The minor works of a genius are often more rewarding than the best that lesser mortals can bring. In the case of Paul Bunyan, the unclassifiable musical entertainment that had its South Florida premiere Saturday night at the Miami-Dade Auditorium, the rewards are actually double: This is the work of…
With its enticing characters and an engaging plot, Enchanted April lives up to its name. The tale begins in 1922 in dreary England, where a frumpy Lotty Wilton (Cary Anne Spear) finds herself dissatisfied with her tyrannical husband and her humdrum existence. She finds escape through an ad in the…
Merm and Me: The nomadic EDGE theatre, now encamped in Miami Lakes, presents Jim Tommaney’s autobiographical play about his complicated, confusing relationship with Broadway star Ethel Merman. The play, which tracks four friends of Merman in 1985 who conjure up her spirit one year after her death, is a stra…
One of the offbeat charms of Jim Tommaney and his rough-and-tumble EDGE Theatre is trying to figure out where they’re going next. Not just aesthetically but literally. The peripatetic producer, playwright, performance artist, and poet has staged shows in fifteen locations in less than ten years, pinballing around South Florida…
Several questions are raised in Florida Stage’s Ice Glen, but not ones the theater likely intends. The first is why this underrealized world premiere was pushed into production before its time. Veteran playwright Joan Ackermann’s work offers poetic sensibilities, but it trickles its watery way to a tepid conclusion, and…
Now that the holiday season has descended upon us, theatergoers as well as producers are faced with the dilemma of “classic” shows. Should we surrender to tradition and go with the tried and true or attempt to buck the trend? Coral Gables’s New Theatre deftly solves this dilemma by presenting…
Bug: This wild riff on blue collar paranoia from the author of Killer Joe is set in an Oklahoma City motel where a hard-luck waitress encounters a Gulf War vet who claims that the government has implanted mind-controlling insects under his skin. Director Joseph Adler stirs up a highly charged…
Oh, how deceiving first appearances can be. At the start of Tracy Letts’s Bug, now in its Florida premiere at Gablestage, a leggy redhead stands in the doorway of a battered motel room, sipping some wine and swaying gently to lively Colombian music playing somewhere off in the night. It’s…
There’s a lot to be said for this thing that just opened at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, but here’s the essence: Crush the Infamous Thing: The Adventures of the Hollywood Four is the season’s funniest comedy and the best cure for postelection, preholiday blues. Don’t miss it. The screwball setup…
The Marilyn Monroe most people know is her star persona: A ditzy blonde who oozed sexuality and was both a threat and revelation to the conservative Fifties. But the real Marilyn, as depicted in various biographies and here in Jim Tommaney’s intriguing Final Hours of Norma Jeane, was a woman…
Late Nite Catechism: You don’t have to be Catholic to laugh with Vicki Quade and Maripat Donovan’s one-woman show starring Kathleen Stefano that has turned the Encore Room into a parochial school complete with holy cards, wooden rulers, and one formidable nun who will be sure you do not chew…
Take a holiday classic loved by all, add a few star turns and more than a whiff of camp, don your gay apparel and get set to make some memories: That is the aim of It’s a Fabulous Life!, David Sexton and Albert Evans’s loose and merry musical adaptation of…
Late Nite Catechism: You don’t have to be Catholic to laugh with Vicki Quade and Maripat Donovan’s one-woman show starring Kathleen Stefano that has turned the Encore Room into a parochial school complete with holy cards, wooden rulers, and one formidable nun who will be sure you do not chew…
Just the Funny: Performers in “Miami’s Home for Improv & Sketch Comedy” use props and phrases (both supplied by the audience) and various skits to showcase their comic talents. “Pick a Line” and a Scarface spoof in which the stage is covered with white powder are particularly funny, as is…
It’s pretty near impossible not to be impressed with the Actors’ Playhouse’s gangbuster production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (yes, the corporate moniker is part of the official title). This should come as no surprise; the Coral Gables troupe has become the undisputed king of musical theater in South…
The best show in town happens to be an opera. Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is just the first offering of the Florida Grand Opera’s 2004-2005 season, a varied feast that promises other mega hits such as Lucia di Lammermoor and The Magic Flute, as well as a tasty rare treat in…
The characters talk and talk throughout Two Trains Running, but what they say and do never really adds up to much in Pulitzer Prize-winner August Wilson’s play about seven regulars in a Pittsburgh diner circa 1969. This is a long (nearly three hours), static work that speaks to the lofty…
Hoagy — the Hoagy Carmichael Musical: This “biomusical” features the remarkable vocal talents of Broadway chanteuse B.J. Crosby and San Francisco cabaret star Billy Philadelphia as Hoagy Carmichael in an amiable if inspid walk through the life and career of the songwriter-turned-movie actor. Philadelphia is adept at playing Carmichael, and…
The official motto of the Coconut Grove Playhouse is “Broadway by the Bay,” but its unofficial one should be “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The Playhouse has featured a string of successful if skimpy “biomusicals” about great American songwriters and singing stars — Al Jolson, Al Dubin, Alberta…
Barrio Hollywood: The New Theatre’s latest world premiere has considerable potential: it’s not only a play about boxing, it’s also about Mexican-American culture, family loyalty and cross-cultural romance. To this add some imaginative staging by the New’s Rafael de Acha and evocative, colorful production design and all signs point to…
If South Florida theaters were planets, Miami’s Mad Cat would be off in a separate galaxy. The gritty, award-winning ensemble works out of a small performance space on lackluster Biscayne Boulevard, putting up shows that are unique to this region. They’re mostly about ordinary South Floridians with basic problems of…
Charles Busch’s 1984 camp classic Vampire Lesbians of Sodom began life as a cabaret act and famously went on to become one of off-Broadway’s longest-running hits. Though much of the play’s initial success had to do with the glamour and chutzpah of Busch himself — a nice Jewish boy with…
