Five things you should know before seeing Martha Mitchell Calling: 1. Martha Mitchell Calling is irritating. It’s irritating because Martha Mitchell is irritating, even more so in this production than in life. She was the wife of John Mitchell, attorney general to Richard Nixon until 1972, and in the early…
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea was a last-minute addition to the Alliance Theatre Lab’s season. It was an economics thing, apparently. Danny’s got two actors and almost no set, so it’s easy to produce. Actually it’s probably easy in all respects: easy to direct, easy to star in. John…
Cosi Fan Tutte: Lorenzo Da Ponte’s translated libretto of the Mozart opera is bolstered by good comic acting, especially from tenor Brian Anderson and baritone Michael Todd Simpson. Except for Susanne Mentzer (Despina), whose role demands a lot of funnily voiced character singing, there is never a metallic note from…
At Barry University on a recent evening, Antonio Amadeo was showing signs of strain. “All my writers are leaving,” he said as he watched another top-tier SoFla playwright disappear into the night. He looked like a kid whose best friends had bailed at a slumber party. “My prediction is, in…
After squinting and squinting, picking out maybe one in 10 words of the translated libretto projected above the stage, I was not in a good mood during a recent Carnival Center staging of Cosi Fan Tutte. Which is fine: The music of Mozart was performed during the American Civil War,…
The M Ensemble is one of South Florida’s longest-extant pro theater companies, and I like it a lot. It has a refreshing DIY vibe that is matched in Miami only by the fuck-it-all punk aesthetic of Mad Cat, over on Biscayne Boulevard. But M is cozier. Check out the photos…
Triptych: Edna O’Brien’s story tells of three women (a mistress, a wife, and a daughter) who plot against one another for the affection of one man, dissolve when that affection is withheld, and generally make asses out of themselves. Maybe their behavior is excusable, maybe not; since the man himself…
Little Shop of Horrors: Huge carnivorous plants from outer space really capture the imagination. Witness how Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s Little Shop was launched twice in SoFla in the past month — once in a very amateur production in Hollywood, and now here, at much-less amateur (though still nonprofessional)…
Little Shop of Horrors: Huge carnivorous plants from outer space really capture the imagination. Witness how Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s Little Shop was launched twice in SoFla in the past month — once in a very amateur production in Hollywood, and now here, at much-less amateur (though still nonprofessional)…
Let’s talk about race. There is a tendency among white folks (and I am a very white folk) to lavish uncritical praise upon any piece of sensitive-looking art that comes from the black community, so long as the art in question somehow affirms the nobility of any white people who…
Worldwide ecological disaster has a way of changing a man. So says Caldwell B. Cladwell, and he’s probably right — but not too right, because there is nothing remotely unfamiliar about the denizens of “The Poorest, Filthiest Urinal in Town,” where Act I, Scene 1 of Urinetown takes place. “It’s…
Michael Yawney assumed “bugchasing” was just a gay myth, like a Village People reunion tour or bathroom sex at “Homo” Depot. A 2003 Rolling Stone article about the phenomenon was marred by faulty reporting, and besides, people would not actually seek to contract HIV, would they? “Gift” parties, where HIV-negative…
It’s New Year’s Eve 1972, and 15-year-old Janice Billie has decided to kill herself. She lives in a trailer on the Seminole reservation in Broward County with her brother, his wife, and their baby, and she’s waiting for the ball to drop. She has already stolen a gun, and after…
Shakespeare and Melvin Van Peebles are not generally mentioned in the same breath, though soon they’ll be sharing the same stage. This is thanks to the touring wing of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, which will open its production of Romeo & Juliet this week in the Studio Theater at…
Edmund Farraday will not sell out. He refuses. He’s young, he’s an artist, he has long hair, and he likes Rousseau. He is a free spirit, the kind of guy who would break ties with his daddy if daddy tried to make him go into the family business. He would…
Talk Radio: Eric Bogosian’s play (which was filmed by Oliver Stone in 1988) about radio host Barry Champlain, once a small-time Akron DJ blessed with the gift of gab, incorporates elements of radio host Alan Berg’s murder at the hands of neo-Nazis. — Brandon K. Thorp Through October 7. Mosaic…
Live from the Edge: Presented by the Miami Light Project is fusion theater from the New York-based Universes ensemble. The show is the culmination of the fifth annual Miami/Project Hip Hop, in which artists, activists, and educators from all over the United States convene for a weekend of dialogue and…
Act One: AmericanAirlines Arena, Wednesday, August 22. Big steps covered with darting humanity. Camera crews, journos, fast-moving people wearing color-coded shirts and performing mysterious functions. And kids — thousands of them, some heading into the arena and some heading out, some scared or grim and others bursting out of their…
So: last show of the Shakespeare Festival — now “Shakespeare & Friends” — at New Theatre. Crippling fear gripped this reviewer prior to the event. I had been studiously avoiding the place after a run of ghastly reviews, because you can publish horrible things about a person only so many…
The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a lighthearted political satire prominently featuring four murders, two toenail-pullings, one near-miss nipple amputation, two cats’ brains, six punctured eyeballs, many severed limbs, and something like nine gallons of blood. It is a Grand Guignol explosion of death, violence, and bodily fluids that fuses big…
Everything Will Be Different: A Brief History of Helen of Troy is a lot like The Passion of the Christ. It’s torture-porn, a slow-motion snuff film that gains momentum by playing on the same febrile masochistic streak that powers all such voluntary journeys into the darker wilds of human entertainment…
TomFoolery was first produced by the Actors’ Playhouse in 1989, when the troupe was operating out of Kendall. They did it there again in 1992 and again in 1996, at the current location on Miracle Mile. Now they’re doing it once more. All four actors involved in this musical revue…
