Neil Simon has written 30 plays and numerous screenplays since 1960. Undeniably one of America’s most prolific writers, he is also one of the most abundantly produced. Four of his comedies ran simultaneously on Broadway during the 1966-67 season. Since last January six have been produced in South Florida alone…
In Jon Robin Baitz’s drama Three Hotels, the wife of a corporate executive delivers a speech to wives who are about to move to the Third World for the first time. Barbara Hoyle, whose husband’s company markets baby formula to mothers in developing nations, titles her talk “Be Careful.” She…
Since the early 1980s, Jane Martin has been offering the world well-received comedies and dramas such as Talking With …, a series of monologues by diverse women, and Keely and Du, an absurdist twist on the pro-choice debate in which a pregnant woman seeking an abortion is kidnapped by right-to-life…
Comedian Rob Becker, creator and star of Defending the Caveman, the longest running nonmusical solo show in the history of Broadway, has a little secret. He discovered it during the first year of his marriage and he let me in on it during a recent telephone interview from New York…
Dry as a martini, smooth as a smoking jacket, pointed as the end of a cigarette holder — Noël Coward’s wit has been synonymous with jaded sophistication for almost three-quarters of a century. Personally and professionally, the Master, as the English writer has been called, cut a stylish swath across…
Since its inception in May 1995, South Beach’s intimate EDGE/Theatre has garnered a reputation for venturing where no other local small theater dares to tread. Tucked away on the top floor of an Espanola Way gallery, the company has resurrected, with varying degrees of success, neglected work by Tennessee Williams…
In the program notes for the Pope Theatre Company’s edgy staging of the surreal comedy Below the Belt, playwright Richard Dresser is quoted as saying: “In the course of supporting myself as a writer over the past few decades, I’ve had the occasion to work at a series of jobs…
The frisky production of Ray Cooney’s 1990 comedy Out of Order currently on-stage at Coconut Grove Playhouse recalls a print advertisement from years ago. “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye,” ran the copy under a picture of a satisfied customer chomping into a piece of bread…
Since his debut as a novelist in 1963, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has been surprising the public. Not only does he move with stylistic ease between forms (novels, short stories, criticism, journalism, essays, plays) and genres (political allegories, mysteries, erotica), he wreaks havoc with literary conventions in his fiction…
A bare-bones synopsis of Christopher Durang’s 1987 comedy Laughing Wild would read like a magic-realist love affair in which the protagonists meet cute: A man and a woman share a brief encounter in the aisle of a Manhattan grocery store. The woman relays her version of the meeting in a…
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…
