Rafael de Acha says he’s taking a risk. Rather than launch the eleventh season of his Coral Gables-based New Theatre with a classic from the dramatic canon, a piece of proven contemporary theater, or a crowd-pleasing musical, instead, early this month, he debuted the New Plays Project, a showcase of…
On-stage a man straddles a tire covered with netting, and then ties the side of a wooden ladder to the tire with a rope. Under cover of night, accompanied only by the sound of crickets, he swiftly constructs a raft. Once, twice, he hears a sound and looks up, panic…
In Eric Overmyer’s jaunty two-act brainteaser On the Verge, the leisurely pace of the nineteenth century collides with the speed-addicted tempo of twentieth-century life. Three Victorian lady travelers set out in 1888 to explore an uncharted region known as Terra Incognita. Faster than you can say paradigm shift, the feisty…
Take the agitprop politics and innovative acting techniques of German theater genius Bertolt Brecht. Pour in an equal measure of melodrama from Fifties Hollywood soapmeister Douglas Sirk, director of infamous weep fests such as Imitation of Life, All That Heaven Allows, and Written on the Wind. Shake. Then serve up…
I confess. I went to see the Hollywood Boulevard Theatre’s revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s 1977 Uncommon Women and Others with an attitude. True, any production of a play written by a woman and directed by a woman (in this case, Amy London Tarallo) and featuring an all-woman cast is cause…
Albert Schweitzer arrived in French Equatorial Africa, now known as Gabon, in 1913 and spent the better part of the next 50 years there treating the sick and supervising the building of medical facilities. Although the doctor worked in obscurity at first, his dedication and success eventually sparked the curiosity…
The murder mystery may be the bastard progeny of drama and fiction, and the finest of this breed sure knows how to entertain. At its strongest, a mystery, a thriller, a detective story, a tale of suspense will seize you from the first plot twist and not once let go…
In a recent essay in the New York Times, writer Larry Gelbart traced the roots of modern comedy to ancient Rome. Gelbart, creator of the television series M*A*S*H and coauthor of the 1962 musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, now in revival on Broadway,…
Go ahead, try to run from them. I guarantee, however, that if you go to the theater on a regular basis, you will not be able to hide from the contemporary phenomenon known as the one-person show. In the past two decades solo shows have proliferated at an exponential rate…
Few people come to Miami in search of history. If anything, people flock here to escape the past. They flee oppressive political regimes, depressed economic conditions, and brutal weather. Retirees trade in work for golf and a poolside seat. Families relocate for the promise of jobs. Artists and entertainers leave…
When Juan Cejas resigned as artistic director of ACME Acting Company in November 1994, the innovative — yet struggling — theater group seemed to be facing its last stand. Sure, the troupe had an eight-year history of acclaimed productions, from 1978’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea through 1994’s Jeffrey…
On January 3, 1956, the Coconut Grove Playhouse opened its doors for the first time with a European tragicomedy, overzealously billed by its American producer as the “laugh sensation of two continents.” Tennessee Williams and Walter Winchell attended the premiere. Actors Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell were on-stage. And two-thirds…
At first glance the premise of Jane Martin’s bizarre 1993 play Keely and Du seems to be the product of a hot-wired, somewhat paranoid imagination: A group of extremists abducts a young woman from an abortion clinic, spirits her away to an underground cell, and keeps her there against her…
Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to appreciate the nuances of a culture in ways that the members of the culture itself cannot appreciate. That certainly seems to be the case with the magnificent revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1945 American masterpiece, Carousel, in its current production by…
The first time I saw the feisty Pajama Game, I was prompting my high school’s early-Seventies production of the show, almost twenty years after its 1954 debut on Broadway. I sat through scores of rehearsals until I could recite the book and the lyrics blind. I remember the musical as…
Last fall Coconut Grove Playhouse was all set to conclude its 1995-96 season with Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. But at the last minute the show’s New York City-based producers booked the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama on a 1996-97 national tour, precluding its being presented at regional theaters such as the…
If British playwright Rod Dungate’s 1992 Playing by the Rules has an intelligible point of view, a consistent focus, or even a story worth telling, it’s impossible to discern from its current production at Edge/Theatre on Miami Beach. Adapted for the American stage (reconstituted into a South Beach version) and…
David French’s two-character gem Salt-Water Moon contains few dramatic revelations. Less than one-third of the way into the 90-minute one-act, the author has already played out most of his narrative hand: Boy loves girl; boy leaves girl; girl gets engaged to another boy; first boy returns and attempts to win…
When Hermann Goering met Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1922, he pledged a lifetime of service to the future German fhrer. Goering worked tirelessly within the German political system to ensure that Hitler gained absolute power in 1933. Serving as Hitler’s second in command, Goering headed the formidable Luftwaffe (the…
The innovative and provocative choreography performed by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was stirring up debate long before dance critic Arlene Croce denounced the troupe’s most recent — and most ambitious — work. “I have not seen [choreographer] Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here and have no plans to review…
In Herb Gardner’s 1962 A Thousand Clowns, dogged nonconformist Murray Burns divides the human race into two categories: those who love pastrami and those who don’t. Inspired by Murray, I’m moved to classify humanity in another way: those who love Herb Gardner and those who don’t. Members of the group…
You read the play in high school. You sat through a version trotted out by a community theater group. Perhaps you saw Dustin Hoffman portray Willy Loman in the 1984 revival on Broadway, or watched Hoffman in the made-for-television edition. If you’ve been going to the theater long enough, you…
