Comments (1) Best Theater Season - 2010

The Caldwell Theatre

It's definite: The Caldwell is fusty no more. Its last season, helmed by new Executive Artistic Director Clive Cholerton, was powerful, varied, and risky. He took some knocks for that, of course — nobody much liked The Old Man and the Sea, which in retrospect probably didn't need to be turned into a play — but mostly, the word among theater people is that Cholerton is the most exciting thing to happen to the performing arts in SoFla in years. The first show he mounted while running the theater, an experimental musical called Vices, a Love Story, was nothing short of thrilling; his second effort, the new The Whipping Man, was a trenchant meditation on power and guilt that was lovely, deep, and enlightening; and the masterful The Voysey Inheritance asked Caldwell's moneyed Boca Raton audience to have compassion for, of all people, a Ponzi schemer. That's balls. It was also great theater.