Blind Date: Last year the New Theatre scored an incredible coup when it commissioned Nilo Cruz’s surprise Pulitzer winner Anna in the Tropics. This year lightning may have struck a second time as the New Theatre has delivered another masterpiece of a play. Mario Diament’s stunning, brilliant world premiere tracks…
Sometimes life really does imitate art. In a parallel universe, the New Theatre’s artistic director, Rafael de Acha, could be a world-famous Hollywood studio chief, renowned for his skill at ferreting out new works of genius. In our own less-judicious universe, de Acha isn’t well-known outside of South Florida. But…
Gay marriage is at the top of the news these days, so the Trap Door Theatre’s decision to produce David Mamet’s bitter comedy Boston Marriage could not be more timely. Mamet’s tale is a faux-Victorian intrigue about two nineteenth-century lesbians whose live-in relationship is considered by society to be platonic…
Blind Date: Reviewed in this issue. Through April 4. New Theatre, 4120 Laguna St., Coral Gables. 305-443-5909. Boston Marriage: Reviewed in this issue. Through March 20. Trap Door Theatre at the Black Box Theatre, Miami Dade College North Campus, Building #5, 11380 NW 27th Ave. 305-237-1438. The Bris, the Bar-Mitzvah,…
On the face of it, Jolson and Company, the latest biographical musical presented by the Coconut Grove Playhouse, should be dead on arrival. Its subject, Al Jolson, became a star before World War I, died more than a half-century ago, and hardly registers in the contemporary Zeitgeist. He was reputed…
Blind Date: The New Theatre presents another world premiere with Mario Diament’s Blind Date. Diament is the Miami-based, Argentine-born author of The Book of Ruth and Smithereens. As the title suggests, the play explores encounters between strangers, sighted and blind. Directed by Rafael de Acha. March 6 through April 4…
Ars longa, vita brevis, goes the old Roman saying, and it remains true today. While decades and centuries come and go, art endures. The tumult of prerevolutionary Russia is by now a dim memory, but Chekhov’s plays remain to recall the era. So it is with the plays of Jon…
Chekhov in Repertory: Actors engage in a battle of egos as they struggle through an ill-fated production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters; presented in rotating repertory with The Cherry Orchard. Through February 28. University of Miami Ring Theatre, 1312 Miller Dr., Coral Gables. 305-284-3355. The Drawer Boy: Watching Florida Stage’s…
Watching Florida Stage’s new production of The Drawer Boy is a bit like observing a bumblebee in flight. Based on the evidence, it shouldn’t fly, but there it goes. Michael Healey’s 1999 script is riddled with implausibilities and secondhand ideas. Nevertheless it offers some gentle humor and soul, and both…
Beauty of the Father: There is much to savor and even more to contemplate in Nilo Cruz’s new play, now receiving a visually compelling world premiere at the New Theatre. The production offers several pleasures, first and foremost of which is Cruz’s poetic, luxuriant language. Listening to Beauty is like…
Want to know my definition of good theater? It’s when you take a seat, see a show, and go home a changed person. That’s what you can expect from the M Ensemble’s new production of Strands, now on dazzling display at the venerable company’s North Miami theater. Strands is one…
Beauty of the Father: There is much to savor and even more to contemplate in Nilo Cruz’s new play, now receiving a visually compelling world premiere at the New Theatre. The production offers several pleasures, first and foremost of which is Cruz’s poetic, luxuriant language. Listening to Beauty is like…
If you’re looking to see theatrical craft in action, I suggest you get over to the Coconut Grove Playhouse’s carefully wrought production of The Chosen, which features an array of fine acting talent and one world-class performance by Theodore Bikel. In a modern world that relies on fast-paced glibness for…
Producing theater is something akin to surfing. Hard work and talent don’t always make for success — you gotta catch the right wave. Most of the time shows roll in and out of production with unremarkable regularity and less impact. But once in a while a tsunami hits. That’s a…
Watching the Hollywood Playhouse’s new, energetic production of Beau Jest: The Musical is like attending two shows in one. As entertainment, this musical version of the popular comedy offers some sprightly tunes while retaining the original show’s humor and offering a fine performing ensemble. The play draws dramatic strength from…
There is much to savor and even more to contemplate in Nilo Cruz’s new play Beauty of the Father, now receiving a visually compelling world premiere at the New Theatre, www.new-theatre.org the third world premiere of a Cruz play at the Coral Gables space in as many seasons. The production…
Those who choose writing as a career often face many sorrows — poverty, public indifference, and critical contempt, to name but three. But whatever woes must be endured in a literary life, the writer has one secret weapon: the chance to turn life experience into a story and, by so…
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of GableStage’s current production, Joe Orton’s silly, sexually provocative farce, What The Butler Saw, is the cultural change that has occurred since Joe Orton’s cheeky sex farce was a scandalous coup de theatre in its Sixties premiere. Orton, a gay writer with a penchant for…
Uh oh. When I learn that a screenwriter has just written a play, I usually look for a place to hide. Many, no, most successful writers fall into the trap of hubris: If they thrive in one medium, they assume they will triumph in all. The result is often abysmal…
Change is a funny thing. Some of it is dramatic, embodied in single moments — a wedding, a birth, a terrorist attack. But a whole lot of change happens incrementally, so slowly that it isn’t noticed until after the fact. These thoughts may come to mind when contemplating the Coconut…
The holidays are upon us, and with them comes the annual choice of whether to surrender to or resist their cheery traditions. Clearly intent on your surrender, the Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables is presenting Annie, a big traditional musical staged in a big traditional way. But whereas past holiday…
“The past is prologue,” goes the old saying, but for much of the theater, ancient and modern, the past isn’t even past. Many plays have been constructed about past crimes that have risen to disturb the peace of the present. It’s an ongoing trend that’s particularly interesting in contemporary America,…
