In the theater world as in society, a happy few are much more fortunate than the rest. Consider the prosperous and respected Florida Stage. Now entering its fifteenth season, the Stage is blessed with a lovely facility (a 250-seat thrust theater with excellent sightlines), critical acclaim (22 Carbonell nominations for…
Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl: the classic model for romantic comedy and drama. According to Rebecca Gilman, it’s also the prescription for obsessive stalking. Gilman, an up-and-coming playwright with a penchant for issue-oriented suspense, has served up a hyperrealistic portrait of one woman’s nightmare in the…
In more than a few ways, producing live theater is akin to staging a military campaign, involving rapidly changing logistical considerations of time and personnel and never enough money. Generals must marshal their limited resources, placing assets where they will be the most effective. That also is the way it…
Where is the epicenter of live theater in South Florida? There are several contenders, but none can top Coral Gables, with five professional companies in residence. If you toss in the Coconut Grove Playhouse, just down the road, and City Stage, which books the University of Miami theater in the…
One of the toughest decisions in my job is choosing which show to cover. Given the amount of theatrical activity in South Florida, there just is not enough room to review every show. This week, though, the choice was easy: I was going to New York. My long-time friend and…
Amid warehouses and train tracks on NE Flagler in Fort Lauderdale, the new Sol Theatre Project’s neon logo lights up the dark night like a cheery inn. The interior space is disarming. With a bookcase crammed with scripts, a large-mouthed bass mounted over a window, mismatched couches, and stuffed chairs,…
I don’t know what motivated Rafael de Acha and his New Theatre to produce Nilo Cruz’s new play Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams. Maybe it was the topicality and locality of a South Florida production of a play about Cuban Americans searching for their roots. Cruz himself has been…
Since the here and now has been so visceral these last days, many South Floridians may have spent little time looking ahead. But eventually they should, when it comes to theater. The upcoming season looks promising; both established companies and upstarts have ambitious plans. As has been the case for…
Skeletons in the corner, jittery women in crisply pressed nurses’ uniforms, doors that are shifting entries to alternative realities … if you think this is theater of the absurd, think again. You have entered one of theater’s most loved but problematic genres: the thriller. From Sleuth to Deathtrap, theatrical thrillers…
This is not a common subject for the stage, screen, or most anyplace else. But Cuillo Centre for the Arts’ current production, Menopause: The Musical, is a cabaret-style musical about what feminist Gail Sheehy termed “the Silent Passage” and what aunts, mothers, and grandmothers for generations have referred to in…
Chances are the woman sitting next to you has been raped: One out of three women in the United States are sexually assaulted by age eighteen. Of all rape cases that are prosecuted, only two percent result in conviction. The average rapist rapes 29 times. These are all statistics that…
It’s not every day that a play about death resuscitates the English language. The word wit as a noun has all but vanished from the English language only to be replaced by the shallower derivative, the adjective witty — a witty joke, a witty game show host, a witty comment…
From Bosnia to Bessie Smith, Florida Stage’s 2000-2001 season consistently has shown how music helps shape historical moments and our lives. The theater’s final production of the summer, At Wit’s End, is no exception. This musical comedy uses live piano accompaniment throughout to re-create one of the most culturally vital…
The audience at the 26th Street Theatre’s production of William Finn’s musical Falsettoland can be as idiosyncratic as the play itself. In South Florida (and especially in Broward and Palm Beach counties), where theater audiences usually consist of retirees age 65 and older, a recent Sunday’s full house consisted of…
The Mad Cat experience Here in My Car may not be for everyone, but it may be for you. The best way to tell is not whether you’ve acquired a studied cool or nerdy hipness; it’s really more a matter of semantics. To find out if you qualify to get…
Most plays begin when the actors first appear, but Hollywood Playhouse’s Game Show: The Comedy You Play starts the moment you walk into the 200-seat theater. David K. Sherman has done an excellent job of setting the stage for this entertaining blend of interactivity and comedy. The brightly colored podiums…
The plot of David Hare’s The Blue Room might be described as “six degrees of penetration.” In the play’s opening scene, an off-duty cab driver gets it on with a prostitute. Next the cab driver seduces a French au pair, then the au pair has a sexual encounter with a…
A bearded man in olive drab spews out a fist-pounding diatribe. A couple gyrates brutally as if trapped in a sadistic rumba. A young man stands motionless with a black box over his head. A girl with a red scarf around her neck pulls it over her face in one…
Ominous techno music engulfs the expectant audience at the Museum of Art Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale. The stage is barren except for a black office chair and desk. The desk is covered with a black cloth. As if the title of the play, The Penis’ Responses to the Vagina Monologues…
Like apparitions rolling in from the sea, four rafters descend down the aisles from the back of the darkened Colony Theater toward the stage. Pedro (Luis Alberto Garcia), a soldier, crouches and peers excitedly through a telescope. Octavio (Gerardo Riveron) enters with a compass. Devoto (Jorge Hernandez), dressed as a…
When Sonia (Connie SaLoutos), an aspiring lyricist, meets successful composer Vernon (Dan Kelley) in They’re Playing Our Song, she hesitates while searching for the right words to describe his work: “Your music is, well, universally embraced…. I don’t want to use the word commercial.” Ironically adjectives like commercial have plagued…
Early on in Florida Stage’s The Pavilion, the narrator looks out at the audience and declares, “This is a play about time.” Normally such an audacious statement might undercut the play’s actual content, but The Pavilion delves into the concepts of time, memory, and perception so thoroughly, and often eloquently,…
