In a starkly furnished Paris apartment, spectator Marc (Judd Hirsch) circles a white canvas with the wary step of a big-game hunter while Serge (Cotter Smith) looks on expectantly; we can’t help but wonder if it is the art, or his best friend, that Marc is about ready to attack…
Works that penetrate the façade of normalcy in marriage are nothing new to American theater audiences. In the 1938 classic Our Town, Thornton Wilder pioneered what we now call “relationship drama” when he placed a young couple on the altar and allowed the audience to listen in on their innermost…
Some would say it’s a guy thing: crushed cans of Schlitz strewn across the floor of a Motel 6 room, belching as an alternative to conversation, and the inevitable discussion about the undeniably rhetorical question, “How could you be my best friend and screw the love of my life?” Such…
Adapted for the stage by TG Cooper, the late founder of the M Ensemble Company, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Live! is a tribute to the black comedienne who broke the color lines and paved the way for other artists. Born Loretta Mary Aiken in the 1890s, Mabley is often called the…
Nilo Cruz’s A Park in Our House is a record of the human spirit when the human body exists in a totalitarian state and survives on a continuum not of belief but of disbelief. The romantic, the idealist, the realist, the repressed, the rebel, and the messiah — these are…
In a dingy sixth-floor room, two lonely souls join hands, seeking an escape from their solitude and isolation through the medium of dance. They shuffle across the floor, clumsily performing a waltz while chatting about their lives. If this scenario sounds as if it were penned by romance novelist Danielle…
Art is domination. It’s making people think for one moment in time, there’s only one art, one voice, and that’s yours,” declares opera star Maria Callas (Rosemary Prinz) in Master Class. Callas was not simply a talented singer and a beautiful woman; she was a diva. It is the ability…
We enjoy a classic whodunit in the same way we enjoy Christmas carolers: with a certain amused detachment. We are not seeking new insight into the human condition but instead are indulging in a bit of nostalgic escapism. Thus, if the revival of a genre piece like Ira Levin’s classic…
When you walk into the Miami Light Project’s theater space, you will find yourself momentarily onstage. The space is set up so the stage has its back to those entering; you have to walk through it to get to the chairs. There’s a sensation of getting lost backstage and accidentally…
Five Southern women, some hard liquor, and about two and a half bolts of lilac-color taffeta. If we threw in Julia Roberts and a walk-on by Tommy Lee Jones, would we have another Steel Magnolias? Happily, no. Where that film drowned in a cloying syrup of bathos and fake accents,…
Junior officers quickly become disoriented in the Orient,” navy wife Julia Anderson warns newly arrived officer “Sparky” Watts in A.R. Gurney’s play Far East. Indeed the New Theatre’s production of this work seems to offer a heady brew of scandal, sex, and unrequited love, promising to leave the audience pleasantly…
The literary canon is spinning, the hyphen that binds so-called multicultural fiction — Asian-American, Hispanic-American, African-American fiction — will not hold. Nor should it. Any thought-provoking work on ethnic identity must offer audiences a real look at the themes young playwrights are likely to undertake. In its inaugural performance, Miami’s…
The logistic, aesthetic, and emotional challenges of keeping a small arts organization afloat would flummox the savviest CEO. Why do artistic directors struggle to bring live theater to South Florida stages when they could spend half the energy and earn six figures directing deodorant commercials? In the second part of…
Live theater has never been a big draw in South Florida, an area not usually recognized as a center for first-class theatrical performances. Independent arts organizations in general have a hard time just staying afloat — witness the shuttering of the Alliance Cinema’s doors last week. Yet several nonprofit local…
You could say Shirley Richardson has a theatrical heritage. Growing up in Miami in the Fifties and Sixties, her entire family worked for the Coconut Grove Playhouse, either as domestic or manual laborers. Shirley would accompany her mother, Bennie Mae, who was a cleaning woman at the playhouse from 1954…
Paper elephants and donkeys; red, white, and blue banners; and two video screens — one posted in each of the far corners of the space — set the scene for George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing, one of Broadway’s first political satires. We are quickly reminded that successful…
I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. — Stevie Smith In Douglas Carter Beane’s As Bees in Honey Drown, Evan Wyler (played by Mark Heimann) learns a little something about the facts of life and even more about life’s fictions. After nine years of…
It’s no myth that one of the first constitutional rights U.S. settlers fought for after freedom of speech, was the right to bear arms. Americans have an undeniable fascination (indeed, love affair) with the gun as phallus — an insatiable attraction to the romance of the Bonnie and Clyde rampage…
The forms of entertainment competing with live theater seem to grow every year, from IMAXes to e-books to women’s basketball. And now there’s even a new form onstage. “The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction,” wrote Jean Cocteau, and South Florida, being the capital of contradiction and fertile…
As the house lights go up at the end of Brief Encounters, the Lake Worth Playhouse’s second annual one-act festival, the cast shuffles onstage, folding chairs in tow. Each Friday night of the three-week festival, audience members can stick around to ask questions and chat with the cast. The actors…
Remember that instantly evaporating pop hit from the early Eighties, “Video Killed the Radio Star”? If ever there were a comparable anthem for the relationship of the small screen to the stage, it would be Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet. The backstage comedy that hit Broadway in 1991 pits art…
While some critics would say Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dark tales are not of this world, The House of the Seven Gables reveals a work very much of two worlds, or rather two Americas — the new and the old. Woven from the black cloak of Calvinism but enlightened by the threads…
