Catering to obsessed foodies who crave tasting menus, and battling boorish socialites who demand priority seating, Sam Peliczowski mans the telephone lines booking reservations at a wildly popular Manhattan restaurant. In Fully Committed we meet Sam, an actor for whom this is a pays-the-rent job, and a colorful cast of…
Flyin’ West: Set in 1898, Flyin’ West follows three black sisters who’ve left the South and struck out on their own, settling in Nicodemus, Kansas. The hardships of freedom and independence are compounded by their struggle to protect themselves from white speculators trying to buy their land and splinter their…
Be thankful for small theaters. While the larger companies in South Florida cater to conventional tastes, the tiny troupes fill out the menu with an array of riskier, challenging programming. Fort Lauderdale’s Sol Theatre has made risk-taking a fundamental company rule. Tony Priddy and Robert Hooker’s cheeky crew debuted in…
The Homestead Act of 1862 inspired large groups of former slaves to leave the South following the Civil War and create a number of all-black towns in America’s wide-open Midwest and West. Many of those settlers were unmarried or widowed women who operated their own farms and ranches. Set in…
A Picasso: Art and politics collide in this fictional drama set in Paris during the German occupation. The mysterious Miss Fischer is sent to interrogate the famed Pablo Picasso regarding the authenticity of three paintings left behind by their owners, who have fled the regime. April 13 through May 2…
If the traditional Broadway musical is your cup of tea, your cup runneth over with Fiddler on the Roof, now at the Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables. The beloved, well-known classic about a tradition-bound Jewish community caught up in the turbulent changes of prerevolutionary Russia is a huge undertaking, but…
This satire on life in America’s heartland may be suggestive of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, but it’s a sure bet its authors weren’t thinking of the poet when they created it. Greater Tuna began in 1982 as an impromptu party skit but ended up being one of the most…
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…
Poet Louise Bogan writes, “True revolutions in Art restore more than they destroy.” The same could be said for the theater of ideas. Thomas Gibbons’s most recent stage examination of the great American race divide, Permanent Collection, promises to resuscitate audiences who have become catatonically content with theater whose fiction…
Lionel Goldstein’s Halpern & Johnson, now onstage at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, is the story of two men brought together by the death of a woman who was central to both their lives. Despite an engaging premise, Goldstein’s adaptation of his own 1983 HBO teleplay Mr. Halpern & Mr. Johnson…
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…
The Caldwell Theatre’s new show, Iago, certainly offers the promise of blood-pumping drama. James McLure’s play is set backstage during a mid-twentieth-century production of Shakespeare’s Othello and takes its inspiration from the tempestuous real-life relationship between Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, and Leigh’s adulterous affair with the young Peter Finch…
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…
