Change is the metaphor that pervades Eleanor: Her Secret Journey, in which Jean Stapleton gives an affecting and affectionate portrait of first lady and Hillary Clinton precursor Eleanor Roosevelt. Indeed the young society wife and mother transformed herself into one of the most influential people of the Twentieth Century. Despite…
The most memorable detail in Tom Tom on a Rooftop, Daniel Keough’s new play now receiving its East Coast premiere in Hollywood, is a piece of the set. The feeble comedy takes place entirely on the tarpaper roof of a modest apartment building, where, amid lawn chairs and milk crates,…
Of all the versions of Cuba that exist, few are as fragmented or elusive as those that live in the memory of exiles. Anyone who left the island before his or her own memories really began or grew up in the United States with exile parents knows stories of how…
By sheer coincidence, A Bicycle Country, Nilo Cruz’s bewitching play about the fate of three balseros, is premiering against the backdrop of the political drama of the young rafter Elian Gonzalez. Or is it coincidence? If six-year-old Elian hadn’t been rescued off Palm Beach on Thanksgiving Day, then perhaps some…
The single poignant moment in Buddy — The Buddy Holly Story depicts an imperiously fragile moment of rock and roll history, the one in which protorocker Buddy Holly wrote the song “Everyday.” Not the best or the most popular of Holly’s work, the tune nonetheless is charming, and so much…
Like most people at a recent performance of Arje Shaw’s powerful work The Gathering, I had tears in my eyes by the end of the two-hour drama. And like many around me, I suspect, I found the plight of Gabe, the Holocaust survivor at its center, imperiously heart-wrenching. All the…
The seedy Berlin of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret is so familiar to us that to encounter the sedate world of John Van Druten’s I Am a Camera is something of a shock. Instead of the Kit Kat Club, we get Christopher Isherwood’s tiny apartment; in place of goose-stepping Nazis, we…
I dare anyone who thinks movies and television come near to providing the thrill of top-drawer live theater to go see Closer, and not just because actress Jen Ryan spends part of Act Two wearing little more than a see-through mesh top. You can observe Jen’s breasts, sure, but you…
Tim Bennett’s set — a sitting room in an English manor, dappled with gorgeous pink light and a dozen vases of cut flowers, opening out on to a rose-strewn garden — is so inviting that I wanted to walk up onstage and move in. That’s the only positive thing I…
Karen Stephens is such an appealing performer that I wish her one-person show were as compelling as she is. Called Out of the Box, the show is billed as a multimedia event that looks at “societal and racial parameters through the life experiences of a black American female and her…
In these post-Sondheim, pro-revival days, it’s sometimes difficult to find the why and wherefore of the Broadway musical. On the one hand, Times Square overflows with new productions of Grease and Saturday Night Fever and the self-perpetuating Cats, as though the industry were one gigantic broken record. On the other,…
Glen Berger’s new play, Great Men of Science, Nos. 21 & 22, is a disaster of such epic proportions it practically begs comparison to the Titanic and the Hindenberg. Indeed, ten minutes after it leaves port, so to speak, this world premiere by the author of A Suit to Please…
Sophie, Totie, & Belle.
Are you going to Europe? South America? Do you need to know how to ask “Where is St. Sophia’s?” in Italian? How about “Where is Sophia Loren?” Both phrases are translated in the snappy musical travel guide, Secrets Every Smart Traveler Should Know. No actual travel advice is provided, but…
“Pretty fire” is the shockingly inappropriate term the young Charlayne Woodard gave to the sight of a cross burning in her grandparents’ front yard. It’s also the name of her autobiographical one-woman show, which tells the story of how as a child she witnessed this hateful conflagration while visiting her…
The road signs are blurry but the way is clear in the New Theatre’s intimate production of How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama that’s wrapped up in automobile metaphors. Set in rural Maryland and unfolding over three decades, the play tells the story of a…
Any actor will admit that the audience can become a character in a live performance, in part because of the chemistry that wafts back and forth across the proverbial fourth wall. That’s never more true than with improv comedy, in which actors are force-fed random lines, situations, and emotions, often…
In his hilarious stage memoir, Charles Nelson Reilly talks about his days as a Broadway understudy, his death-obsessed uncle, and his memories of Ruth Draper, “the best actor who ever lived.” But the story that captures the comedy-spiked bathos at the heart of the show is the anecdote he tells…
James McLure’s one-act Pvt. Wars made a neat splash back in 1979 when it appeared at the celebrated New Playwrights Festival at the Actors Theatre in Louisville. But between that time and now the work has run aground, having hit many of the metaphorical icebergs that are apt to sink…
Somewhere between writing dialogue for the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story and creating Sunday in the Park with George, the only Broadway show to date based on an Impressionist painting, Stephen Sondheim revolutionized American musical theater. Inspired by the elaborate story musicals of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein…
Like her contemporary, the movie star James Dean, Patsy Cline arrived in pop-culture heaven prematurely, the result of a tragedy. She died in a plane crash in 1963 at the age of 30, leaving behind two small children and the work that resulted from twelve recording sessions, not to mention…
Miss Julie and The Stronger.
Written by August Strindberg. Directed by Rafael de Acha. With Iris Delgado, Marta Velasco, Israel Garcia, Robert Maxwell, Lucia McArthur. Through September 5. New Theatre, 65 Almeria Ave, Coral Gables, 3054435909.
