For better or worse, nuns have left an indelible mark on American theater, recurring in plays and especially musicals about as often as reformable gold diggers and penniless hoofers. You’ve probably seen more nuns on stages than you’ll ever see in real life. So it takes originality to stand out…
At Empire Stage, the ability to accomplish so much with so few resources never ceases to amaze, no matter which theater company is renting out the space. Kim Ehly’s Baby Girl, conceived at a New York City writer’s workshop just after 9/11, has finally received a full-fledged production at the…
It is, appropriately enough, a story that never gets old. Endlessly updated across multiple generations, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan has enjoyed a robust life in literature, in cinema, and on Broadway. The musical version, first produced in 1954, was later translated into an Emmy-winning telecast and has seen more revivals…
With a shock of scarlet hair and a chalky complexion that borders on the paranormal, pianist Lynne Arriale is a compelling presence onstage — a specter possessed by jazz. Closing her eyes as her fingers dance across the keys, Arriale is consumed by a passion for the classics and originals…
At Empire Stage, the ability to accomplish so much with so few resources never ceases to amaze, no matter which theater company is renting out the space. Kim Ehly’s Baby Girl, conceived at a New York City writer’s workshop just after 9/11, has finally received a full-fledged production at the…
Until this past weekend, I had never seen a production of The Fantasticks — a startling omission from any theater critic’s résumé. The Fantasticks, after all, is billed as “the world’s longest-running musical,” having played for 42 straight years and more than 17,000 performances in its first off-Broadway run. It…
Much like the conception of people, the birth of plays can begin in unexpected ways. Playwright and actress Kim Ehly first knew she was on to something back in 2001, when she was assigned to write a two-page monologue for a Strasberg scene study class in New York City and…
Described by artistic director Louis Tyrrell as “the Daily Show of its time,” cabaret shows in Weimer-era Berlin roasted Adolf Hitler, excoriated anti-Semitism, and injected a progressive ideology into the issues of the day. This is more than apparent in Cabaret Verboten, Tyrrell’s latest production at Delray Beach’s Arts Garage…
“This is like children’s theater for 40-year-old gay people.” So says a malicious Olympian muse as she slinks into the shadows of a roller disco, ready to watch her demigoddess companion unseat their leader, a spirited blond in Barbie-pink skates and leg warmers. This is one of the many winks…
Are you a local hip-hop sensation? Can you juggle flaming bowling pins? Make your hamster disappear? Do you think you can dance? If the answer is yes to any of these questions — or even if you just think the answer is yes — the event organizers at the Box…
William Shakespeare never lived in postwar Key West. He never wrote his masterpieces on gum-speckled tables in boisterous Duval Street bars, wearing T-shirts printed with phrases like “At Wherefore Art the Ladies?” But if Bill Shakespeare did populate Key West dives, his early comedy Love’s Labours Lost might look something…
The 1980 film Xanadu — you know, the one with Olivia Newton-John as an Olympian muse who roller-skates out of a mural/portal and saves art as we know it — was considered so bad that an entire bad-movie awards show was created because of it. The candy-colored, ELO-scored fantasy ended…
Whether you’re heading for Hollywood, bound for Broadway, or angling for a local commercial, the Actor’s Workshop of South Florida will equip you with the acting chops you’ll need to land the part. Now in its 11th year, the Actor’s Workshop operates in a nondescript, virtually hidden warehouse in Deerfield…
The Edge of the Our Bodies is less a play than a monologue, like a New Yorker fiction story read aloud. For an uninterrupted 80 minutes, Bernadette (Lexi Langs), a 16-year-old woman who ceased being a girl a long time ago, will share a few days of her life while…
Chances are, writer David Pumo and actor Moe Bertran would still be creating great theater together even if they were not legally married. But after taking advantage of last year’s gay-marriage legalization in New York, the opportunity to complete a show as wedlocked stage professionals must have seemed that much…
Here’s a fun drinking game: Take a swig every time somebody in Proof mentions a number. The 2000 play by David Auburn, which concerns aspiring, erstwhile, and self-denying mathematicians in Chicago, is awash in numerals — ages, page counts, inside-math jokes, and complex proofs and calculations that roll off the…
If you like your spy thrillers rough, local, and lo-fi, then don’t miss She Is a Spy. The 1998 cult film from West Palm Beach’s own Chocolate Star Productions is directed by no-budget auteur Gary Davis, whose delectable archive includes titles like The Nubian Vampire and Santa Vs. Zombies. A…
Edward Albee is one of America’s greatest dramatists, but only a handful of his 30-plus plays ever see production here or anywhere else. If he were a musician, his greatest-hits collection would be an EP. Not content to mount yet another Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or The Zoo Story,…
Staging Shakespeare today – and wrapping our 21st-century dialects around all of those arcane phrases – is difficult enough. But staging a full Shakespeare play with six actors performing 18 parts? That could be suicide. Or it could be totally amazing. The Lake Worth-based nonprofit company Take Heed will attempt…
For the current production Love Burns, Nicole Stodard’s Thinking Cap Theatre has been transformed into a coffee shop called Hip Sip Coffee, which shamelessly milks the branding of a certain ubiquitous coff eehouse chain. During the “night of coffee and one-act comedies,” there are two comedic short plays, both set…
In a marshy Florida fort a couple of miles north of Saint Augustine, for up to 120 years before Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the inception of the Thirteenth Amendment, African-Americans had been living free. The community was called Fort Mose – a beacon of progressivism…
You couldn’t live in or around Deerfield Beach in the fall of 2009 without hearing about the horrific attack on 15-year-old Michael Brewer. The middle-school student was allegedly doused in rubbing alcohol and set ablaze by four of his classmates, reportedly because of an unpaid loan for a $40 videogame…
