In the program notes for the Pope Theatre Company’s edgy staging of the surreal comedy Below the Belt, playwright Richard Dresser is quoted as saying: “In the course of supporting myself as a writer over the past few decades, I’ve had the occasion to work at a series of jobs…
The frisky production of Ray Cooney’s 1990 comedy Out of Order currently on-stage at Coconut Grove Playhouse recalls a print advertisement from years ago. “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye,” ran the copy under a picture of a satisfied customer chomping into a piece of bread…
Since his debut as a novelist in 1963, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has been surprising the public. Not only does he move with stylistic ease between forms (novels, short stories, criticism, journalism, essays, plays) and genres (political allegories, mysteries, erotica), he wreaks havoc with literary conventions in his fiction…
A bare-bones synopsis of Christopher Durang’s 1987 comedy Laughing Wild would read like a magic-realist love affair in which the protagonists meet cute: A man and a woman share a brief encounter in the aisle of a Manhattan grocery store. The woman relays her version of the meeting in a…
A wavering light spins on the dark stage floor as an actor’s voice booms from the sound system, reciting a speech from Antony and Cleopatra. “Come, let us have one more gaudy night,” the voice beseeches. The stage lights rise and the actor staggers into view, pulling a costume rack…
In the late Nineteenth Century, Thomas Edison created the first light bulb. In the early Twentieth Century, Henry Ford designed the first production-line automobile. Our plugged-in, revved-up contemporary world owes much to these quintessentially American geniuses, both of whom were as adept at marketing products as they were at inventing…
Legend has it that French writer, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau’s aesthetic was shaped by an injunction from the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. The young Cocteau, having achieved a minor measure of celebrity as a poet in Paris before World War I, complained to Diaghilev that the older man did…
“It’s time to take the hot seat, Mary,” says Rafael Lima, leading a Thursday morning class in the play-writing program at New World School of the Arts (NWSA). Mary Manning’s cheeks flush as she pushes her hair behind her ears. Clutching a thick loose-leaf notebook, she makes her way to…
One-person shows. Single-character plays. Monodramas. Autobiographical monologues. By whatever term actors, promoters, or critics dub solo performances, the format — in which one artist attempts to mesmerize an audience throughout an entire evening — has proliferated on the theater scene in recent years. Just check the listings from London to…
Baby boomer sensibility reached an all-time level of overexposure when the drama thirtysomething aired on television from 1987 through 1991. The show followed the angst-ridden escapades of white, educated, mostly overachieving and workaholic friends. Enamored with analyzing their every emotional twinge, this gang perfected an approach to life that blended…
Ever since Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical theater version of the classic film Sunset Boulevard debuted in London in 1993, much of the press about the show has concerned numbers: Mounting the remake of Billy Wilder’s sardonic, campy parable of Hollywood decadence and self-delusion cost $13 million; forgotten silent-film queen Norma…
David and Martha Flanagan are brother and sister, each burdened by memories of the past, each practiced at covering up pain, living together in their childhood home. Vietnam veteran David, once a high school golden boy, now numbs himself with alcohol, cigarettes, and casual sex in order to forget how…
At one point during 1984’s The Mystery of Irma Vep, Charles Ludlam’s insanely goofy yet sly sendup of Gothic novels and Victorian sensibilities, a British Egyptologist leaves nineteenth-century England for the Middle East. There, Lord Edgar Hillcrest pillages an ancient tomb and schleps the spoils back home. This lust for…
Most of the theater productions I’ve seen in South Florida over the years, from Palm Beach to South Dade, can be classified as “pleasant.” Bearable to sit through, they didn’t offend, irritate, or prompt me to leave during intermission. They proffered moments of dramatic tension, provided the occasional insight, featured…
Journalists and movie stars circle each other warily, in an uneasy dance born of need and skepticism. On one level, they are interdependent: Stars rely on journalists to promote them, while journalists use celebrity escapades as story fodder. On another level, they never know how much to trust one another:…
From the moment Richard Jay-Alexander saw his first musical he was hooked. “When I was in the fourth grade my dad took me to see Bye Bye Birdie, and I went nuts,” recalls the executive producer and associate director of the long-running Broadway mega-hit Les Miserables. “It was a bad…
As anyone who has relied on canine companionship to get through a difficult time can attest, a faithful dog more than deserves the moniker “man’s best friend.” Few species on Earth offer such undying devotion, unconditional love, reliable warmth, cuddly coats to snuggle up to, and homing instincts for returning…
Set against the backdrops of ghostly castles, lonely heaths, magical forests, and islands inhabited by spirits, the plays of William Shakespeare have been offering us insights into the human condition for four hundred years. Complex characters, from Hamlet to Lear to Prospero, from Lady Macbeth to Desdemona to Cleopatra, have…
This past January, artistic director Rafael de Acha proudly announced that the Coral Gables-based New Theatre had secured the rights to present an August 1996 production of Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! to be directed by company member Bill Yule. De Acha knew that the Caldwell Theatre Company was planning…
Naysayers have been tolling theater’s death knell since the development of motion pictures more than a century ago. The sound has grown louder with each new technological threat to live performance, from television to VCR to CD-ROM to virtual reality. Audiences, the theater world bemoans, have also been lured away…
If exuberant performances were the only criteria for judging good theater, two musicals playing in Miami this summer would earn unequivocally high marks. At Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables, a quartet of veteran musical theater artists have an infectiously good time singing, dancing and mugging their way through Tom Lehrer’s…
At the heart of the provocative 1992 drama The Twilight of the Golds lies a hypothetical medical and moral dilemmma: If you are pregnant and find out, through a futuristic prenatal genetic test, that your child is going to be gay, what do you do? For some of us, if…
