While on hiatus from smoking crystal meth, creating absurd performance art, and speaking bad French in Paris, a young David Sedaris took a brief stint as a department store elf at a Macy’s in New York City. He wrote an essay about it, The SantaLand Diaries, which he read on…
Carried by Gregg Weiner’s grounded yet forceful performance, Red is a semibiographical drama based on the life of Mark Rothko, the Russian-born American painter whose expressionist works rival those of Jackson Pollock on the abstract-genius scale. At its core, the play is a series of snapshots of the artist’s mind…
Taking inspiration from a Chinese folktale called The Magical Embroidery, the PlayGround Theatre, which prides itself on staging unique and innovative stories for all ages, presents an encore performance of The Red Thread, a moving and fun journey into myth and fantasy, for the holiday season. It’s a tale steeped…
You might know the amiable and charming Madeline from Ludwig Bemelmans’s popular children’s book series about an all-girls Catholic boarding school in Paris. Actors’ Playhouse, which did such a splendid job with Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, is bringing one of the precocious little redhead’s…
Chambers Stevens just sounds like a guy who’d write a play about Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw sitting down to lunch. In fact, it sounds like a guy who might have attended such a lunch. Truth is, the playwright of the show making its world premier December 2 at…
About a month ago, the Fillmore Miami Beach announced that our favorite comedian, Tracy Morgan, would be gracing their stage on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Our heart went aflutter and we shot our Miami New Times editor an email begging asking to cover the show. Luckily for us she obliged,…
Gosh, were we excited for the Dancing with the Stars Grand Finale. And boy did ABC go all out for us! Instead of the usual flippant DWTS introduction, we get a very serious Explosions in the Sky-scored, grainy film-effect montage of Ricki, Rob, and J.R. We are reminded that Ricki…
Luisa Fernanda at the Ziff Ballet Opera House through November 26
The Red Thread at the PlayGround Theatre through December 18
Red at GableStage through December 4
South Florida “funniest comics you’ve never heard of,” the Have-Nots have teamed up with Just the Funny — Coral Way’s comedy clubhouse for sketch and improv. They’re doing a television broadcast that is sure to be the South Florida comedy equivalent to the Power Rangers’ Megazord bio-mechanical robot vehicle, or…
Red at GableStage: Rothko’s ornery genius
Since this spring, Brazz Dance Theater has been giving Miami audiences sneak peeks at a work called “Cordel.” In the company’s March performance at the Adrienne Arsht Center’s Carnival Theater, we saw a short lyrical piece, no doubt a tiny fragment of what has now become an ambitious, hour-long choreography…
The idea of a funny doorman is perfectly logical. The job puts people in their line of vision for exactly ten seconds, prompting short conversations every time they enter and exit the building — a situation that seems almost designed for the cultivation of witty one-liners.Maybe that’s what playwright Kenneth…
Red, which opened last night at the GableStage, is a venerable one-act play that hurls symbolism, existentialism, and Fredrick Nietzsche all up in your face like an abstract expressionist dousing flecks of paint on a canvas. Loosely based on the life of Mark Rothko, the brilliant Russian-born American painter whose expressionist…
Not so enthused with the job market? Go hang yourself… upside down from 40-foot silk scarves, that is.Victoria Pike! — exclamation intended — isn’t even out of high school, but she’s already setting her sights on an untraditional career path: the circus. The quirky 16-year-old has spent the past two…
Garth Fagan choreographed the spectacular Broadway production of The Lion King, and that one show has sealed his legacy. But there is much more to the 71-year-old Fagan than leaping gazelles and flying baboons. His company, Garth Fagan Dance, has set the standard for contemporary dance inspired by the many…
Miami native, Octavio Campos, founder and director of the arts organization Camposition, has built a local and international reputation for creating provocative, multidisciplinary performances that reinvent the boundaries between dance, theater, and activism. Now after a two-year hiatus, Camposition debuts Intention Intervention, a hybrid dance theater piece commissioned by Sleepless…
Hairspray at Actors’ Playhouse through November 13
Captiva at the Arsht Center through November 20
Reading the biography/history section of the Carpetbag Brigade’s website may cause seizures. The San Francisco group puts on visual extravaganzas using improvisation, acrobatics, music, circus antics, and butoh (explanation below).This Saturday, the Carpetbag Brigade will perform their live show, “Callings,” as part of the much anticipated Sleepless Night, an overnight…
You might remember Ana Gasteyer, the current star of ABC’s Suburgatory, better as sweater-clad Margaret Jo McCullen, whose NPR spoof show Delicious Dish featured Pete Schweddy sharing his delicious trademark Schweddy Balls and Betty White giving the ladies a taste of her “dusty muffin.” Or if that doesn’t ring a…
