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BEST STAGE DESIGN

Victor Becker

Black Sheep

Florida Stage

Using an all white-set and a series of mobile screens, Becker created an ever-shifting fun house of mobile space, a perfect setting for Lee Blessing's elusive, dreamlike comedy that offered director Michael Bigelow Dixon plenty of staging opportunities. The space allowed the play itself to expand into the marvelous production that it was. If you wanted to see how it's done, this was the perfect learning ground.

BEST THEATER FOR DRAMA

Florida Stage

This Palm Beach County company serves up challenging productions with a nice blend of local and New York actors and a welcome infusion of very talented directors and designers from across the nation. Artistic director Louis Tyrrell has an excellent instinct for play selection and maintains close relationships with several important playwrights. The result is a sophisticated level of theater artistry that sets the standard in South Florida. Some highlights this season: the sly and sophisticated comedy Red Herring, set during the McCarthy era (hey, red baiting can be a hoot!), and Lee Blessing's Black Sheep, also a dark comedy that takes aim at racial relations, the idle rich, and insipid pop culture (hey, maybe it's American culture in general that's a hoot!).

BEST ENSEMBLE CAST

Red Herring

Florida Stage

More kudos for the little Florida Stage that could. But here's why: Stephen G. Anthony, Patricia Dalen, Suzanne Grodner, Kendra Kassebaum, Johnathan F. McClain, and Gordon McConnell. This outstanding cast served up an endless stream of hilarious yet sometimes touching characters in this black comedy, from Anthony's tortured G-man to Grodner's wacky Mrs. McCarthy, the wife of Senator Joe, to Kassebaum's smoldering, sex-hungry good girl. This romp of a production included romance and intrigue, spies and bagmen, nuclear secrets and red scares, hard liquor and clever parody. The cast took the basket of outrageous thematic goodies and ran with spirit, hilarity, wit, and panache. Can't wait for more.

BEST BLACK-BOX PRODUCTION

audiovideo

Juggerknot Theatre Company

What's the difference between a black box and a full theater? Size, yes. The first is much more intimate. But in the right hands a black-box experience becomes something entirely new. Like when a director decides to ignore the confines of a stage and work with the space as a whole. Like when homegrown writer/director Michael John Garces decides to use Juggerknot's Biscayne Boulevard box for his one-act audiovideo, which blew away just about everything else produced in this town. The other half of the show, land, as well as most stuff performed at Juggerknot, was top-notch, but audiovideo stands alone. We didn't watch actors on a stage. We watched two teenage boys move around our literal and metaphorical basement as they discussed what to do with a lost sex videotape they had made. The directing was so tight, the acting so skilled (bravo to Oscar Isaac and David Perez), the dialogue so clever (the speech is often fragmentary, the boys finish each others' sentences, or let physical acts do the talking) that the audience was left wondering just exactly what they had seen -- that was not simply theater, was it? No, it was simply great.

BEST LOCALLY PRODUCED STAGE COMEDY

Here in My Car

Mad Cat Productions

Miami Light Project's Light Box Theatre

The trick of a successful comedy is to walk the fine line between life and art, which the local acting troupe Mad Cat did so humorously in their third production, Here in My Car. It cleverly combined a bit of Melrose Place with a healthy dose of The Real World and plunked it down in Miami. This original piece, penned by Ivonne Azurdia and Paul Tei, was a series of vignettes that connected the loves and lives of eleven Miamians. All the action took place in an early-Eighties model Honda, an artifice that gave the piece cohesiveness and a dramatic starting and finishing point. The two writers, approximately ten years apart in age, brought an interesting blend of decades to the writing: references to Paul McCartney and Wings and Less Than Zero spliced with talk of Green Day and Blink-182. What kept Here in My Car from being a narcissistic, "Hey! A Play About Me and My Friends!" production was Tei's excellent direction and the Mad Cats themselves, one of the most spontaneous and adventurous group of actors Miami has to offer.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Paul Tei

Black Sheep

Florida Stage

As Max, a spoiled rich kid turned film critic, Tei turned in an over-the-top performance that stole the show, no small feat in a very strong cast and very strong play. But Tei's done it before, in the fabulous Popcorn last year at GableStage and other productions around town. It was time, however, for Tei to break mold and this year he did, pushing into new emotional territory in his own Mad Cat company's dark tale, Portrait, and as the tortured, sarcastic, vodka-swilling Sergio in New Theatre's Smithereens. Yet Tei's ability to wring humor out of twisted situations is one of his best assets, and as the terminally juvenile Max he did just that, giving South Florida a genuine treat.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Brenda Thomas

Bee-luther-hatchee

Florida Stage

Thomas was outstanding as Libby Price, a world-weary black woman adrift in the Southern racial struggles of the Sixties in this interesting production. ("Bee-luther-hatchee" is early twentieth-century African-American slang for a faraway, damnable place, the next station after the stop for Hell.) This was the New York-based actress's first stop in South Florida, and her emotionally compelling work was a model of simplicity and clarity, and left an indelible mark on the memory. With more such roles, maybe we'll be fortunate enough to see more of Thomas on our stages.

BEST SOLO PERFORMANCE

Teo Castellanos

NE 2nd Avenue

Serving up a rogues' gallery of local Miami characters, Castellanos showed off his considerable performing and writing gifts in one of the theater season's highlights. Donning different hats, literally, Castellanos took on the accent, the movements, indeed the appearance of a Haitian jitney driver, a small-time Wynwood ("Wynwooood") Puerto Rican drug dealer, a Cuban vendor, a Hialeah teenager, a black woman, Jamaican man, Jewban grandfather. With humor and an authentic feel for the streets, Castellanos brought home the wonderful diversity that is Miami in the cozy Encore Room at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, a bravura theatrical experience sponsored by the Miami Light Project.

BEST ACTRESS

Pamela Roza

Boy Gets Girl

GableStage

Roza was memorable as a tightly wound professional woman in Manhattan being stalked by a would-be suitor. Her emotional range and willingness to explore the character's ugly sides helped turn Rebecca Gilman's issue-driven potboiler into a dark, troubling character study. We've seen Roza before in other psychological dramas, such as Extremities, where she played a rape victim who turns the tables on the perpetrator, literally and emotionally trapping her tormentor; and in her disturbing performance in Medea Redux (the title tells you something), one of three plays in Bash by Neil LaBute, where she revealed a simultaneous vulnerability and hardness that made us remember why watching live performances by talented actors is a riveting experience.

BEST ACTOR

Peter Haig

Someone Who'll Watch Over Me

Haig's performance in this show (at the Mosaic Theatre in Plantation) was little seen but indelible. An insular literature professor imprisoned in war-torn Beirut, chained in place for the entire play, Haig could barely move, not even stand, but nevertheless managed to conjure up a moving, nuanced portrait of a limited, conflicted man who discovers a well of strength he never knew existed. As a medieval scholar, Haig's character initially seems the frail one, a man living through his ancient texts in an ivory tower into which harsh reality never makes its way. But Haig reveals a man capable of something more, and shows us a strength derived from words, not force. Haig has always chosen intelligent roles, so it's worth your while to choose his performances whenever they pop up.

Best Of Miami®

Best Of Miami®

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