If you choose this week to enter into the world created by the ninth International Hispanic Theatre Festival, you may find yourself in a landscape of altered reality, where the stakes are high, the laughs are dark, and the tragic and comedic are almost inextricably tangled. For nearly a decade…
Anyone who has seen Luis Santeiro’s two prior plays in their world premieres at the Coconut Grove Playhouse — Mixed Blessings (1989) and The Lady from Havana (1991) — knows what to expect from his latest offering at the Playhouse, The Rooster and the Egg. Although Santeiro has won seven…
London, August 1973. Married less than six months, my husband and I strolled down Kings Road, blissfully in love with each other and with youth. Craftsmen on the street sold gold rings with artful designs, buskers played haunting ballads on weather-beaten guitars. We came upon a theater, brightly lighted, where…
I would be less than truthful if I said that the 1993-94 theater season in South Florida was anywhere near triumphant; in fact, it was not half as exciting as the two previous years I’ve spent here as a critic. Disregarding the few high points and the few dismal failures,…
Recently I saw a T-shirt imprinted with a cartoon that made me laugh out loud. It showed a young man sitting in a large but otherwise empty auditorium. The banner suspended from the ceiling read, “Convention Headquarters: Children from Completely Normal Families.” It’s now acceptable, even fashionable, to drag old…
An outraged member of the local theatrical community recently confronted me during the intermission of a play and asked if it was true that I, like some other regional critics (who he did not name), was about to begin rating productions using a star system, as do many restaurant and…
After observing more than five years of solid growth in South Florida theater, it has become clear to me that certain venues, mostly by virtue of the skills of their artistic directors, produce dependably excellent work, both in the choice of scripts and actors. The bad news in this is…
A.R. Gurney seems to be one of those playwrights you either love or hate, depending upon your appreciation of the dry wit and humor slowly unveiled within the restrained settings of his plays. Whether it’s the painful family estrangement in The Middle Ages or The Cocktail Hour, or the ironies…
Miss Saigon — that monster musical hit from the creators of Les Miserables and producer Cameron Mackintosh, now playing at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts — reminded me of the Vietnam War, which serves as its backdrop. Like the war, the show contained some striking and poignant scenes,…
If playwright Geoffrey Hassman were a high school freshman, and if his play Jacob’s Blanket A currently running at the Drama Center in Deerfield Beach A were his first attempt at writing, I might cut him some slack. Some of the characters are endearing, the pace is not slow, and…
Before the antics of Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, before Jerry Lewis won over the fickle hearts of the French, lo, even before Milton Berle was belted with numerous pies in the face and Buster Keaton tripped over his own feet, a very famous writer wooed the crowds…
While pure lighthearted entertainment is fine from time to time, I freely admit to preferring art, whether on stage, screen, page, or canvas. If someone were to pin me down and demand a definition of art — a term so often abused — I would state that it is simply…
Even though it’s my usual task to comment on the work of playwrights, directors, and performing artists, I must open this review with a barb directed toward a fellow critic. William A. Henry III recently wrote an impossibly ignorant paragraph in the February 14 issue of Time magazine. In discussing…
A great evening at the theater is composed of a whole host of elements, some obvious, some more subliminal. The basic minimum is an excellent script and superb cast. Then lighting, sound, costumes, and other technical effects — or the stark absence of them — contribute more. But what about…
Remember the old scenario about describing a blind date? “Is she (he) cute?” you ask. “Well,” comes the halting answer from your friend. “She (he) has a great personality.” Of course this means a night with a refugee from the animal shelter. But let’s suppose we update that anecdote for…
Finally, the theatrical famine that plagued South Florida this year at Yuletide 0.is ending, and new shows are actually opening again. Barry Steinman, president of the Theatre League of South Florida, told me he isn’t sure why so many houses went dark over these holiday months (unlike last year and…
My mind is capable of doing a couple of things at once. Therefore, while watching Shirley MacLaine Live! at the Jackie Gleason Theater, my thoughts drifted to the current sorry state of the modern musical and the dramatic arts in general — but that is not a negative comment on…
Normally, the second half of South Florida’s theatrical season comes up rosier than the first; this is the time of the tourists, when artistic companies present their most interesting offerings and try to appeal to a broader audience in terms of age and interests. Unfortunately, this year — partly owing…
To sum up South Florida’s theatrical menu in 1993, I must use one of the most famous — if rather cliched — passages in English literature, Charles Dickens’s opening of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the…
Without a doubt, A Criminal Sorority provided me with one of the most entertaining evenings I’ve spent watching theater since I moved down here. Presented in a less than perfect location — Rose’s Bar & Lounge — where glasses clink, people shoot pool and bar patrons shout on the telephone,…
Playwrights often complain bitterly about the subjectivity of critics. A.R. Gurney, author of such classics as The Dining Room, has given several lectures around the country in which he rants about the fact that everyone, including professional viewers, comes to the theater with certain preconceptions that make it impossible for…
‘Tis the season to be jolly, go shopping, trim the tree, and light the candles. And to be falsely pious. Right this moment it’s ultrachic to embrace that Christmas and Chanukah spirit, even if it doesn’t extend as far as helping a homeless man on the street, or committing a…
