Tim Bennett’s set — a sitting room in an English manor, dappled with gorgeous pink light and a dozen vases of cut flowers, opening out on to a rose-strewn garden — is so inviting that I wanted to walk up onstage and move in. That’s the only positive thing I…
Karen Stephens is such an appealing performer that I wish her one-person show were as compelling as she is. Called Out of the Box, the show is billed as a multimedia event that looks at “societal and racial parameters through the life experiences of a black American female and her…
In these post-Sondheim, pro-revival days, it’s sometimes difficult to find the why and wherefore of the Broadway musical. On the one hand, Times Square overflows with new productions of Grease and Saturday Night Fever and the self-perpetuating Cats, as though the industry were one gigantic broken record. On the other,…
Glen Berger’s new play, Great Men of Science, Nos. 21 & 22, is a disaster of such epic proportions it practically begs comparison to the Titanic and the Hindenberg. Indeed, ten minutes after it leaves port, so to speak, this world premiere by the author of A Suit to Please…
Sophie, Totie, & Belle.
Are you going to Europe? South America? Do you need to know how to ask “Where is St. Sophia’s?” in Italian? How about “Where is Sophia Loren?” Both phrases are translated in the snappy musical travel guide, Secrets Every Smart Traveler Should Know. No actual travel advice is provided, but…
“Pretty fire” is the shockingly inappropriate term the young Charlayne Woodard gave to the sight of a cross burning in her grandparents’ front yard. It’s also the name of her autobiographical one-woman show, which tells the story of how as a child she witnessed this hateful conflagration while visiting her…
The road signs are blurry but the way is clear in the New Theatre’s intimate production of How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama that’s wrapped up in automobile metaphors. Set in rural Maryland and unfolding over three decades, the play tells the story of a…
Any actor will admit that the audience can become a character in a live performance, in part because of the chemistry that wafts back and forth across the proverbial fourth wall. That’s never more true than with improv comedy, in which actors are force-fed random lines, situations, and emotions, often…
In his hilarious stage memoir, Charles Nelson Reilly talks about his days as a Broadway understudy, his death-obsessed uncle, and his memories of Ruth Draper, “the best actor who ever lived.” But the story that captures the comedy-spiked bathos at the heart of the show is the anecdote he tells…
James McLure’s one-act Pvt. Wars made a neat splash back in 1979 when it appeared at the celebrated New Playwrights Festival at the Actors Theatre in Louisville. But between that time and now the work has run aground, having hit many of the metaphorical icebergs that are apt to sink…
Somewhere between writing dialogue for the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story and creating Sunday in the Park with George, the only Broadway show to date based on an Impressionist painting, Stephen Sondheim revolutionized American musical theater. Inspired by the elaborate story musicals of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein…
Like her contemporary, the movie star James Dean, Patsy Cline arrived in pop-culture heaven prematurely, the result of a tragedy. She died in a plane crash in 1963 at the age of 30, leaving behind two small children and the work that resulted from twelve recording sessions, not to mention…
Miss Julie and The Stronger.
Written by August Strindberg. Directed by Rafael de Acha. With Iris Delgado, Marta Velasco, Israel Garcia, Robert Maxwell, Lucia McArthur. Through September 5. New Theatre, 65 Almeria Ave, Coral Gables, 3054435909.
Actress Elizabeth Dimon was so delightfully adroit this past spring in the Caldwell Theatre Company’s production of The King’s Mare and the Florida Stage’s Quills that it should surprise no one that she walks away with the part of Cissy, the female half of the comic pair of lovers in…
When he was 107 years old, the story goes, Broadway legend George Abbott was asked what he thought was the most important development in the theater to have taken place in his lifetime. His answer: “Electricity.” Although his active career as an actor, director, and producer spanned some six decades…
Socrates and Plato, Emerson and Thoreau, Mr. Kotter and Vinnie Barbarino — the history of Western civilization is cluttered with memorable teacher-student pairs, each bringing its unique dynamic to one of the most powerful relationships in humankind. It’s no surprise that quite a few twentieth-century dramas, from Educating Rita to…
If nothing else, Naked Boys Singing! lives up to the hype of its title. The cast members are naked, they are male, and they sing. In fact they sing rather well. That’s a good thing, since the revue, already a hit at the Celebration Theatre in Los Angeles (another production…
The fascinating part of Twilight at Monticello: An Evening with Thomas Jefferson is not the hour-and-45-minute monologue that serves as the main attraction but rather the short question-and-answer period that follows in which actor-creator J.D. Sutton answers questions about the show’s subject. He does this first in character as the…
What’s a nice socialist playwright like Naomi Wallace doing in Coral Gables? Getting a crackerjack production of her play at the New Theatre, that’s what. Wallace’s 1996-97 Obie-winning play One Flea Spare, is about class struggle, bubonic plague, and biting poetry, hardly the usual ingredients of polite Sunday matinees or…
It’s almost always funnier when men dress up as women than the other way around. Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli are drag standbys in theaters and cabarets around the world. Elizabeth Dole and Hillary Clinton are routinely skewered on Saturday Night Live and in improv clubs. But where are the…
Playwright John Patrick Shanley once told the New York Times that he bought a copy of Krafft-Ebing’s nineteenth-century textbook Psychopathia Sexualis because “I have an unhealthy interest in sex and eccentric German people.” (Well, who doesn’t?) It might stand to reason then that he named his 1997 comedy Psychopathia Sexualis…
