What do an accounts-receivable clerk, an exterminator, a sociologist, and a pawnshop worker have in common? These are not recovering alcoholics huddling in a basement for a noontime 12-step meeting, nor are they castaways in a reality-based TV show. These seemingly everyday folk are some of South Florida’s most accomplished…
When aspiring lyricist Sonia (Connie SaLoutos) meets successful composer Vernon (Dan Kelley) in They’re Playing Our Song, she hesitates while searching for the right words to describe his work: “Your music is, well, universally embraced…. I don’t want to use the word commercial.” Adjectives like commercial have plagued author Neil…
Wherever there’s a talking vagina, a penis in need of dialogue can’t be far away. It’s no surprise then that on the heels of Eve Ensler’s critically acclaimed and commercially successful The Vagina Monologues comes Dr. Dean C. Dauw (a.k.a. Dr. Love) and his play, The Penis’ Responses to the…
A TV turns to static. A young girl lies motionless on a bed. A man in a suit enters a dark kitchen, loosens his tie, and opens a refrigerator. These scenes could be indiscriminate snapshots of anyone’s daily life, but placed in one of Michael John Garces’s plays, they become…
Perhaps it’s sheer coincidence, but it seems largely appropriate that the first International Monologue Festival began with a voyage and ended with an enigmatic door. The festival, which took place from April 27 to May 6, began with Teatro Mio’s Waiting for Odysseus and closed with Teatro Buendia’s The Eighth…
If playwright Stan Lachow could have seen the set that the Hollywood Playhouse was going to construct for the world premiere of Harry and Thelma in the Woods, he would have edited out the “in the woods.” Walking into the small, residentially located theater, you are so assaulted by the…
Where were Howard Fast, Joe Adler, and Bob Rogerson when Mr. Nelson, my high-school history teacher and the wrestling team’s coach, sidled up to the lectern to teach the American Revolution? That war, as I remember it, was a series of lively anecdotes about converting Boston Harbor into a giant…
Classic noir is the color this season in West Palm Beach. The Cuillo Centre for the Arts’ current production, The Betrayal of Nora Blake, is a musical comedy billed as “musical noir.” This spoof of the film-noir classics of the ’30s and ’40s takes all the late-night B-movies you’ve ever…
At best the revival of a classic stirs our sensibilities much like a remarkable piece of music. A chord is struck that reverberates from antiquity to the present, reuniting us with the universality of our most human emotions. At its worst a classic only manages to transport us as far…
If Robert Johnson made a deal with the devil, then Bessie Smith drank gin with ol’ Lucifer — and put him under the table. As soon as she steps onto the set of Florida Stage’s production of The Devil’s Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith, Smith (Miche Braden)…
You could say that Sarah Jones’ poetry is on the move. Her one-woman show, Surface Transit, has been in demand throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, and will soon be produced for television by Spike Lee. Jones’ dynamic performance and gutsy social message have won her fans from Robin…
When one thinks of William Shakespeare, great cities such as London come to mind. That’s why much ado is being made about the 29th annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, which will be held April 12 through 14 in Miami. Each year a different city is chosen as…
Drinking green beer. Vomiting green beer. Pinching fellow green-beer drinkers who are not wearing an article of green clothing. Let’s face it, this is the stuff of Saint Patrick’s Day. But that’s in the rest of the nation. South Florida doesn’t have many bars that attract would-be bagpipers and other…
Violet represents the quintessentially American spiritual journey — the road trip. Set in 1964, it is the story of a young woman named Violet (Jennifer Hughes), who travels by Greyhound bus, her late mother’s confessional in hand, from her mountaintop home in rural North Carolina to the Hope and Glory…
There’s a myth that the right person saw the right starlet slinging hash at the local diner, and poof! Metro Goldwyn Mayer and 20th Century Fox popped up out of nowhere. Derek Elley’s 1998 documentary, Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies, and the American Dream, debunks this myth by revealing a more fascinating…
The strife between the lead characters inCaldwell Theatre’s production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane goes way beyond the typical mother-daughter friction. Early in the play, while Maureen Folan (Cary Anne Spear) slams cabinet doors and slings pans around the kitchen of their little cottage, her aged mother, Mag (Virginia…
Legend has it Robert Johnson became a blues guitar master in an amazingly short time, hence the myth that he made a deal with the devil. Johnson didn’t achieve fame during his lifetime, but his signature sound and lexicon of powerful tunes have lived on through the work of rock…
If translation is treason, as Argentine author Jorge Borges said, then adaptation might be considered assassination — especially when it comes to reviving a Tennessee Williams work, which more often than not results in catastrophe. Not in the case of the attempt by Cuban-born director Rolando Moreno, whose sensitivity to…
But God rattled on in his holy language about all kinds of important stuff, life-and-death stuff, and Moses just sat there like a grade A, number one goof, not understanding a single word. Well, you know what he felt like? He felt like some miserable little 12-year-old kid from West…
If the British have a love-hate relationship with the French, it could be said that Americans have a laugh-hate relationship with the Brits. What we find riotously funny in them is what we abhor in ourselves: repressed sexuality, sniveling impishness, and hostility behind a thin veneer of civility. Words like…
Most dramas about modern marriage and infidelity dwell on the clandestine nature of extramarital affairs and the havoc they wreak on everyone involved. Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing picks up where most such tales leave off, delving into what happens after the cheaters have sloughed off their former spouses and…
How can one not be leery of a play staged in an attic? The ominous mahogany furniture, the curled yellowed pages of old newspapers and photo albums, and the inevitable sepia-tone photos hark back to a time only remarkable to the people who own the clutter. Most attic settings are…
