Nicky Silver is one twisted playwright, and his Raised in Captivity is too much. Now on stage at PS 742 in the heart of Little Havana, the deadly serious, seriously funny black comedy begins at a funeral: After years of not seeing each other, Sebastian and his twin, Bernadette, meet…
Betty’s Summer Vacation: To playwright Christopher Durang, hell is psycho roommates screwing up your seaside holiday. That’s the freakish situation in Betty’s Summer Vacation, a comedy of menace that is receiving a first-rate staging from Miami’s Mad Cat Theatre Company. The tedious script, featuring rape, murder, and genital mutilation, is…
Americans can’t seem to agree on much these days, but all must allow that these are tense, restless times. War, terrorism, a divided electorate, and a widespread debate about the nation’s purpose are everyday subjects on television, in newspapers, and at the local java joint, yet few contemporary plays and…
Betty’s Summer Vacation: To playwright Christopher Durang, hell is psycho roommates screwing up your seaside holiday. That’s the freakish situation in Betty’s Summer Vacation, a comedy of menace that is receiving a first-rate staging from Miami’s Mad Cat Theatre Company. The tedious script, featuring rape, murder, and genital mutilation, is…
“Hell is other people,” Jean Paul Sartre once opined. To Christopher Durang, hell is psycho roommates screwing up your seaside holiday. That’s the freakish situation in Betty’s Summer Vacation, Durang’s comedy of menace that is receiving a first-rate staging from Miami’s Mad Cat Theatre Company. Durang’s thin script has been…
Heaven Help Us! The Swingin’ New Rat Pack Musical: This toe-tapping world premiere about God sending the Rat Pack back to Vegas to help a suicidal lounge owner is stylishly presented, with the terrific cast belting out some great tunes — some 29 hits pop up in the show, ranging…
Fit To Be Tied: Tormented Arloc hates his promiscuous mother and falls for an “angel” in a local dramatic production. Long, somewhat aimless, and without conjuring any discernible interest, Nicky Silver’s play needs about three more drafts and some quality actors before it will be even remotely watchable. — Dan…
Whew! Summer is here with a vengeance, a fierce season that is, in some ways, a little like winter up north. Most everyone starts spending more time indoors and plotting how to minimize the time spent walking in full sunlight between car and destination, while the spare room or the…
The EDGE Theatre’s self-appointed mission is to “find new playwrights and produce the neglected works” of well-known writers. That this charge knowingly does not lend itself to works with tremendous commercial appeal is admirable. However, that same mantra becomes troublesome when long and dreadful pieces like Nicky Silver’s Fit to…
Josephine’s Bakery: A small bakery in France is given a rambunctious welcome by two overtly gay proprietors of the establishment and an orchestra of misfits. By mistakenly attempting to be a topical, biting black comedy instead of taking solace in what it really is — a rowdy, raucous farce –…
In the restaurant business, one classic mistake is to pay more attention to the presentation of the meal than the cooking itself. Beautiful décor and lighting and expert service always enhance a dining experience, but they can’t compensate for an ill-prepared entrée. The same truth applies to show business. Take,…
With Josephine’s Bakery, showing at the Prometeo Theatre’s new home on the downtown Wolfson Campus of Miami Dade College, things get off to a raucous, deliriously fun start, then slow down and never quite get back up to speed. The play, informed by Jean Anouilh’s The Orchestra, is billed as…
King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The New Theatre’s annual Shakespeare fest is played in true repertory, with King Lear, the Bard’s greatest tragedy, alternating nightly with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that popular comedy of lunacy, love, and poetry. Director Rafael de Acha and his superior design team deliver…
The Life: The tiny Atlantis Playhouse takes a crazy gamble on The Life, a dark and gritty musical about pimps and prostitutes on New York’s mean streets in the Eighties. The risk pays off. This rarely produced Tony Award winner (in its first-ever regional production) features a fine score from…
Let’s begin with the bottom line: By any measure, The Shakespeare Project, the New Theatre’s summer repertory of King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is an undeniable success. These masterworks, played by a plucky acting ensemble of thirteen, are delivered in visually striking stagings by artistic director Rafael de…
Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out, now in its Florida premiere at the Caldwell Theatre, is nothing if not ambitious. Its subjects are wide-ranging — among them, major-league baseball, gay identity, prejudice, and tolerance — and so are its genres. The play wants to be both a pressure-cooker drama and a…
Richard Feynman was a physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1965, helped develop the atomic bomb, and was a key member of a panel that investigated the Challenger explosion in 1986. He was also a loon. Oozing eccentricity as often as possible, Feynman — aside from being considered the…
Desert Storm: Jim Tommaney’s antiwar fable balances three stories: soldiers on the war front, their concerned parents back home, and inside the Oval Office as the first President Bush and aides discuss U.S. involvement in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. The fictional plight of the soldiers and families hits hard,…
All hail irrationality! And Wayne Gretzky too (hold on a minute — we’ll get to that). Irrationality is the only explanation of why the Atlantis Playhouse’s Gary Waldman decided against all logic to present The Life, a stark, gritty musical about pimps and prostitutes that’s a 180-degree change from the…
There are eighteen songs in Songs for a New World, some more imaginative than others but all striking in their deceptive simplicity. The common themes in this revue of composer Jason Robert Brown’s work are life and happiness, or lack thereof. They run the gamut from unabashed optimism to shocking…
Summer Shorts: City Theatre’s annual festival of short plays, a highlight of the South Florida stage scene, is back with mini comedies and dramas in all styles and sizes. Twenty playlets from one to twenty minutes long are presented in two separate programs, which can be taken in on separate…
Has it already been a year since Summer Shorts was last in town? This festival of short plays (twenty minutes max) has become a nationally recognized event in its nine-year history and something of a must-see/must-be-seen-there social event for South Florida cognoscenti. Shorts has its own cheerily subversive personality; this…
