For ten years, the Delray Public Library has been a site of democracy in action. Within its walls, the most senior of Delray Beach’s citizens have argued the great issues of the day, sometimes intelligently, sometimes contentiously, and sometimes both.But no longer. Old people, as it turns out, are too…
Please picture an angel in wings, no shirt, translucent white tights. His mouth is full of a ball gag, and he is cuffed at his feet and hands to a vicious wooden chair that looks a little like Old Sparky. He is locked in the bedroom of a tony New…
As you read this review, it is worth bearing in mind that Bud Light is the world’s most beloved beer, clobbering its nearest rival by 12.7 million barrels a year. (The second-placer? Budweiser.) Consider too that the world’s most beloved eatery is McDonald’s, its favorite purveyor of Italian food the…
Despite the repeated and increasingly exasperated attempts of a lifelong best friend, I cannot quite experience Evil Dead as a “fun” film. It’s the very thing that grates on my nerves that also drives its fan boys crazy. To wit: This B-grade cheese fest, in addition to being a showcase…
The obnoxious thing about Wicked Sisters at the Women’s Theatre Project is not its sloppy genre-hopping. Nor is it the author’s plain disbelief in the intelligence of her audience, the egregious overacting of three of the production’s four actresses, nor their pathetic — there is no other word — mimicry…
D.L. Coburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Gin Game is a two-character play set on the porch of a half-dilapidated old-age home, somewhere in deepest Americana. There, an old man named Weller (Peter Haig) spends his afternoons cheating at solitaire and holding his fellow senescents in silent contempt. His solitude is disturbed…
Congratulations to the Caldwell Theatre, which has pulled off that rarest of all theatrical feats: the production of an intelligent summertime show. Usually, summer shows are half-assed and cynical, a money grab to make the subscribers pay full price for a show that cost almost nothing. Well, that’s not how…
Florida Stage has completed its move to the Rinker Playhouse, an inelegant, forgotten-looking corner of the Kravis Center. And it’s the perfect venue for Low Down Dirty Blues, a jukebox musical I intend to forget the moment this screed is off to print. Low Down is allegedly a celebration of…
It takes a big man to see two sides in a story — especially one about apartheid, and especially if you lived it. And if you’re a white fellow, like playwright Ian Bruce, it takes a certain roguish temperament to cast a knife-swinging, booze-swilling honky killer like Johan (Gregg Weiner)…
There is something ennobling about really great acting. Adequate acting is the assumption of a disguise, but great acting illuminates how the raw stuff of humanity can be made ugly or beautiful, saintly or demonic. It may, if an actor desires, invite sympathy for a creature whose course through life…
Florida is a hard place to represent in drama. How does a stage production communicate Florida’s strangeness — the gangsters, the crackers, the queers, the yachtsmen? Some essential thing will be left out, and those who know the place will be left confronting the representation of a state they haven’t…
Seeing the characters of Broadsword onstage in a South Florida theater is a little weird. Not that they are inappropriate subjects for a play. It’s just that nobody had an interest in treating them as such before Marco Ramirez came along. Because anyone coming of age in the ’00s has…
On one level, Lisa Loomer’s mach-speed dramedy, Distracted, is a play about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD — an ailment barely known to exist prior to the 1990s, and which now allegedly plagues about 1/20th of all children in America. (Girls are less affected than boys, one out of…
Be advised, dear reader: On opening night, Mosaic Theatre’s Dying City was so gripping that this reviewer forgot to take a single note. Therefore, anything I say about the show is reconstructed from memory and from conversations with other people who were there. Not that they’re much help. Because Dying…
The beloved Sol Theatre is long gone now, but a band of dramatists called Infinite Abyss Productions is operating out of its erstwhile digs — for this month, at least. Sol was long Florida’s funkiest, chillest theater, with a performance space at Empire Stage in Fort Lauderdale that was magical…
“Louie Louie,” as recorded by the Kingsmen, is a great rock record, and nobody with any sense would disagree. Never mind that the chords are basically identical to those of “La Bamba,” “Wild Thing,” and even “Shake It Up, Baby.” Who cares? G, C, and D — that’s all the…
The original Reefer Madness served as an antipot propaganda flick, produced in 1936 by moralists. It’s a sobering flick, considering that the forces of disinformation are still at it. Reefer Madness the musical, meanwhile, now enjoying a lovingly over-the-top production at Wilton Manors’ Rising Action Theatre, is really, really funny…
The Old Man and the Sea depicts the struggle against adversity as internal. Though the thrashing of the fish is violent and in certain passages Hemingway’s writing is so powerful and precise that one can actually feel the ebb and flow of strength in the Old Man’s hands, it is…
Sarah Kane’s controversial Blasted is one of the loveliest and hardest to watch plays you’ll ever see, an elegy for love in a world rent by violence and the corruption of power. “I am dying to make love!” cried one character, but he can’t — armed and dangerous, all he…
American Buffalo exists in a world of never-hads. The grief of its three characters — half-bright guys spending most of the late ’70s doing not very much, hanging out in the cluttered front room of a junk shop — is for things that might have been and weren’t. Donny (Dennis…
When Joan Didion mounted the stage to receive her National Book Award in 2005, she might as well have been climbing Calgary. Never what you’d call zaftig, Didion was now almost gone. Cheeks sunken, hair wispy, eyes glued to a speck of space about four feet ahead of her knees…
Things begin well at Laffing Matterz when your leggy waitress brings the special appetizer of the evening: risotto balls in a mushroom and goat cheese sauce. The mere mention of the dish is sufficiently food-pornish to make even those who don’t dig dinner theater begin to feel a cautious optimism…
