As the battle for nationwide same-sex marriage rages on, much has been made of the 1,138 federal rights, protections, and responsibilities granted to married couples and not civil unions, according to the National Organization for Women. But the more states that allow gay marriage, the more comedians downplay it: If…
Like superheroes battling a common enemy, two of South Florida’s newest theater companies will band together Monday in what they hope will be a victory for both of them. Parade Productions, a Mizner Park-based company with just one production under its belt, will host a reading of Better Than Damn…
There’s probably a good movie buried somewhere in the story line of Truck Farm, an obnoxiously quirky documentary by Ian Cheney that has been circulating at film festivals. It’s about the director’s transformation of his 1986 Dodge pickup truck into a mobile “truck farm” — a 1/1,000th-acre farm designed on…
The world premiere of First Step Productions’ Last Call on its opening night at Empire Stage last Friday was a miserable experience. It had nothing to do with skilled director Michael Leeds or this one-woman show’s incredibly creative performer, Terri Girvin. The fault lay entirely with the audience, especially the…
In light of the tragic recent events in Sanford, it seems like the appropriate time for a play about racism — especially the insidious kind that manifests itself when “provoked.” Playwright Athol Fugard, a white South African who grew up during his country’s apartheid era, knew and even participated in…
With The Pillowman, The Unseen, and now Death and the Maiden, the Broward County theaterscape has been populated of late by dramas with one theme in common: totalitarian governments and the havoc they wreck on innocent, or possibly innocent, lives. But all of them share another trait: the enigma of…
Sadly, The Unseen is the last show we’ll see from Davie’s hard-working Promethean Theatre Company, which cited fundraising woes in its death-knell announcement last month. But what a piece to end on. In Craig Wright’s smart, philosophical, paranoid drama, two men (Andrew Wind and Antonio Amadeo) — broken in body…
“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” — Karl Marx “I like being able to fire people.” — Mitt Romney Like women’s reproductive rights, environmental protection, and healthy eating, the issue of workers’ rights is divided…
If you missed the quirky Chinese import The Piano in a Factory when it premiered at last year’s Miami Film Festival, you’ll have another chance at 7 tonight when it screens at the Aventura Arts and Cultural Center. With a divorce looming from his estranged wife, a street musician attempts…
It’s the opening scene of The Pitmen Painters, and a group of British miners is listening to a wannabe art professor lecture them on Renaissance paintings. To art scholars, the man’s words and the visual references he brings on an old slide projector are the building blocks of art history…
A pilot sits in his makeshift “plane” — a repurposed wheelbarrow papered with a sparkly, hand-drawn military insignia. It’s the opening scene of Top Gun! The Musical at Empire Stage in Fort Lauderdale, and the barrow-plane is being rolled clunkily across the small stage by a standing copilot. Meanwhile, the…
Parade Productions, South Florida’s newest theater company, premiered its first show in Mizner Park last weekend, but signs indicated that even members of the team weren’t entirely happy with the result. During the intermission of Brooklyn Boy, a 2004 dramedy from Donald Margulies, an usher made a point to tell…
A radical bisexual anarchist before it was cool, Paul Goodman is remembered today as the 1960s philosopher of the New Left. With his thick-rimmed spectacles, corncob pipe, and rumpled suits, he resembled a right-wing parodist’s image of a left-wing intellectual, but his contrarian ideas helped shape the minds of future…
In the Promethean’s spirited revival of this ’60s comedy by French playwright Marc Camoletti, a playboy architect named Bernard (Matthew William Chizever) has arranged his life around his three fiancées, all of whom are flight attendants on different international airlines — and none of whom knows the others exist. He…
Before The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity begins, two wrestlers for hire go through their motions in a ring onstage, writhing with pseudo-pain after every ear-piecing slam on the forgiving mat. It’s a tone-setting juxtaposition of lowbrow entertainment in a highbrow theater, and it’s brilliant. Buttoned-down spectators are expected to…
For what it’s worth, Infinite Abyss’ production of Snow White Trash delivers exactly what you would expect from its title. Problem is, it’s not worth much. The Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale is recast in a South Florida trailer park, complete with humorous references to Davie and Tamarac. Fleeing the murderous…
Legend has it that in the process of filming the 1972 movie adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, lead actress Joanne Woodward became so engrossed in her sordid part that it strained her relationships off set. Her character was Beatrice Hunsdorfer, a…
If there had been an Occupy movement in post-World War II America, the fictional character Joe Keller in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons would have made for a model nemesis. Joe is a one-percenter, a war profiteer, and a manipulative snake who probably sent 21 fighter pilots plummeting to their…
The miniature locker room off to one side of Mosaic Theatre’s stage looks every bit like a museum piece, festooned with Super Bowl pennants, Green Bay nameplates and scuffed cleats, and preserved for transfer to the NFL Hall of Fame, where waxen Packers will stand chiseled in pregame ritual. This…
A Danish couple, escaping city life after one of them commits infidelity, moves to the Norwegian countryside next door to an insecure couple whose sex life is just as stagnant as theirs in Happy, Happy, the feature-film debut from director Anne Sewitsky. As libidos awaken, so do uncomfortable truths in…
Ben Joseph, the lead character in the Caldwell Theatre’s After the Revolution, is a fascinating specimen. An academic, dyed-in-the-wool socialist with a pompous ponytail, Ben continues to raise his tattered red flag, spreading the people’s gospel at a time when nobody wants to hear it. You see, After the Revolution…
The Women’s Theatre Project’s episodic world premiere of Women Drivers explores the harried life of a driving instructor, Erin (Pilar Uribe), and the pupils who consume her life. There’s the enthusiastic teenager (Lela Elam, saucer-eyed and hilarious), an accident-prone mother (Jacqueline Laggy), and an elderly woman stricken with Parkinson’s (Miki…
