Watching Tommy Femia impersonate Judy Garland for 90 minutes is one of the better ways to spend a Friday evening. His voice maybe isn’t so powerful as the Late Great Garland’s, but it’s a pretty good imitation — especially in the long, slow passages, in which Tommy has the time…

A touching, sassy little play about lives intersecting at a beauty shop. This is called Steel Magnolias, unless it involves a she-male and a former American Idol contestant. Then it’s called Combing Through Life’s Tangles — and it’s a musical! Starring in the piece are world-renowned (backup) singer (previously with…

Prescient or tasteless? That’s the question the men and women of sketch-comedy troupe The Jove must be asking themselves right now, as they prepare to bring Mobile Home Sweet Mobile Home to The Atlantic Theatre (6743 W. Indiantown Rd., Jupiter). Mobile Home, you see, is a comedy about hurricane season…

Too often, the theater scene in SoFla feels like a mid-’90s Spielberg flick. Tons of chops and potential ruined by the mistaken assumption that theater audiences are stone dumb. That’s not the case this month. This month finds the brilliant, funny/depressing Benefactors still running at Palm Beach Dramaworks while the…

Chuck Klosterman, an inane and deeply self-involved pop-culture critic, once (once!) had a good point. That was in Chapter 13 of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, where he said that “the only relevant question available for contemporary filmmakers” is this: What is reality? And what is reality? It’s not a…

In her famous review of The Sound of Music — the one that didn’t, by the way, get her fired from McCall’s — Pauline Kael accused the film of reducing its audience to “the lowest common denominator of feeling: a sponge.” As someone who ordinarily enjoys being so reduced and…

Cinco de Mayo hits Delray on the tres de Mayo this year, and as the moment draws nigh it is worth taking a look at the illustrious, though tragic, history of this little-understood holiday. It was the Fifth of May in the turbulent year of 1862 when handsome, bespectacled Ignacio…

Nanique Gheridian doesn’t get out enough. There are probably good reasons for this — being one of the big cheesettes at Palm Beach Dramaworks probably keeps her busy — but still. She’s smart. She’s seen what theater looks like in the companies forced to create good drama without her presence,…

Most people can’t build a building, and building people is probably a hell of a lot harder. But Benefactors is about that very thing. Michael Frayn’s 1984 drama follows a frustrated architect as he turns from the increasing drudgery of cookie-cutter skyscraper construction to the more interesting task of reconstructing…

How do civic-minded carnivores save animals? By eating meat! Yes! You too can chow down on beef-filled tacos while luxuriating in your own benevolence as you hurl money at Shih Tzu Rescue Inc. — a fine bunch of people who really, really care about oddly coifed Asian dogs. The deal…

Running an underfunded young theater company is hard on the soul. You have big plans, transcendent artistic visions. You understand what you want to do and think you know how to do it. But after busting the bank to lay hands on the script you want, you find you cannot…

Do you know what lesbians love? Catholicism! No. That’s probably a lie, unless you count Camille Paglia. Try again: Do you know what Andrea Dworkin hates? Heaven! Yes, she does. Because contrary to what the poor Dwork’ thought she discovered while being beaten with big wooden planks and burned with…

One of the most evil and satisfying sensations known to man is the anticipation of contempt. It’s a feeling so powerful and pervasive that an author once suggested naming it. He didn’t offer any suggestions, whoever he was, so I’ll posit one: “anticitempt.” I was full of anticitempt on my…

It’s weird but totally true: Gay men love raw fish. In Wilton Manors, Galangas Thai & Sushi has been the site of more romantic first dates than Georgie’s Alibi and Jim Naugle’s favorite bathroom stall, combined. That’s why it makes intuitive sense that, just to the north, Sushi Groove (2730…

Alan Browne was not a beatnik, so far as I know, but Robert Hooker is. And it’s not just the goatee — it’s the way Mr. Hooker’s Sol Theatre Project can occasionally spit in the face of its own limitations and blast off to Elsewhere. This doesn’t happen all the…

This is the kind of thing that doomed the Roman Empire. There was a time, not long ago, when the knowledge of all the dumb things you did at the club was reserved for fellow travelers. If your sister occasionally dyked it up with a girlfriend or two in front…

The last time Twyla Tharp combined her unique choreographic talents with the music of a genius rock ´n’ roller, the results were… well, “shameful” is probably too strong a word, but “regrettable” is far too weak. That was The Times They Are A-Changin’, an unfortunate contribution to the even-more-unfortunate “jukebox…

Before we start hacking into Ward 57, the new Iraq war meditation currently chattering before the footlights at Florida Stage, let’s talk about two shows that are almost nothing like it: Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire and Will Eno’s Thom Paine, both of which recently played in SoFla. Both…

The vernal equinox gets ickily Freudian for neopagans who are serious about their theology, for it is the time when the fast-maturing sun god/grain god/whateverthehell begins dating his mum. They’ll consummate their relationship in May, and enjoy the giddy lives of newlyweds until he croaks at the end of October…

Sol Theatre was good, and then it was bad, and then it was gone. Somewhere between a mind-melting production of The True Nature of Love and Unidentified Human Remains at the end of 2006 and a limp-dick trainwreck called Two Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter’s Night last…

Happy Hump Day, dear reader, and congratulations to you for so gracefully surviving at least half of another workweek. Gritty, wily you — at this rate, I do believe you’ll make it to Saturday! Your remarkable stamina and easy optimism deserve some kind of celebration. Which is why a lot…

In the past few weeks, the big headlines for theater people were mostly flashy. Famous plays, mean plays, experimental plays, and big-budget musicals opened across the three counties, while Sol Theatre got a major overhaul and came roaring back to life after half a year of inactivity. And so theater…