A wavering light spins on the dark stage floor as an actor’s voice booms from the sound system, reciting a speech from Antony and Cleopatra. “Come, let us have one more gaudy night,” the voice beseeches. The stage lights rise and the actor staggers into view, pulling a costume rack…
In the late Nineteenth Century, Thomas Edison created the first light bulb. In the early Twentieth Century, Henry Ford designed the first production-line automobile. Our plugged-in, revved-up contemporary world owes much to these quintessentially American geniuses, both of whom were as adept at marketing products as they were at inventing…
Legend has it that French writer, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau’s aesthetic was shaped by an injunction from the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. The young Cocteau, having achieved a minor measure of celebrity as a poet in Paris before World War I, complained to Diaghilev that the older man did…
“It’s time to take the hot seat, Mary,” says Rafael Lima, leading a Thursday morning class in the play-writing program at New World School of the Arts (NWSA). Mary Manning’s cheeks flush as she pushes her hair behind her ears. Clutching a thick loose-leaf notebook, she makes her way to…
One-person shows. Single-character plays. Monodramas. Autobiographical monologues. By whatever term actors, promoters, or critics dub solo performances, the format — in which one artist attempts to mesmerize an audience throughout an entire evening — has proliferated on the theater scene in recent years. Just check the listings from London to…
Baby boomer sensibility reached an all-time level of overexposure when the drama thirtysomething aired on television from 1987 through 1991. The show followed the angst-ridden escapades of white, educated, mostly overachieving and workaholic friends. Enamored with analyzing their every emotional twinge, this gang perfected an approach to life that blended…
Ever since Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical theater version of the classic film Sunset Boulevard debuted in London in 1993, much of the press about the show has concerned numbers: Mounting the remake of Billy Wilder’s sardonic, campy parable of Hollywood decadence and self-delusion cost $13 million; forgotten silent-film queen Norma…
David and Martha Flanagan are brother and sister, each burdened by memories of the past, each practiced at covering up pain, living together in their childhood home. Vietnam veteran David, once a high school golden boy, now numbs himself with alcohol, cigarettes, and casual sex in order to forget how…
At one point during 1984’s The Mystery of Irma Vep, Charles Ludlam’s insanely goofy yet sly sendup of Gothic novels and Victorian sensibilities, a British Egyptologist leaves nineteenth-century England for the Middle East. There, Lord Edgar Hillcrest pillages an ancient tomb and schleps the spoils back home. This lust for…
Most of the theater productions I’ve seen in South Florida over the years, from Palm Beach to South Dade, can be classified as “pleasant.” Bearable to sit through, they didn’t offend, irritate, or prompt me to leave during intermission. They proffered moments of dramatic tension, provided the occasional insight, featured…
Journalists and movie stars circle each other warily, in an uneasy dance born of need and skepticism. On one level, they are interdependent: Stars rely on journalists to promote them, while journalists use celebrity escapades as story fodder. On another level, they never know how much to trust one another:…
From the moment Richard Jay-Alexander saw his first musical he was hooked. “When I was in the fourth grade my dad took me to see Bye Bye Birdie, and I went nuts,” recalls the executive producer and associate director of the long-running Broadway mega-hit Les Miserables. “It was a bad…
As anyone who has relied on canine companionship to get through a difficult time can attest, a faithful dog more than deserves the moniker “man’s best friend.” Few species on Earth offer such undying devotion, unconditional love, reliable warmth, cuddly coats to snuggle up to, and homing instincts for returning…
Set against the backdrops of ghostly castles, lonely heaths, magical forests, and islands inhabited by spirits, the plays of William Shakespeare have been offering us insights into the human condition for four hundred years. Complex characters, from Hamlet to Lear to Prospero, from Lady Macbeth to Desdemona to Cleopatra, have…
This past January, artistic director Rafael de Acha proudly announced that the Coral Gables-based New Theatre had secured the rights to present an August 1996 production of Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! to be directed by company member Bill Yule. De Acha knew that the Caldwell Theatre Company was planning…
Naysayers have been tolling theater’s death knell since the development of motion pictures more than a century ago. The sound has grown louder with each new technological threat to live performance, from television to VCR to CD-ROM to virtual reality. Audiences, the theater world bemoans, have also been lured away…
If exuberant performances were the only criteria for judging good theater, two musicals playing in Miami this summer would earn unequivocally high marks. At Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables, a quartet of veteran musical theater artists have an infectiously good time singing, dancing and mugging their way through Tom Lehrer’s…
At the heart of the provocative 1992 drama The Twilight of the Golds lies a hypothetical medical and moral dilemmma: If you are pregnant and find out, through a futuristic prenatal genetic test, that your child is going to be gay, what do you do? For some of us, if…
In the musical comedy Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down, currently playing at Hollywood Boulevard Theatre, three actors with energy to burn work admirably hard. Dan Kelley, Terrell Hardcastle, and Kevin Bogan sing, dance, and sweat their way through two acts and twenty-four musical numbers about a trio of…
A pink neon sculpture of a hooker beckons from just inside the glass front doors of ART-ACT, the gallery-cum-theater tucked into a corner of the Design District. A sprawling, eclectic space, ART-ACT features a coffee bar at the far end of one side of the huge room, while folding chairs…
The logistics of Summer Shorts seem to require a calculator and slide rule to figure out what’s going on. An invigorating festival of eighteen one-act plays (each fifteen minutes long or less) that features a twelve-member acting company and eleven different directors, it runs through the end of this weekend…
Eight gay friends gather together during one summer in an idyllic spot outside New York City and learn poignant lessons about love, commitment, and terminal illness. Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, right? If the 1994-95 Tony Award-winning Broadway show about gay men — some of whom are HIV-positive — springs…
