Happiness, both hideous (with his elephant’s head) and splendid (with his good humor). “I am in your kiss and in your cancer,” he says. “I…
Whether they were written by one person or many, by lord or commoner, there remains one undeniable truth about the plays attributed to William Shakespeare: They attain the highest possible goals of playwriting. No other author has produced a body of work so consistently excellent, so relevant, so poignant, so…
Regular readers of this column may have noticed I’ve been writing more about ideas and trends lately than reviewing specific plays. There’s a simple reason for this. Unlike the past two South Florida “off-season” seasons (which were packed with new and unusual work), this year’s torrid temperatures seem to have…
When a theater production is truly disappointing, it usually falls into one of two categories: either the show is so tedious you can’t help nodding off at regular intervals, or it’s like a traffic accident, compelling you to stare at it with gruesome fascination while calculating the extent of the…
Anyone considering playwriting as a hobby or profession should tread with extra care these days. In addition to knowing how to build a story through constant dramatic action, witty dialogue, and realistic but creative characterizations, the potential author must put his or her finger to the wind and discover which…
When a person won’t do something, the easiest excuse to make is that the particular thing in question can’t be done. A masterpiece can’t be painted on the ceiling of a church. A boy can’t play piano brilliantly at the age of four. No one person could have written all…
Recently, I watched a melodramatic but compelling TV movie called And Then There Was One. It featured an excellent performance by Amy Madigan as a young woman who falls in love, gets married, and has a child without knowing that she’s carrying the AIDS virus. She endures the death of…
After one year of operation, the Theatre League of South Florida can boast a profit of $407.60. If that figure doesn’t seem too impressive, especially when compared with other local projects such as Blockbuster Park, consider the following: 1. The organization runs on a purely volunteer basis, and started without…
Significant historical events often shape an entire generation’s psyche, and when that generation reaches maturity, the whole of society can be similarly affected. America’s Depression-era babies, for example, were nurtured in an atmosphere of guilt and whispers; they grew up embracing denial over truth, and refused to re-examine their rigid…
Everyone deserves a vacation, even artistic directors. I suspect that after producing an exceptional season of drama and musical revues at New Theatre, Rafael de Acha decided to take a break, and graciously hand over this summer’s season to John A. Werkheiser, who will be staging the next three productions…
If you choose this week to enter into the world created by the ninth International Hispanic Theatre Festival, you may find yourself in a landscape of altered reality, where the stakes are high, the laughs are dark, and the tragic and comedic are almost inextricably tangled. For nearly a decade…
Anyone who has seen Luis Santeiro’s two prior plays in their world premieres at the Coconut Grove Playhouse — Mixed Blessings (1989) and The Lady from Havana (1991) — knows what to expect from his latest offering at the Playhouse, The Rooster and the Egg. Although Santeiro has won seven…
London, August 1973. Married less than six months, my husband and I strolled down Kings Road, blissfully in love with each other and with youth. Craftsmen on the street sold gold rings with artful designs, buskers played haunting ballads on weather-beaten guitars. We came upon a theater, brightly lighted, where…
I would be less than truthful if I said that the 1993-94 theater season in South Florida was anywhere near triumphant; in fact, it was not half as exciting as the two previous years I’ve spent here as a critic. Disregarding the few high points and the few dismal failures,…
Recently I saw a T-shirt imprinted with a cartoon that made me laugh out loud. It showed a young man sitting in a large but otherwise empty auditorium. The banner suspended from the ceiling read, “Convention Headquarters: Children from Completely Normal Families.” It’s now acceptable, even fashionable, to drag old…
An outraged member of the local theatrical community recently confronted me during the intermission of a play and asked if it was true that I, like some other regional critics (who he did not name), was about to begin rating productions using a star system, as do many restaurant and…
After observing more than five years of solid growth in South Florida theater, it has become clear to me that certain venues, mostly by virtue of the skills of their artistic directors, produce dependably excellent work, both in the choice of scripts and actors. The bad news in this is…
A.R. Gurney seems to be one of those playwrights you either love or hate, depending upon your appreciation of the dry wit and humor slowly unveiled within the restrained settings of his plays. Whether it’s the painful family estrangement in The Middle Ages or The Cocktail Hour, or the ironies…
Miss Saigon — that monster musical hit from the creators of Les Miserables and producer Cameron Mackintosh, now playing at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts — reminded me of the Vietnam War, which serves as its backdrop. Like the war, the show contained some striking and poignant scenes,…
If playwright Geoffrey Hassman were a high school freshman, and if his play Jacob’s Blanket A currently running at the Drama Center in Deerfield Beach A were his first attempt at writing, I might cut him some slack. Some of the characters are endearing, the pace is not slow, and…
Before the antics of Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, before Jerry Lewis won over the fickle hearts of the French, lo, even before Milton Berle was belted with numerous pies in the face and Buster Keaton tripped over his own feet, a very famous writer wooed the crowds…
While pure lighthearted entertainment is fine from time to time, I freely admit to preferring art, whether on stage, screen, page, or canvas. If someone were to pin me down and demand a definition of art — a term so often abused — I would state that it is simply…
