“It’s astounding,” says Stuart Meltzer. “When I first started working in this region, you couldn’t get a new play down here. Nobody wanted to touch new work. It was, Sorry, this isn’t Gypsy, this isn’t Neil Simon, and we don’t want to go near it.’ It’s interesting how much this…
The Boy from Russia: What begins as an icky feelings-fest ends as a smart meditation on suburban values, parental instinct, and the way privilege or deprivation can twist a person’s sensibilities. The new, semiautobiographical play by South Floridian Susan J. Westfall follows yuppies Beth Marshall and Jack Goldman (Sandy Ives…
The Boy from Russia: What begins as an icky feelings-fest ends as a smart meditation on suburban values, parental instinct, and the way privilege or deprivation can twist a person’s sensibilities. The new, semiautobiographical play by South Floridian Susan J. Westfall follows yuppies Beth Marshall and Jack Goldman (Sandy Ives…
“Splendid. This is a splendid play.” That is my date speaking. He is beautiful and smart, but I’m beginning to wonder if he’s not also slightly damaged; twisted in some subtle way that only makes itself known at world premiers of touchy-feely plays about malnourished Russian children and the yuppies…
Romeo & Juliet has been done and redone in approximately five gazillion different ways. Gounod made it into an opera; Tchaikovsky made it into a noise; Franco Zeffirelli did it as kiddie porn; Baz Luhrman did it with guns. Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers have been used to comment on apartheid, the…
Golda’s Balcony: In terms of steely resolve, Golda Meir made most great people of the Twentieth Century look meek. Over the years many folks — and especially the blame-Israel-first crowd — have assumed she was either a heartless ideologue or some kind of blood-sucking Zionist vampire (and then, crazily, certain…
By the end of the first act of David Carlson’s new operatic adaptation of Anna Karenina, I couldn’t wait to get home and excoriate the bastard in print. Oh, the nerve of that man, reducing all the subtle shadings of Tolstoy’s novel to this dreary, deadening drone of diminished chords,…
Melt: Some of the finest actors in South Florida (Stuart Meltzer, Sheaun McKinney, et al.) star in this world premiere of a play by one of SoFla’s most beloved theatrical polymaths (Michael McKeever) in one of Miami’s loveliest, most intimate venues (New Theatre). Michael McKeever’s play is an examination of…
The cast of freaks that populates the Howard Stern Show includes Crackhead Bob, Crazy Alice, Elephant Boy, Sour Shoes, Jeff the Drunk, Gary the Retard and Wendy the Retard, Bong Hit Bill and Bong Hit Eric, High Pitch Eric and Eric the Midget, and the irrepressible Beetlejuice. But the show’s…
A quote from Golda Meir has returned to me often over the last four years: “We can forgive you for killing our sons, but we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” Golda apparently said that to Anwar Saddat midway through her term as Prime Minister of Israel,…
By Any Other Name … Romeo & Juliet: Ballsy as all hell to inaugurate a new theater company with a reworking of Romeo & Juliet, isn’t it? That’s what Antonio Amadeo’s Naked Stage is up to, and bless them for it. The general idea is thus: What makes Romeo &…
Listen: You really, really need to go see Animals & Plants at Mad Cat Theatre. I’m not kidding. Go. When you do, here’s what will happen: You will enter the theater by walking across the stage itself, and you will be struck by the dirty aesthetic purity of the thing…
Late last month the sister blogs of celebrity snark, Gawker and Defamer, posted guerrilla outtakes from the set of I Heart Huckabees, the 2004 film, in which Tomlin clashes with director David O. Russell. “Leave me the fuck alone!” she shouts. “Do you know what the fuck is going on,…
Samson et Dalila is Camille Saint-Saens’s most well-loved expression of his wild terror of women. While his other operatic celebrations of misogyny have, for whatever reason, failed the test of time, Samson et Dalila still packs houses with regularity. In the hands of Florida Grand Opera, it is eminently worth…
La Cage aux Folles: This weirdly resonant story began life as a French play, got reworked as a now-classic French-Italian film, was turned into a Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical that proceeded to win just about every Tony ever invented, and then received a Hollywood face-lift to emerge as The Birdcage,…
My beagle died at the end of February. His name was Ricky, and I’d had him for eleven years. He died a terrible death, poisoned by his own dog food. That same month, my basset hound, Toast, acquired a spinal disease that left his hindquarters paralyzed. Now he has been…
The Sty of the Blind Pig: Phillip Hayes Dean’s play, a classic in African-American theater, debuted onstage in 1972 and was made into a movie in 1974. The work explores race, gender, and spirituality, set against a backdrop of the early civil rights movement in Chicago. The work is performed…
La Cage aux Folles is a weirdly resonant story, and that is not just my opinion. It began life as a French play, got reworked as a now-classic French-Italian film, was turned into a Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical that proceeded to win just about every Tony ever invented, and then…
Fat Pig: If you are a successful young businessman and you find yourself falling in love with a pretty, witty, engaging girl who just happens to be 80 pounds overweight, do you break up with her when your friends start making fat jokes? That’s the dilemma faced by Fat Pig’s…
It was late on a Monday at The Naked Grape in the Wilton Manors neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale, after one of Richard Cortez’s weekly concerts, that I first heard about The Fantasy Party. Richard was packing up his guitar and amps and walking them to his car with a portly,…
Betrayal: Everything in popular culture can be referred back to Seinfeld, even a major work by a Nobel Prize-winning playwright. Harold Pinter’s 1978 play was the inspiration for what is colloquially referred to as “The Backwards Episode” of Seinfeld, which aired November 20, 1997. The sitcom episode begins with Jerry,…
GableStage exists mostly to make people squirm. In the last three years, they’ve presented us with goat fuckers, chicken fuckers, child murders, and drug-addicted, child-molesting judges. Somehow, GableStage has made these subjects — which should be grim, numbing, and distancing — funny, poignant, and immediate. Now the company’s producing artistic…
