Ever since God/Someone/Something invented the male dangly bits, the males, delighted with and ruled by these bits, have pleasured and or terrorized the human race. And if you don't believe me, hurry on down to Florida Grand Opera's current production of Don Giovanni where you'll see the ultimate swordsman put his bits to use, amusing/offending/frightening 2065 women. Well, you'll actually see only four transgressions on stage but that should be enough for even the most avid opera fan.

It's the late 1940s in Seville, Spain and Don Giovanni (Don Juan, Casanova, Tiger Woods) is busy knocking off #2061, Donna Anna, or trying to. Her daddy, the...

The audience leapt to its feet, filling the theatre with applause, as the curtain fell on opening night of God of Carnage at the Caldwell Theatre. But if I can be an intellectual snob for a couple of minutes I'd like to point out that five minutes into the show I thought, uh oh, it's Improv Night at the Caldwell and in the Category: Acting Styles, someone in the house has suggested “Sit-Com.”

God of Carnage, by French playwright Yazmina Reza who's given us such wonderful stuff as Art and The Unexpected Man, is a trifle by comparison. A hit on Broadway and winner of three Tony Awards including Best...

She's in her late thirties. So is he. They meet again twenty-five years after they kissed and kissed again in the moonlight at the seaside. Not much to hang a play on. But playwright Stephen Belber has worked a ninety minute little gem, Dusk Rings A Bell, out of this reunion premise and director Richard Simon, with actors Jenny McKnight and Gregg Weiner, has provided the perfect setting: the stage at Mosaic Theatre.

Molly (Jenny McKnight) in PR for CNN in DC, is divorced, has slept once with her boss and breaks the fourth wall right from the get-go. In a lengthy monologue she spills her beans to us all. And...

That's what they say of Emily Book, heroine of The Sparrow now playing at the Adrienne Arsht Center. But truly, the phrase should be applied to the creators of this piece for the have spun together a piece so imaginative, enthralling and just plain fun that goggle eyes and bated breath rule the auditorium.

The set is simply a square wooden floor with suspended video screens on three sides. As show time approaches the 13 thirteen young adults playing teenagers and older adults meet on stage and wander around in front of the audience, warming up, hugging each other and the first thought is ugh, this is messy. But then suddenly The

No, I'm not talking about formal dances or even jugglers. It's all about the junk, man, at least according to Gregg Weiner, Best Actor in a Play winner, speaking at Monday night's 35th Annual Carbonell Awards Show.

Weiner credited NWSA Professor Andy Noble with teaching him to “act from his balls.” Unorthodox, maybe, but it's working. In 2009 Gregg won Best Actor for The Seafarer at Mosaic theatre, in 2010 he won Best Supporting Actor for Farragut North at GableStage and now he's continuing the streak with 2011's Best Actor for Fifty Words at GableStage.

In an evening where...

There's almost too much to like in Brothers Beckett, the new play by David Sirois receiving its world premiere at the Alliance Theatre Lab. And what a smart move by Adalberto Acevedo in choosing this piece and directing it. And what a smart move casting Sirois in his own play. And adding Shira Abergel, David Dearstyne, Mark Della Ventura and Kaitlyn O'Neill to give us five of the best young actors performing today.

Adelberto's direction elicits such natural performances from this group that the word “acting” doesn't come into it. You come alive with these kids...

If I should bump into you on the street and you tell me you still haven't seen August: Osage County at The Actors' Playhouse then shame on you. If you love good theatre you owe it to yourself to jump into this pool of drugs, alcohol, sex, incest, child molestation, death and snide humor now flooding the massive on-stage homestead of the Weston family.

I'm guessing that Tracy Letts, who wrote this three-hour-plus Pulitzer winner, had a grand old time dreaming up the drug addled matriarch, her alcoholic husband, their three daughters and various other emotionally hopeless inhabitants of Osage County, Oklahoma. He's probably still...

I've got to say, if you put Avi Hoffman in a pot with Chaz Mena. Gordon McConnell, Marckenson Charles, John Archie, Patti Gardner, Paul Homza, Sally Bondi and Alex Alvarez and have Joe Adler stir them up, you'll get one scrumptious evening at the theatre. I'm raving here about Tracy Letts' Superior Donuts at GableStage.

There are four stars working here, each turning in terrific performances. Avi Hoffman is Arthur, owner of the Superior Donuts shop in Chicago and a Polish nebbish who dodged Viet Nam by running to Toronto. With his tie-dyed t-shirt...

The acting is fine, the set is great, the lights and sound top notch; everything is just what you would expect from Caldwell Theatre's production of Next Fall. Except we seem to be watching a tear jerking TV melodrama that telegraphs its line right from curtain rise.

Warning! Plot revealed here. Fortyish man, Adam, gets twentyish boy, Luke, who can't/won't tell his parents he's gay. Man loses boy.

Next Fall opens in a hospital waiting room with Luke offstage awaiting surgery for a head injury. Flash back to Adam...

The rapid whispering is almost inaudible. It's coming from the large man pinned beneath the heavy wooden cross set on the floor. The cross is made from four by fours and bears blazing candles. The man is wearing an unbuttoned red shirt. His massive chest is covered in black hair. He wears black pants. The soles of his feet are black. His head is shaven and his short dyed ginger beard gives him a wild and Nordic look.

The whispering grows louder, the man slowly forces himself out from beneath the cross, he is chanting, faster and faster, perhaps a prayer. A young man at the end of the room slides...