When he was 107 years old, the story goes, Broadway legend George Abbott was asked what he thought was the most important development in the theater to have taken place in his lifetime. His answer: “Electricity.” Although his active career as an actor, director, and producer spanned some six decades…
Socrates and Plato, Emerson and Thoreau, Mr. Kotter and Vinnie Barbarino — the history of Western civilization is cluttered with memorable teacher-student pairs, each bringing its unique dynamic to one of the most powerful relationships in humankind. It’s no surprise that quite a few twentieth-century dramas, from Educating Rita to…
If nothing else, Naked Boys Singing! lives up to the hype of its title. The cast members are naked, they are male, and they sing. In fact they sing rather well. That’s a good thing, since the revue, already a hit at the Celebration Theatre in Los Angeles (another production…
The fascinating part of Twilight at Monticello: An Evening with Thomas Jefferson is not the hour-and-45-minute monologue that serves as the main attraction but rather the short question-and-answer period that follows in which actor-creator J.D. Sutton answers questions about the show’s subject. He does this first in character as the…
What’s a nice socialist playwright like Naomi Wallace doing in Coral Gables? Getting a crackerjack production of her play at the New Theatre, that’s what. Wallace’s 1996-97 Obie-winning play One Flea Spare, is about class struggle, bubonic plague, and biting poetry, hardly the usual ingredients of polite Sunday matinees or…
It’s almost always funnier when men dress up as women than the other way around. Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli are drag standbys in theaters and cabarets around the world. Elizabeth Dole and Hillary Clinton are routinely skewered on Saturday Night Live and in improv clubs. But where are the…
Playwright John Patrick Shanley once told the New York Times that he bought a copy of Krafft-Ebing’s nineteenth-century textbook Psychopathia Sexualis because “I have an unhealthy interest in sex and eccentric German people.” (Well, who doesn’t?) It might stand to reason then that he named his 1997 comedy Psychopathia Sexualis…
Mixed Emotions! is the name of Richard Baer’s astoundingly popular comedy about two golden agers who fall in love. Since its February opening, the show has been a hit for the Broward Stage Door Theatre, which has extended it through late July. Mixed emotions might also describe a demanding theatergoer’s…
Like the old adage about good campers who can start a fire with only three matchsticks, the M Ensemble Company, Inc., has struck a full blaze with Home, a production crackling with inventiveness that defies its low-budget parameters with combustible theater talent. Samm-Art Williams’s drama-in-poetry about a young Southern farmer…
Info: Much Ado About Sonnets By Robin Dougherty The two-year-old Actors’ Project Theatre Company is the first to admit that with Love’s Fire, it’s shamelessly cashing in on the current cachet of William Shakespeare. “He’s hip and young, but older crowds recognize him, too” says Irene Adjan, the company’s cofounder…
If memory serves, Archie Bunker never ranted about brilliant country and western stars who experienced rapid career trajectories and died tragic deaths, possibly because none ever crossed his path. So it’s difficult to imagine what he’d think of daughter Gloria losing her head over Patsy Cline. Of course more than…
Suicide, abortion, death by torture, and plagiarism of an obscure British novelist are an awful lot to cram into a single play. In fact just one of these topics would be a challenge for the best of playwrights. Shakespeare’s potboiler, Titus Andronicus, for example, contains rape, mutilation, and family squabbling,…
In the GableStage production of Full Gallop, actress Judith Delgado reaches out and grabs the audience by their lapels. It’s a performance that would simply thrill Diana Vreeland, whose obsession with clothing infuses this one-woman show just as her hyperbole-driven fashion sensibility filled the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue…
Early in Tom Stoppard’s comedy Rough Crossing, a character refers to the Irish policeman named Murphy who makes an entrance at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice. Don’t remember Murphy? You’re not alone. Never heard of Rough Crossing? You’re also in good company. The 1984 play by the coauthor…
When I asked the four-year-old next to me to explain the appeal of Snow White, she replied, “Seven beds. Seven bowls. Seven everything.” This little theatergoer has probably never heard of Bruno Bettelheim, who deconstructed the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm some twenty years ago. She was entirely oblivious…
If Sid Caesar had ever performed a sketch about Henry VIII, it might have resembled the hilarious second act of The King’s Mare, Oscar E. Moore’s bio-comedy about the Tudor monarch and his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. The entire play is now enjoying a high-spirited world premiere at Boca…
Ariel Dorfman’s political potboiler opens like the creaky thrillers from which it’s descended — on the proverbial dark and stormy night. Paulina is alone, waiting for her husband to arrive at their desolate beach house. It’s raining. There’s no phone. A stranger enters. Well, maybe not a stranger. As Death…
“It sure was a beautiful night,” says Jamie Tyrone, one of the two survivors in American theater’s most famous morning-after scene. “I’ll never forget it,” this drunk says to Josie Hogan, the woman who has given him the only respite from misery he’s likely to get in this life. But…
William Mastrosimone’s Tamer of Horses takes place in a universe in which a kid named Hector wanders into the lives of two frustrated classics professors. You might surmise a coincidence like this is at hand from the title, a reference to Hector, the warrior hero of the Iliad. But would…
David Mamet’s war-between-the-sexes conundrum is nothing if not a tense night out at the theater. That’s true if you’re male, female, a college student, a professor, or merely an innocent bystander trying to figure out whether there actually is a watertight argument inside this situation tragedy. Oleanna is about a…
The “dinner party for dead people” play, in which an author gathers people who may or may not have met in real life and plops them into the same room for supper, isn’t officially recognized as a dramatic genre. But it’s so popular that maybe it ought to be. Few…
Imagine a brainy spider battling cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn and you’ll get some idea of the shenanigans onstage in the National Actors Theatre touring production of The Gin Game, starring Julie Harris and Charles Durning. The Tony Randall-produced revival, which just left the Royal Poinciana Playhouse to take up residence…
