Moments after the legendary showboat Cotton Blossom pulls up to its Natchez, Mississippi, berth, skipper-cum-thespian Cap’n Andy, declares, “You’ve never seen a show like this before.” Chances are, though, you’ve seen many shows like this before. Indeed, you may have even performed in a show like this. Show Boat –…
When Seinfeld fans joke ad nauseum that the popular TV show is “about nothing,” they mean that the sitcom doesn’t have a traditional story hook. There’s no overarching premise along the lines of, say, “Widowed dad raises three kids with help from Japanese housekeeper.” But even when a script offers…
Valentine’s Day is long gone, but the utterly charming revival of the 1963 musical She Loves Me at the Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables proves that romance is lasting. Certainly the story of feuding shop clerks who unwittingly fall for each other as pen pals has endured. First presented in…
“A man walks into a bar.” Stand-up comics have launched into routines with that line so often that it’s no surprise comedian-turned-movie actor Steve Martin chose the same setup to fuel the many laughs in his first effort as a playwright. In the case of Picasso at the Lapin Agile,…
Nothing brings theater to life like a little death. Let a doctor say someone has only a few months to live and you’ve got drama. In recent years some of the best productions have posted alarming mortality rates. Gay characters in particular have struggled through the final stages of AIDS…
Having to wait for one month out of the year to buy candy hearts with cute sayings printed on them is no big deal. After all, those hard little wafers have lost much of their appeal now that they’re more likely to break my aging molars than to attract a…
In an example of last-minute housecleaning before the February ratings sweeps began, ABC network executives pulled the plug on the cop drama Cracker. While I liked the few episodes I saw about the raffish psychologist who solves homicides, I’m glad it’s gone. One of the series’s writers, Steven Dietz, doesn’t…
Touted as a comedy-thriller, Corpse! is more accurately a thriller-comedy in which the suspenseful plotting of the first act gives way to farce in the second. Picture a film adaptation of an Agatha Christie mystery starring Benny Hill and you’ll have some idea of the myriad plot twists and loony…
The Othello Project, on-stage at the Florida Shakespeare Theatre in Coral Gables, takes its Deep South setting and part of its title from the Mississippi Project, in which more than 800 college students went down to promote black voter registration in the summer of 1964. Less than two weeks into…
James Joyce’s work is an acquired taste. Whereas the Irishman’s short-story collection Dubliners (1914) is an easy read, his later novels have been banned from my beach bag because of his experiments in style. Not willing to thread my way through the stream-of-consciousness narrative of Portrait of the Artist as…
The recent referendum creating Miami-Dade County is just the latest sign the area is suffering from an identity crisis worse than Sally Fields’s in Sybil. While the county government proffers the moniker as an all-purpose consumer label, many residents would be hard-pressed to describe themselves as typical Miamians. That’s not…
The convoluted political negotiations surrounding Pope John Paul II’s trip to Cuba next week seem facile compared to the grave robbing, relic switching, and sundry other ecumenical dirty tricks attendant to a papal visit in playwright Michael Hollinger’s farce Incorruptible. Even though the play’s setting in France sometime around 1250…
At a time when gang-related drive-by killings plague the nation’s major cities, a 40-year-old musical in which two rival packs sit down to a war council at the local soda shop and order “Cokes all around” should seem hopelessly dated. Yet when a police detective shows up spewing racial slurs…
Frida Kahlo’s boyfriend recalled seeing her drenched in blood and coated with gold dust. The boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez Arias, and his eighteen-year-old companion were returning to their homes in suburban Mexico City one September day in 1925 when the city bus on which they were riding collided with a streetcar…
“Their music is incredibly melodic,” notes Mary Rodgers, referring to the work of famed songwriters Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II during a recent phone conversation from her home in New York City. “Human beings are constructed to enjoy that. We have something instinctive that needs that melodic base. And…
In 1996 Rent picked up the Pulitzer Prize for its rock and roll update of Puccini’s La Boheme, edging out another work that has ties to the classical canon: Jon Marans’s drama Old Wicked Songs. The latter play, about the life lessons a young pianist and his seasoned vocal coach…
Even if you’re the type destined to arrive late for your own burial, you should make it a point to show up at least fifteen minutes early for Grandma Sylvia’s Funeral, the interactive comedy now at the Broward Stage Door Theater in Coral Springs. That’s the time Grandma Sylvia herself…
When you can’t figure out which direction the stock market will head or which nation isn’t complying with nuclear disarmament, it’s soothing to know that at least somewhere on the television dial things remain constant: Mary Richards will never find Mr. Right, Lucy Ricardo won’t headline at Ricky’s club, and…
To borrow a line from the great soul singer Sam Cooke, I don’t know much about history, but I do know that Benedict Arnold turned traitor during the Revolutionary War. In the world premiere of Benedict Arnold, now at Palm Beach’s Florida Stage (formerly the Pope Theatre Company), playwright William…
Some plays transport you back through time by parading actresses in hoop skirts across the stage or bathing the scenery in the simulated flicker of gas lamps, but Clarence Darrow, now at Coral Gables’s New Theatre, accomplishes the feat by presenting nothing more than ideas. Based on the life of…
During the intermission of Private Lives, being staged by downtown Miami’s Ramsay-Hutchison Players, a dance professor from the New World School of the Arts asked me if I review college theater. I said no and went on to explain that I am reluctant to write in-depth reviews of performances by…
Forty years after his playwriting debut, Harold Pinter ranks in the top five of living drama scribes in at least two categories: most acclaimed and least understood. His works delight academics, who find existential metaphors for the Atomic Age in his characters’ random actions and disjointed dialogue. Those very same…
