Performing Arts

City Theatre’s Summer Shorts Festival Is Filthy and Fabulous

Havana Bourgeois is an import from Los Angeles, with a mixed cast of local actors and gifted carpetbaggers (including the hunky Danny Pino, from television’s Cold Case). But spiritually and emotionally, this is a Miami show. Some of the most extreme audience reactions I’ve ever witnessed in a theater were…

No Child… Through May 17 at GableStage at the Biltmore, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables; 307-446-1116; gablestage.com Here’s an original story idea: An idealistic teacher goes to an inner-city school and teaches a bunch of toughs about the beauty of learning and art, and gives them an inkling of their…

Mauritius By Theresa Rebeck Through May 17 New Theatre 4120 Laguna St., Coral Gables 305-443-5909 new-theatre.org Mauritius is a play about overvalued bits of paper and the way people screw each other over in order to get them. We’re talking about stamps, but also money — both figure heavily in…

The Odd Magic of New Theatre’s Mauritius

Too much has been said about Lela Elam for this statement to make much of an impact, but here it goes: Lela Elam is a great actress. And though her current play, No Child…, probably has a profound message to share — something about hopes and dreams and the innate…

Mad Cat Theatre Dabbles in Diabolism with Broadsword

Les Misérables By Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil. Directed by David Arisco. Through April 5. Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables; 305-444-9293; actorsplayhouse.org Truly, the secret to Les Misérables’ stunning success is its target demographic. This is theater for people who do not like theater,…

The Glass Menagerie By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Ricky J. Martinez. Through March 29. New Theatre, 4130 Laguna St., Coral Gables; 305-443-5909, new-theatre.org Where the hell is Tennessee? You’ll never miss Mr. Williams more than when exiting the tiny auditorium at The New Theatre, fresh from a new production of…

The amazing thing about Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, now playing at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, is the way it keeps telling you things, no matter how many times you’ve seen it. After Saturday’s opening-night production, Carbonell voter Marzi Kaplan rose from her seat and said, “I didn’t…

There are at least two men hiding in John Patrick Shanley’s 59-year-old corpus: Shanley The Pedant and Shanley The Unsure. The former is a long-winded brat who writes plays such as the unwatchable Dirty Story, which presumed to tell us what, when, and how to think about geopolitics in the…

A Woman Called Truth By Sandra Fenichel Asher. Directed by Jerry Maple. Through March 1. The M Ensemble, 12320 W. Dixie Hwy., North Miami; 305-895-8945, themensemble.com A new play at The M Ensemble, A Woman Called Truth, isn’t your typical bioplay. It’s a haunting, surrealistic exploration of the young-womanhood of…

In the world of American theater, it’s difficult to imagine more dramatically fertile subject matter than our history of slavery. It is terrifying even in theory, but Americans can’t think about it theoretically. It was here; it happened. Slavery hits close to the bone: You never know if the ground…

Kissing, a brand-new play now making its world premiere at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, is so precious it ought to trigger your gag reflex. It doesn’t. It bypasses the alimentary canal altogether and burrows straight to the heart. Cynics and hipsters might feel annoyed, but they shouldn’t. Kissing…

A shell-shocked silence filled the GableStage auditorium in Coral Gables Saturday night. The ensemble had just finished a hugely complicated musical number, and from the audience: nothing. Maybe they wanted to applaud, but something in the crowd’s vibe warned against it. Theirs was a silence that communicated not disinterest, not…

The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged By The Reduced Shakespeare Company. Through January 16 at the Adrienne Arsht Center, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami; 305-949-6722, www.arshtenter.org According to the advertisement, those who like Shakespeare will like Shakespeare (Abridged), and those who hate Shakespeare will love this version of his plays. And…

The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged By The Reduced Shakespeare Company. Through January 16 at the Adrienne Arsht Center, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami; 305-949-6722, www.arshtenter.org According to the advertisement, those who like Shakespeare will like Shakespeare (Abridged), and those who hate Shakespeare will love this version of his plays. And…

The plays of August Wilson have been so celebrated in print that it is probably pointless to begin the discussion anew. If he wasn’t the most poetic, the most novel, the most fun, or the most profound of recent American playwrights, he certainly combined all of those elements to a…

Adam Szymkowicz’s Nerve needs a new name. Its two characters are notable for many things — guilelessness, instability, horniness, and especially awkwardness — but their nerve is notable only by its absence. Elliot and Susan are a couple who meet on the Internet and then enjoy a first, fumbling date…

The mixtape cannot achieve perfection. Place Adrian Belew side by side with the X-Ray Specs, and you might draw undue attention to Belew’s geekiness. Pair Patti Smith with the Rolling Stones, and she might come off as a blowhard. On almost any mixtape, at least one song will fail to…

Next week in a small theater roughly the size of dormitory lounge, a local middle-school teacher named Kimberly Cox will magically transform herself into the most powerful image in the free world. “I already have the bangs and the glasses,” Cox says, “so I just put the blazer on.” Every…

An actor — I won’t say which one — once told me that Joe Adler doesn’t write down notes on blocking. This is true. Last Saturday, as the crew at GableStage headed into the final week of preparations for David Mamet’s new presidential comedy, November, the actors couldn’t quite keep…