Music by Elton John, words by Tim Rice, book by Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi. Directed by Julie Taymor. With Phindile Mkhize, Dionne Randolph, LaShanda Reese-Fletcher, Mark Cameron Pow, Timothy Carter, Malcolm-Ali Davis, Jeremy Gumbs, Dylan Jenet Collins, Chantylla Johnson, Jayne Trinette, Randy Donaldson, Michael Nathanson, Mark Shunock, Ben Lipitz, Dashaun Young, Erica Ash, and others. Presented through June 3 at the Broward Center, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale. Call 954-462-0222, or visit www.browardcenter.org.

By Bruce Graham. Directed by Louis Tyrell.

With Andrew Rasmussen, Laura Turnbull, and Stephen Schnetzer. Presented through June 17 at Florida Stage, Plaza del Mar Shopping Center, 262 S. Ocean Blvd., Manalapan. Call 800-514-3837, or visit www.floridastage.org.

The Voice of the Prairie is almost certainly the strongest offering from Palm Beach Dramaworks this season, and that’s saying a lot. Though it’s been a favorite of the nation’s regional theaters for going on 20 years, John Olive’s Voice has never had the arty cachet of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal…

Written by Christopher Durang. Directed by Robert Hooker. With Julia Clearwood, Erynn Dalton, Jenna Gavaletz, Jeff Holmes, Daivd Tarryn-Grae, and Jeison Tomi. Presented through June 2 at the Sol Theatre Project, 1140 N. Flagler Dr., Fort Lauderdale. Call 954-801-9207, or visit www.soltheatre.com.

By the end of the first act of David Carlson’s new operatic adaptation of Anna Karenina, I couldn’t wait to get home and excoriate the bastard in print. Oh, the nerve of that man, reducing all the subtle shadings of Tolstoy’s novel to this dreary, deadening drone of diminished chords,…

The purpose of 9 Parts of Desire is to get us thinking about Iraqis not in sectarian or sociological terms but as individuals. Thinking about them this way, coming face to face with the fucked-up lives of civilians caught between the most astonishing military machine ever created and an evil…

Michael Feingold is a wonderful, witty, and cantankerous coot, and his work makes me think and smile in equal measure. He is one of the theater critics at our flagship paper, the Village Voice, so I say this both out of genuine admiration and a certain, panicky sense of self-preservation…

Listen: You really, really need to go see Animals & Plants at Mad Cat Theatre. I’m not kidding. Go. When you do, here’s what will happen: You will enter the theater by walking across the stage itself, and you will be struck by the dirty aesthetic purity of the thing…

South Florida is not a great place for surfers. The waves are reliable, but they are seldom huge, and whenever they are huge, it’s a sign that some monstrous hurricane is about to swoop in from the Atlantic and eat your house. But South Florida is a great place for…

I tried going to see Backwards in High Heels backwards in high heels. It didn’t work. I am not cut out for the life of reverse drag. I sat in my car in the Florida Stage parking lot in Manalapan, surrounded by the luxury metal and sensible people you usually…

Brian Friel’s dramas always reveal as much or more in their textures and atmospheres, in their words and the way they hang together, as they do in the specifics of their plots. This is true in his most famous piece, the Tony Award-winning Dancing at Lughnasa, but it was never…

Caryl Churchill’s A Number is a play that’s superficially about cloning and only slightly less superficially about the nature of identity — very slightly, for this piece is not subtle with its ruminations. The play has been hailed as “an astonishing event” by the London Evening Standard, was said by…

The “Director’s Note” in the program I received last Friday at Palm Beach Dramaworks revives the old line about Harold Pinter’s plays being “comedies of menace.” As near as I can tell, this means allowing glimpses of little, mundane moments to reveal the dread and horror that lives beneath life’s…

GableStage exists mostly to make people squirm. In the past three years, it’s presented us with goat fuckers, chicken fuckers, child murderers, and drug-addicted, child-molesting judges. Somehow, GableStage has made these subjects — which should be grim, numbing, and distancing — funny, poignant, and immediate. Now the company’s producing artistic…

There is probably nothing new to say about The Lion in Winter. It was written by James Goldman (who, it is interesting to note, is the elder brother of The Princess Bride’s William Goldman — inconceivable, I know), it was turned into a 1968 movie by Goldman and Anthony Harvey…

It appears that the beer franchise at the Florida Renaissance Festival has been taken over by Warsteiner. In previous years, you could buy Harp, Guinness, all kinds of good, Celtic brews that went down full of froth and heft, like drinking a cheeseburger. No longer. It is 10:30 a.m. on…