Few things are more difficult to describe than childhood molestation. But Paula Vogel’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning controversial play, How I Learned to Drive, now onstage at the University of Miami’s Jerry Herman Ring Theatre, does just that. Set in Maryland largely during the Sixties, this 90-minute dark comedy moves in…
Ceremonies in Dark Old Men: Some things mature with age, others don’t. Almost 40 years after Ceremonies premiered off-Broadway, it still offers a powerfully rich portrayal of a disenfranchised African-American family in crisis. But it also projects such a clichéd, outdated, and stereotypical image of black men that it begs…
Slam is the World Wrestling Entertainment of the literary universe. It’s a sport like Fox’s Survivor. There’s competition. Someone wins. Someone loses. And that makes Will “Da Real One” Bell, a six-foot five-inch, 36-year-old Liberty City native, the main draw at Miami Art Central for the Invitational Poetry Slam February…
Some things mature with age, others don’t. Almost 40 years after M Ensemble’s latest show premiered off-Broadway, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men still offers a powerfully rich portrayal of a disenfranchised African-American family in crisis. But Lonne Elder III’s classic tale also projects such a clichéd, outdated, and stereotypical image…
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka topped the charts with a slew of hits during the late Fifties and early Sixties; many of them are now considered golden oldies. The twenty-odd Sedaka classics Breaking Up uses to narrate its predictable plot will lure baby boomers and doo-wop…
Eclectic by design and multicultural with a vengeance, Miami Light Project’s Here & Now: 2006 is the riskiest and most ambitious edition yet. This innovative performance, multimedia, and film festival — produced in collaboration with the new Miami Performing Arts Center — is a hothouse for local talent. Through February…
Julio Bocca is, simply put, one of the great dancers of our age. But the hunky American Ballet Theatre star is much more: a sometime Broadway baby who starred in the musical Fosse, a choreographer, a director, a persuasive ambassador for Argentine culture, and an electrifying showman with an eye…
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: With just two productions under their belt, the cast and crew of White Orchard Theater are courageously readying the curtain once again, this time for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s provocative 1972 play. Set in the bedroom of the show’s title character, this provocative work…
You’d think Cirque du Soleil’s dauntless artistes were superhuman. That is unless you witnessed the heart-stopping finale during this past Friday’s opening-night performance of Varekai and the gymnast who painfully missed his landing. Watching paramedics rush toward his motionless body magically unmasked the 56-strong troupe for what they really are:…
Imagine a ballet with a Billy Joel cover band for an orchestra. That pretty much describes Movin’ Out in a nutshell. The brainchild of two-time Emmy-winner Twyla Tharp — with a little help from the Piano Man himself — Movin’ Out is not your average Broadway show. In fact it…
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: With just two productions under their belt, the cast and crew of White Orchard Theater are courageously readying the curtain once again, this time for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s provocative 1972 play. Set in the bedroom of the show’s title character, this provocative work…
Michael McKeever is a raconteur of small miracles, dispelling the myth you can’t create a self-contained, highly nuanced world of performance in the space of two hours. Miami’s own prolific playwright can deliver walloping polemic, drawing-room comedy, and satire roiling in a stew of symbolism — usually in the course…
Thank God — a new play about Catholic priests that mentions neither pope nor pedophilia. South Florida Everyman playwright/actor Michael McKeever’s production is about miracles, which might raise eyebrows. Plays about miracles can veer into theological, epistemological debate and result in a wholly intellectual play that puts the matinee crowd…
David Christopher has reason to gloat. The fourth edition of the Miami Improv Festival, presented through Sunday on two stages at the Miami Museum of Science and Planetarium, is “our biggest one … not just in terms of the number of shows and workshops, but also in stature,” says the…
Exits and Entrances: Athol Fugard has the well-earned ability to suck the air out of any other plays competing against him on any given night. This snapshot of the mid-twentieth-century crossroads of change in South Africa is no exception. Although the playwright-icon isn’t here in body, his spirit shines through…
Every year at this time most of us determinedly scribble a list of New Year’s resolutions, pledges, if you will, by which we solemnly vow to live the remainder of our lives: Quit smoking, stop drinking, begin rigorous exercise regimen, go on strict diet, develop enviably muscular physique, find perfect…
Exits and Entrances: Athol Fugard has the well-earned ability to suck the air out of any other plays competing against him on any given night. This snapshot of the mid-twentieth-century crossroads of change in South Africa is no exception. Although the playwright-icon isn’t here in body, his spirit shines through…
Exits and Entrances: When Athol Fugard is in town, he has the well-earned ability to suck the air out of any other plays competing with him on any given night. This snapshot of the mid-twentieth-century crossroads of change in South Africa is no exception. Although the playwright-icon isn’t here in…
Regardless of the damage done by David Sedaris’s Santaland Diaries and Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa, the wide-eyed hope inspired by Santa lives on. Tots dressed in their holiday best still ritually queue up with their haggard parents to create the kind of endearing memories that will later fuel pre-rehab…
Talk about ebony and ivory! Two very, very loud shows opening this weekend playfully redefine a couple of ethnic-cultural niches while shamelessly aiming for the masses. Presented by the Miami Light Project at the Byron Carlyle Theater in Miami Beach is Will Power’s Flow. Then, direct from the land of…
Now onstage at Coral Gables’ Miracle Theatre is Johnny Guitar: The Musical, which respins the tale of when the West was wild, the men were tough, and the women were Joan Crawford. Though the score is surprisingly gentle and its songs don’t match the transgressive thrills of the motion picture…
New Theatre’s Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women could be considered a Victorian-era Sex and the City. But the four New York women at the center of Alfred Allan Lewis’s memory play are not your average singletons searching for Mr. Right. These ladies are the crme de la femmes of high society,…
