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…
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…
