John Thomason

When assessing 2015's best productions in Broward and Palm Beach counties, it has to start with Maltz Jupiter Theatre's Les Miserables. After the debacle of Tom Hooper's 2012 film adaptation, director Mark Martino restored the epic musical to its glorious perch near the top of the international musical canon, from...

Before he achieved award-winning success with such works as Parade, The Last Five Years, and The Bridges of Madison County, composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown was a scrappy striver, toiling at piano bars and nightclubs in New York City. His first show, Songs for a New World, which premiered off-Broadway in...

For the past three decades, the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival has been the unofficial kickoff of Broward County's cultural season, and this month's landmark 30th anniversary festival is no exception. More than 150 features, documentaries, and shorts from around the block (like Stories on the Skin, a doc about...

The first example of intrusive sound in Bug opens when the play does: A telephone rings inside a squalid motel room in Oklahoma, but there’s nobody on the line. There’s never anybody on the line. Sometime later, a persistent cheep resounds across the room — a smoke alarm that seems...

Jason Robert Brown's off-Broadway hit The Last Five Years is both an ecstatic celebration of love and a bone-scraping anatomy of a divorce. It all happens in about 90 minutes, ingeniously structured as a showcase for two actors and conveyed through expository songs with a minimum of dialogue. Running at...