Worldwide ecological disaster has a way of changing a man. So says Caldwell B. Cladwell, and he’s probably right — but not too right, because there is nothing remotely unfamiliar about the denizens of “The Poorest, Filthiest Urinal in Town,” where Act I, Scene 1 of Urinetown takes place. “It’s…
Michael Yawney assumed “bugchasing” was just a gay myth, like a Village People reunion tour or bathroom sex at “Homo” Depot. A 2003 Rolling Stone article about the phenomenon was marred by faulty reporting, and besides, people would not actually seek to contract HIV, would they? “Gift” parties, where HIV-negative…
It’s New Year’s Eve 1972, and 15-year-old Janice Billie has decided to kill herself. She lives in a trailer on the Seminole reservation in Broward County with her brother, his wife, and their baby, and she’s waiting for the ball to drop. She has already stolen a gun, and after…
Shakespeare and Melvin Van Peebles are not generally mentioned in the same breath, though soon they’ll be sharing the same stage. This is thanks to the touring wing of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, which will open its production of Romeo & Juliet this week in the Studio Theater at…
Edmund Farraday will not sell out. He refuses. He’s young, he’s an artist, he has long hair, and he likes Rousseau. He is a free spirit, the kind of guy who would break ties with his daddy if daddy tried to make him go into the family business. He would…
Talk Radio: Eric Bogosian’s play (which was filmed by Oliver Stone in 1988) about radio host Barry Champlain, once a small-time Akron DJ blessed with the gift of gab, incorporates elements of radio host Alan Berg’s murder at the hands of neo-Nazis. — Brandon K. Thorp Through October 7. Mosaic…
Live from the Edge: Presented by the Miami Light Project is fusion theater from the New York-based Universes ensemble. The show is the culmination of the fifth annual Miami/Project Hip Hop, in which artists, activists, and educators from all over the United States convene for a weekend of dialogue and…
Act One: AmericanAirlines Arena, Wednesday, August 22. Big steps covered with darting humanity. Camera crews, journos, fast-moving people wearing color-coded shirts and performing mysterious functions. And kids — thousands of them, some heading into the arena and some heading out, some scared or grim and others bursting out of their…
So: last show of the Shakespeare Festival — now “Shakespeare & Friends” — at New Theatre. Crippling fear gripped this reviewer prior to the event. I had been studiously avoiding the place after a run of ghastly reviews, because you can publish horrible things about a person only so many…
The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a lighthearted political satire prominently featuring four murders, two toenail-pullings, one near-miss nipple amputation, two cats’ brains, six punctured eyeballs, many severed limbs, and something like nine gallons of blood. It is a Grand Guignol explosion of death, violence, and bodily fluids that fuses big…
Everything Will Be Different: A Brief History of Helen of Troy is a lot like The Passion of the Christ. It’s torture-porn, a slow-motion snuff film that gains momentum by playing on the same febrile masochistic streak that powers all such voluntary journeys into the darker wilds of human entertainment…
TomFoolery was first produced by the Actors’ Playhouse in 1989, when the troupe was operating out of Kendall. They did it there again in 1992 and again in 1996, at the current location on Miracle Mile. Now they’re doing it once more. All four actors involved in this musical revue…
Julius Caesar: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend us your butts: William Shakespeare’s play about the fall of Rome’s most storied dictator comes to the New Theatre as the latest installment in its Shakespeare & Friends Festival. The Bard wrote The Tragedy of Julius Cæsar, more commonly known as Julius Caesar, in…
Smut is either the least sexy show about sex in the history of theater, or theater’s most subversive pro-abstinence statement. These things are always fifty-fifty, and Joseph Adler is usually at his best when he’s courting ambiguity. Intentionally, I mean. Neither Adler nor anybody else is at his or her…
There is a delicious scene in the Hispanic Theater Guild’s production of La Curva de la Felicidad (The Curve of Happiness), in which the hangdog protagonist, Quino, informs his ex’s mover that he’s a television writer who pens suicide notes. Quino, you see, has been dumped because he’s “too fat,…
Not every trip to the theater needs to end with an earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting, consciousness-expanding lesson, but Summer Shorts does. And here it is: Paul Tei is far and away the most exciting director in South Florida. Summer Shorts allows folks the rare opportunity to see a very great many artists’…
“It’s astounding,” says Stuart Meltzer. “When I first started working in this region, you couldn’t get a new play down here. Nobody wanted to touch new work. It was, Sorry, this isn’t Gypsy, this isn’t Neil Simon, and we don’t want to go near it.’ It’s interesting how much this…
The Boy from Russia: What begins as an icky feelings-fest ends as a smart meditation on suburban values, parental instinct, and the way privilege or deprivation can twist a person’s sensibilities. The new, semiautobiographical play by South Floridian Susan J. Westfall follows yuppies Beth Marshall and Jack Goldman (Sandy Ives…
The Boy from Russia: What begins as an icky feelings-fest ends as a smart meditation on suburban values, parental instinct, and the way privilege or deprivation can twist a person’s sensibilities. The new, semiautobiographical play by South Floridian Susan J. Westfall follows yuppies Beth Marshall and Jack Goldman (Sandy Ives…
“Splendid. This is a splendid play.” That is my date speaking. He is beautiful and smart, but I’m beginning to wonder if he’s not also slightly damaged; twisted in some subtle way that only makes itself known at world premiers of touchy-feely plays about malnourished Russian children and the yuppies…
Romeo & Juliet has been done and redone in approximately five gazillion different ways. Gounod made it into an opera; Tchaikovsky made it into a noise; Franco Zeffirelli did it as kiddie porn; Baz Luhrman did it with guns. Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers have been used to comment on apartheid, the…
Golda’s Balcony: In terms of steely resolve, Golda Meir made most great people of the Twentieth Century look meek. Over the years many folks — and especially the blame-Israel-first crowd — have assumed she was either a heartless ideologue or some kind of blood-sucking Zionist vampire (and then, crazily, certain…
