Diva Unplugged

Art is domination. It’s making people think for one moment in time, there’s only one art, one voice, and that’s yours,” declares opera star Maria Callas (Rosemary Prinz) in Master Class. Callas was not simply a talented singer and a beautiful woman; she was a diva. It is the ability…

Death Warmed Over

We enjoy a classic whodunit in the same way we enjoy Christmas carolers: with a certain amused detachment. We are not seeking new insight into the human condition but instead are indulging in a bit of nostalgic escapism. Thus, if the revival of a genre piece like Ira Levin’s classic…

Stage Fright

When you walk into the Miami Light Project’s theater space, you will find yourself momentarily onstage. The space is set up so the stage has its back to those entering; you have to walk through it to get to the chairs. There’s a sensation of getting lost backstage and accidentally…

Wedding Belles

Five Southern women, some hard liquor, and about two and a half bolts of lilac-color taffeta. If we threw in Julia Roberts and a walk-on by Tommy Lee Jones, would we have another Steel Magnolias? Happily, no. Where that film drowned in a cloying syrup of bathos and fake accents,…

Staid in Japan

Junior officers quickly become disoriented in the Orient,” navy wife Julia Anderson warns newly arrived officer “Sparky” Watts in A.R. Gurney’s play Far East. Indeed the New Theatre’s production of this work seems to offer a heady brew of scandal, sex, and unrequited love, promising to leave the audience pleasantly…

New Roots to Travel

The literary canon is spinning, the hyphen that binds so-called multicultural fiction — Asian-American, Hispanic-American, African-American fiction — will not hold. Nor should it. Any thought-provoking work on ethnic identity must offer audiences a real look at the themes young playwrights are likely to undertake. In its inaugural performance, Miami’s…

We Don’t Aim to Please, Part 2

The logistic, aesthetic, and emotional challenges of keeping a small arts organization afloat would flummox the savviest CEO. Why do artistic directors struggle to bring live theater to South Florida stages when they could spend half the energy and earn six figures directing deodorant commercials? In the second part of…

We Don’t Aim to Please

Live theater has never been a big draw in South Florida, an area not usually recognized as a center for first-class theatrical performances. Independent arts organizations in general have a hard time just staying afloat — witness the shuttering of the Alliance Cinema’s doors last week. Yet several nonprofit local…

The Revolution Will Be Staged

You could say Shirley Richardson has a theatrical heritage. Growing up in Miami in the Fifties and Sixties, her entire family worked for the Coconut Grove Playhouse, either as domestic or manual laborers. Shirley would accompany her mother, Bennie Mae, who was a cleaning woman at the playhouse from 1954…

Presidential Follies

Paper elephants and donkeys; red, white, and blue banners; and two video screens — one posted in each of the far corners of the space — set the scene for George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing, one of Broadway’s first political satires. We are quickly reminded that successful…

Not Waving but Drowning

I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. — Stevie Smith In Douglas Carter Beane’s As Bees in Honey Drown, Evan Wyler (played by Mark Heimann) learns a little something about the facts of life and even more about life’s fictions. After nine years of…

Natural Born Theater

It’s no myth that one of the first constitutional rights U.S. settlers fought for after freedom of speech, was the right to bear arms. Americans have an undeniable fascination (indeed, love affair) with the gun as phallus — an insatiable attraction to the romance of the Bonnie and Clyde rampage…

All the World’s a Dance

The forms of entertainment competing with live theater seem to grow every year, from IMAXes to e-books to women’s basketball. And now there’s even a new form onstage. “The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction,” wrote Jean Cocteau, and South Florida, being the capital of contradiction and fertile…

Short and Sweet

As the house lights go up at the end of Brief Encounters, the Lake Worth Playhouse’s second annual one-act festival, the cast shuffles onstage, folding chairs in tow. Each Friday night of the three-week festival, audience members can stick around to ask questions and chat with the cast. The actors…

The Unbearable Bardness of Being

Remember that instantly evaporating pop hit from the early Eighties, “Video Killed the Radio Star”? If ever there were a comparable anthem for the relationship of the small screen to the stage, it would be Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet. The backstage comedy that hit Broadway in 1991 pits art…

House of the Damned

While some critics would say Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dark tales are not of this world, The House of the Seven Gables reveals a work very much of two worlds, or rather two Americas — the new and the old. Woven from the black cloak of Calvinism but enlightened by the threads…

Lila’s Transformation

The key to great parody is that it hits home in contemporary society. Although Cuban playwright Rolando Ferrer’s play Lila, La Mariposa (Lila, the Butterfly) was meant to be a criticism of Havana and the 1950s when it was first written back in 1954, Teatro Avante’s rendition continues the tradition…

Triangular Love

Walking out of the Caldwell Theatre’s production of Snakebit, you can be certain you will not hear a playgoer over age 60 sigh, “Ahhh! To be young again!” This hard-hitting drama leaves no room to fantasize about the potency and possibility of the thirties. Playwright David Marshall Grant’s increasingly complex…

Burning Brass

A strong monologue, very much like a steaming jazz solo, should always seem improvisational, even if it’s not. Like music it moves and gathers momentum and in doing so, meaning. No long-winded plot summary or a pedantic sermon, the final monologue in GableStage’s production of Warren Leight’s Side Man does…

Speaking in Tongues

Ceremonia Inconclusa (Unfinished Ceremony).

Created by, directed by, and starring Magaly Agüero. Artemis Performance Network’s Performance Space 742, 742 SW 16th Ave; 305-643-6611.

No Short Cuts

We take a seat in front of the screen, stage, or box to disengage. Sometimes it has to do with art — a riveting portrayal of the human drama — sometimes not. TV and film provide many ways to disengage, through electronic hypnosis, Surround sound inoculation, big-screen digital imagery, and…

Empty Souls

If all the world’s a stage, then surely a courtroom is the place to see some of the best drama. Just think of Johnnie Cochran, striding across a courtroom and slamming down his briefcase, or O.J. Simpson, struggling to squeeze his huge hand into the glove that didn’t fit. A…