The Sty of the Blind Pig: Phillip Hayes Dean’s play, a classic in African-American theater, debuted onstage in 1972 and was made into a movie in 1974. The work explores race, gender, and spirituality, set against a backdrop of the early civil rights movement in Chicago. The work is performed…
La Cage aux Folles is a weirdly resonant story, and that is not just my opinion. It began life as a French play, got reworked as a now-classic French-Italian film, was turned into a Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical that proceeded to win just about every Tony ever invented, and then…
Fat Pig: If you are a successful young businessman and you find yourself falling in love with a pretty, witty, engaging girl who just happens to be 80 pounds overweight, do you break up with her when your friends start making fat jokes? That’s the dilemma faced by Fat Pig’s…
It was late on a Monday at The Naked Grape in the Wilton Manors neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale, after one of Richard Cortez’s weekly concerts, that I first heard about The Fantasy Party. Richard was packing up his guitar and amps and walking them to his car with a portly,…
Betrayal: Everything in popular culture can be referred back to Seinfeld, even a major work by a Nobel Prize-winning playwright. Harold Pinter’s 1978 play was the inspiration for what is colloquially referred to as “The Backwards Episode” of Seinfeld, which aired November 20, 1997. The sitcom episode begins with Jerry,…
GableStage exists mostly to make people squirm. In the last three years, they’ve presented us with goat fuckers, chicken fuckers, child murders, and drug-addicted, child-molesting judges. Somehow, GableStage has made these subjects — which should be grim, numbing, and distancing — funny, poignant, and immediate. Now the company’s producing artistic…
It’s been a season of firsts since the opening of the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts. On the heels of the Miami debut of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, one of the finest stagings of Swan Lake in the world will have its local premiere. While the Merce in…
Neil Berg’s 100 Years of Broadway: Showman Neil Berg’s salute to the Great White Way’s top-drawer musicals takes the stage for a performance that has been dedicated to the memory of local educator Zelda Glazer. The rip-roaring revue features veteran Broadway actors belting out memorable numbers from Showboat, Chicago, Cabaret,…
I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given To Me By a Young Lady From Rwanda is a play about a young lady from Rwanda who is trying to write a remarkable document. Good for her! Literature is a high and noble pursuit, and I hope this young Rwandan succeeds…
He’s been at this for a while, but even after more than 50 years before the public, there remains something weird and wonderful about Merce Cunningham’s dance pieces. His troupe rehearses without music. And whatever music ends up being made for the works — everything from John Cage’s still-shocking sonic…
Early in the day on February 3, 2004, Jaime Rodrigo Gough was murdered in a bathroom on the second floor of Southwood Middle School in Palmetto Bay. Though he’s still awaiting trial, it is almost certain that then-eighth grader Michael Hernandez was responsible for the slaying. The events of that…
Florida Grand Opera’s new production of Bellini’s La Sonnambula is not to be missed. One of the most demanding and beautiful of all operas now emerges as what can only be called a sublime musical landmark for this company, for this city, and for music lovers everywhere. Running here through…
Alice Does Wonderland: The Sol Theatre is a dirty place filled with dirty people. In Alice Does Wonderland, you will see a puppet give a man analingus. You will see Alice going down on the Cheshire Cat. You will see the Red Queen deep-throat a light saber, which is dangerous…
Sin Full Heaven: The third installment of Ricky J. Martinez’s Island Trilogy is a good example of everything that can go wrong with homegrown, indie theater. The writing is a mess of clichés and hideously tortured sentence structures (Q: “Haven’t you kissed women before?” A: “Never the lips of an…
Puccini was not alone in loving this woman. The public first fell for her as the heroine of the sexy novel The Tale of the Chevalier Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost. It was the saga of a fast girl’s rise and fall that was turned into operas…
Sin Full Heaven: The third installment of Ricky J. Martinez’s Island Trilogy is a good example of everything that can go wrong with homegrown, indie theater. The writing is a mess of clichés and hideously tortured sentence structures (Q: “Haven’t you kissed women before?” A: “Never the lips of an…
Ricky J. Martinez does not deserve the following review. Martinez is a nice guy, all comfy pats-on-the-back and easy laughter, and he’s obviously passionate about his work. He gets giddy while discussing it, and that’s fine. I wish his work would provoke some giddiness in me. It doesn’t. Sin Full…
Romance: A filthy, filthy courtroom farce in the grand Mametian tradition of filthy farces, Romance contains moments when the Jew jokes, pedophilia jokes, and gay jokes make even the hip audiences at GableStage gasp instead of chuckle. This is all to the good: Although the story seems like an afterthought…
If you’re a tiny little theater with a tiny little budget, there is no better play to tackle than Three Angels Dancing on a Needle, by exiled Iranian playwright Assurbanipal Babilla. You need no sets, no props, no costumes. All that’s required is a director as perverse as Square Peg…
It’s asinine to think any human being can truly know the heart or mind of any other, but I’ve got a theory about David Mamet anyway: He thinks all human beings are deaf-mutes. At first glance, Romance appears to be a play about peace; either that or it’s about nothing…
Dear New Times Reader: You are hip and young, or so we tell the advertisers. In 2006 you turned the entertainment culture on its ear with your bloggings and YouTubings. You whipped Congress like it was an obstinate mule and burned America in effigy at the altar of Sacha Baron…
City Beneath the Sea: The story of a young girl who saves an underwater metropolis from the powers of evil, played out through sparkling marionette sea creatures, is Pablo Cano’s ninth marionette production at the Museum of Contemporary Art. This musical production consists of hand-crafted puppets made from cookie cutters,…
