The small-town setting of The Laramie Project has been compared to Thornton Wilder’s Grover’s Corners in the classic play Our Town, and rightfully so. Both plays forage the archetypal American town and uncover truths that are disturbing, moving, and in the case of the more recent work, brutal. The bare…
Made famous by reggae legend Bob Marley, buffalo soldiers were the African-American U.S. Army troops who patrolled the American West after the Civil War. As the song indicates, these black soldiers had a unique tie to the land they were protecting. Many had been born slaves or were sons of…
As The Music Lesson opens, the houselights are dimmed and a subtle illumination spotlights the hand of Irena (Jessica K. Peterson), a pianist and music teacher from the former Yugoslavia. As she sits center stage on a white piano bench, her hand slowly begins to play an invisible keyboard one…
When American poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “The personal is political,” she reminded us that political acts cannot be separated from the circumstances of individual lives. Too often drama that attempts to convey an ideological message does so by striving to be “universal” at the expense of the characters’ discrete choices…
The word juggernaut means “an overpowering force,” and appropriately the artistic director of Juggerknot Theatre Company, Tanya Bravo, is tapping into the powerful force of theater by pushing limits — both artistic and geographic. On the 67th block of Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, there’s more than one craft being fine-tuned:…
In a starkly furnished Paris apartment, spectator Marc (Judd Hirsch) circles a white canvas with the wary step of a big-game hunter while Serge (Cotter Smith) looks on expectantly; we can’t help but wonder if it is the art or his best friend that Marc is about ready to attack…
Works that penetrate the façade of normalcy in marriage are nothing new to American theater audiences. In the 1938 classic Our Town, Thornton Wilder pioneered what we now call “relationship drama” when he placed a young couple at the altar and allowed the audience to listen in on their innermost…
Some would say it’s a guy thing — crushed cans of Schlitz strewn across the floor of a Motel 6 room, belching as an alternative to conversation, and the inevitable discussion about the undeniably rhetorical question, “How could you be my best friend and screw the love of my life?”…
George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, one of the country’s most traditional ballets and a holiday mainstay in any American company’s repertoire, just got funkier. Through an innovative synthesis of dance, costumes, and music, audiences witness one little girl’s exploration of her American and African roots in Ashanti Cultural Arts’ presentation of…
Adapted for the stage by TG Cooper, the late founder of the M Ensemble Company, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Live! is a tribute to the black comedienne who broke the color line and paved the way for other artists. Born Loretta Mary Aiken in the 1890s, Mabley is often called the…
Bringing freshly cut greenery into the house at the onset of winter has symbolized the promise of the coming spring in many cultures since ancient times. This holiday season, some 35 to 40 million evergreen trees will be purchased and decorated in the United States alone. Adding a little tinsel,…
Nilo Cruz’s A Park in Our House is a record of the human spirit when the human body exists in a totalitarian state and survives on a continuum not of belief but of disbelief. The romantic, the idealist, the realist, the repressed, the rebel, and the messiah — these are…
In a dingy sixth-floor room, two lonely souls join hands to escape their solitude and isolation through the medium of dance. They shuffle across the floor, clumsily performing a waltz as they banter about the drama of their lives. If this scenario sounds as though it were penned by romance…
“Art is domination. It’s making people think, for one moment in time, there’s only one art, one voice, and that’s yours,” declares opera star Maria Callas (Rosemary Prinz) in Master Class. Callas was not simply a talented singer and a beautiful woman; she was a diva. It is the ability…
We enjoy a classic whodunit in the same way we enjoy Christmas carolers — with a certain amused detachment. We are not seeking new insight into the human condition but instead are indulging in a bit of nostalgic escapism. Thus, if the revival of a genre piece like Ira Levin’s…
“A shade filled the door, and I knew him at once,” David Novak utters in his spookiest voice. “It was old, cold Mr. Grim. Death had entered the room. I motioned to him to join me….” Audiences expecting tales that begin with “once upon a time…” and end with “and…
When you walk into Miami Light Project’s theater space, you will find yourself momentarily on stage. The space is set up so the stage has its back to those entering; you have to walk through it to get to the chairs. There’s a sensation of getting lost backstage and accidentally…
Five Southern women, some hard liquor, and about two and a half bolts of lilac-colored taffeta. If we threw in Julia Roberts and a walk-on by Tommy Lee Jones, would we have another Steel Magnolias? Happily, no. Where that film drowned in a cloying syrup of bathos and fake accents,…
“Junior officers quickly become disoriented in the Orient,” Navy wife Julia Anderson warns newly arrived officer “Sparky” Watts in A.R. Gurney’s play Far East. Indeed the New Theatre’s production of this work seems to offer a heady brew of scandal, sex, and unrequited love, promising to leave the audience pleasantly…
The literary canon is spinning, the hyphen that binds so-called multicultural fiction — Asian-American, Hispanic-American, African-American fiction — will not hold. Nor should it. Any thought-provoking work on ethnic identity must offer audiences a real look at the themes young playwrights are likely to undertake. In its inaugural performance, Miami’s…
Could it be that we now have sunshine, sand, and the cream of the NYC theater scene? Broward Center For the Performing Arts CEO and president Mark Nerenhausen seems to think so. He hasn’t merely scheduled crowd-pleasing Broadway hits like Cabaret and Godspell at the Broward Center this season, he’s…
The logistic, aesthetic, and emotional challenges of keeping a small arts organization afloat would flummox the savviest CEO. Why do artistic directors struggle to bring live theater to South Florida stages when they could spend half the energy and earn six figures directing deodorant commercials? In the second part of…
