The Sorrows of Young Werther: Of the many reasons this adaptation of Goethe’s play succeeds, the director’s savvy use of the small venue ranks highest. Jesús Quintero and his upstart troupe recognize that close quarters allow for eye contact with the audience and for the use of nuances that would…
Kenny Carnes’s Last Words wouldn’t play well in the rest of the theatergoing world. A one-man show examining the human side of the death penalty, it simply wouldn’t make sense. Most countries with happening theater scenes don’t kill their prisoners. This one does, though: More than 1,000 people have been…
The Sorrows of Young Werther: Of the many reasons this adaptation of Goethe’s play succeeds, the director’s savvy use of the small venue ranks highest. Jesús Quintero and his upstart troupe recognize that close quarters allow for eye contact with the audience and for the use of nuances that would…
Levee James begins as a fond family reminiscence, with a woman visiting her brother-in-law and his children on a cotton farm in rural Georgia. This, the first of four scenes, should be when playwright S.M. Shephard-Massat gets his exposition out of the way: who Levee James is, what has brought…
Altar Boyz: The hit off-Broadway musical about a fictional Catholic boy band brims with delightful sacrilege. The show is set up like a concert, with songs and between-song banter, and is moving in the flashy, exuberant manner of feel-good musical theater. It is the Boyz’ mission to save us all…
New Times spoke on the phone last week with the dusky-voiced Elizabeth Blancke-Biggs, who will be portraying Floria Tosca through the majority of Florida Grand Opera’s upcoming production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca. One of the most psychologically dramatic operas — its plot bursts with torture, murder, attempted rape, and suicide…
The men and women who nominate things for Tony Awards are probably very smart and very, very cultured. These people know why all Playbills look alike. Perhaps they’ve noshed on lobster poached in vanilla cognac at Le Cirque, or truffle risotto at Masa. Maybe they’ve figured out why Bernadette Peters…
Love Is Good: An Evening with Christine Andreas: If it weren’t for the marketeers who fill store aisles with red hearts, we might forget the buy-chocolate-for-the-person-you-sleep-with holiday is approaching! Before cynicism has taken all the fun out of a fancy dinner and a dozen roses, remember that romance and beauty…
Altar Boyz is a hit off-Broadway musical about a fictional Catholic boy band, and it is among the most sacrilegious things I’ve ever seen. To me the sacrilege was both obvious and delightful, but some audience members seemed to feel differently. Our divergent opinions might have had something to do…
In a press release, New Theatre has this to say about its new production, Fill Our Mouths: “Gay or straight? Hearing or deaf? Set in Paris, a heterosexual woman’s sexually adventuresome affair with a hard-of-hearing lesbian weaves a sensual fabric of communication and self-realization. As the relationship grows between them,…
Jeffrey Ross is famous for, among other things, posing this question to Courtney Love and a viewing audience of millions in 2005: “How is it possible that Courtney Love looks worse than Kurt Cobain?” Ralphie May is famous for, among other things, making fun of retarded people’s inability to pronounce…
In a few months New Times will roll out its annual “Best Of” issue. Nestled among Best Tattoo Artist, Best Streetside Falafel Stand, and Best Club in Which to Meet a Midget Mutant Amputee Leather Nun, you’ll find theatrical best-ofs: best show, actor, actress, director, and so forth. But there…
Five things you should know before seeing Martha Mitchell Calling: 1. Martha Mitchell Calling is irritating. It’s irritating because Martha Mitchell is irritating, even more so in this production than in life. She was the wife of John Mitchell, attorney general to Richard Nixon until 1972, and in the early…
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea was a last-minute addition to the Alliance Theatre Lab’s season. It was an economics thing, apparently. Danny’s got two actors and almost no set, so it’s easy to produce. Actually it’s probably easy in all respects: easy to direct, easy to star in. John…
Cosi Fan Tutte: Lorenzo Da Ponte’s translated libretto of the Mozart opera is bolstered by good comic acting, especially from tenor Brian Anderson and baritone Michael Todd Simpson. Except for Susanne Mentzer (Despina), whose role demands a lot of funnily voiced character singing, there is never a metallic note from…
At Barry University on a recent evening, Antonio Amadeo was showing signs of strain. “All my writers are leaving,” he said as he watched another top-tier SoFla playwright disappear into the night. He looked like a kid whose best friends had bailed at a slumber party. “My prediction is, in…
After squinting and squinting, picking out maybe one in 10 words of the translated libretto projected above the stage, I was not in a good mood during a recent Carnival Center staging of Cosi Fan Tutte. Which is fine: The music of Mozart was performed during the American Civil War,…
The M Ensemble is one of South Florida’s longest-extant pro theater companies, and I like it a lot. It has a refreshing DIY vibe that is matched in Miami only by the fuck-it-all punk aesthetic of Mad Cat, over on Biscayne Boulevard. But M is cozier. Check out the photos…
Triptych: Edna O’Brien’s story tells of three women (a mistress, a wife, and a daughter) who plot against one another for the affection of one man, dissolve when that affection is withheld, and generally make asses out of themselves. Maybe their behavior is excusable, maybe not; since the man himself…
Little Shop of Horrors: Huge carnivorous plants from outer space really capture the imagination. Witness how Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s Little Shop was launched twice in SoFla in the past month — once in a very amateur production in Hollywood, and now here, at much-less amateur (though still nonprofessional)…
Little Shop of Horrors: Huge carnivorous plants from outer space really capture the imagination. Witness how Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s Little Shop was launched twice in SoFla in the past month — once in a very amateur production in Hollywood, and now here, at much-less amateur (though still nonprofessional)…
Let’s talk about race. There is a tendency among white folks (and I am a very white folk) to lavish uncritical praise upon any piece of sensitive-looking art that comes from the black community, so long as the art in question somehow affirms the nobility of any white people who…
