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Although you won't actually see any flaming babies on stage at Zoetic's South Beach Babylon they do get talked about a lot along with barbed wire and a girl getting intensely personal with herself.
But what you will see are bare boobies (only two), hilarious knock-offs of Romero Britto's art, and the vainglorious machinations of artists with an e and the enablers who mishandle them.
South Beach Babylon
We're waiting for the lights to dim, the show to begin, when this old black woman shuffles through the door from the lobby and blithely announces she's our homeless usher for the evening and then delights in giving us the South Florida Director/Producer's Welcoming Speech*. She's Karen Stephens and this is how she cranks into a solo evening at The Women's Theatre Project in Ft. Lauderdale.
An actress with remarkable chops, Stephens creates 14 characters, men and women, out of the stuff of her own talent and the sometimes brilliant writing of Sarah Jones, who wrote and starred in this original piece Off-Broadway in 2004 and then won a Special Tony...
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The longer I watched Jean Paul Sartre's No Exit the more I realized what eternity really meant. Three people, locked into each other until the end of time. Of course, this is Hell. A banal Hell that will never end. Were I a religious person, I would not have slept much last night after falling thrall to the power of this play and of this production at Naked Stage.
Could Hell really be found in a 1940s Parisian salon? A salon without windows, pictures, mirrors, photos on the walls, yet discernible as in the Second Empire fashion? There's an...
Wendy MacLeod's play, The House of Yes, spawned a successful movie in 1997 and it's easy to see why at the Alliance Theatre Lab's current production of the show. It's a bright, vicious and ultimately tragic ninety minutes, teetering on the edge of cartoon land but with Adalberto Acevedo's direction never crossing over.
Dysfunctional families can be boring, everyone's got one somewhere, but the family Pascal shown here are never that as they reach the heights of role playing, incest and murder. And, of course, brother boffing brother's fiancée, cheered on by mother, is only a slight bump in the upward path.
My old Grand Dad told me once when I was a lad that there was nothing like a good vice. “It'll clean up the complexion and purify the blood.” Words of wisdom from an old geezer who lived to be forty-seven. Too bad he didn't live long enough to catch Vices: A Love Story at the Caldwell Theatre. He would have made ninety-eight, still applauding this terrific show.
Give thanks to Susan Draus, Everett Bradley (he performed the brilliant “Some Like It” at this year's Carbonell Awards Show), Michael Heitzman and Ilene Reid who wrote the music and Heitzman and Reid...
Kristina Wong is a terrific physical comedienne whose love of dry humping, scrambled TV porn, reusable female necessities, scatology and vegetable oil make her highly qualified to be an ecological martyr. And if you don't believe me, go see her show Going Green The Wong Way at the Arsht Center in downtown Miami.
Produced by the Mad Cat Theatre Company and directed by Paul Tei, GGTWW is Wong's funny tale of how she tried to do the right thing and Save The Earth.
Wong's enthusiasm sells this...
Oliver! It's playing at the Actors' Playhouse and the sixteen Workhouse Boys and “Food, Glorious Food” have opened the show. Ken Clement and Elizabeth Dimon as Mr Bumble and Widow Corney follow with “Oliver,” “I Shall Scream” and “Boy For Sale,” Just great. Then there's “That's Your Funeral” with Mark A. Harmon and Maribeth Graham. Delightful. And we're all set for a wonderful evening of Lionel Bart's classic of 1850's London.
But somewhere along the way, towards the end of the first act, when we're in the Thieves Kitchen, things start to go flat. The veteran Gary Marachak is the star of the show as Fagin and when he speaks...
So this chick with the great smile walks into the third floor apartment of Ruth Steiner. Ruth once gained fame as a short story writer. Now she teaches and writes. And regrets. But here's Lisa Morrison, a post-grad student, the smiling chick, to cheer her up. Lisa's looking for help with her writing and Ruth is just the person to put her in her literary place.
It's Donald Marguiles' Collected Stories, now playing at Richard Jay Simon's Mosaic Theatre and Simon once more has demonstrated his theatrical nous, having Margaret M. Ledford direct Barbara Bradshaw and...
Being a bit of a snob (an ex-wife once called me a pompous, arrogant snob. What a kidder.) I tend to disregard gatherings of players in church halls. Such a silly boy.
Just how silly I discovered last night at the dress rehearsal (it runs for only three performances) of Miami Beach – The Musical, an original production of the Arts at St Johns.
Performed in the church rather than a hall, the setting is limited: a raised black stage, split pastel curtains as a back drop, a raised platform stage left and the church's pulpit stage right. An excellent trio, piano, drums and bass is also stage right...
Some pretty fine singers are pouring it forth in the concert version of Follies at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton. The third in the Stephen Sondheim concert series after Sunday in the Park with George and Into The Woods, this Follies is pretty much a delight through and through.
Briefly, the beautiful Weismann chorus girls are attending a reunion at the theatre in which they performed many years before. They see the shades of their younger selves and the two groups play shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's musical marital strife but the wonderful Sondheim music and the sardonic Sondheim lyrics make this one of the better shows ever on Broadway. It first ran in...
If sitting in a sight line challenged theatre watching four stoner-losers bring drivel to an art form is your life's desire then you're going to enjoy the hell out of New Theatre's Jack Goes Boating. If, however, you're like me, you're going to sit there not giving a rat's ass about the unlikeable characters on stage.
When Phillip Seymour Hoffman, co-artistic director with John Ortiz of New York's LAByrinth Theatre Company, presented this show in 2007 you can bet they saw a starring vehicle for themselves. And they were right. Too bad they're not working for New Theatre.
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There's always a wonderful air of anticipation when the house lights dim in the theatre, and especially so when the soon to be revealed play is a world premiere by Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz. His The Color of Desire is now playing at Actors' Playhouse in Coral Gables and when the lights come up on stage we are immediately drawn into 1960 Havana and the revolution.
Sean McLelland's wonderfully detailed set is a costume room beneath a theatre, an apartment, a lovers' bedroom, a restaurant, a night club and a Cuban shoreline. Working as seamstresses in the costume room are two elderly sisters, Leandra and Albertina, (Isabel...
If you had your little old granny within 75 yards of GableStage on Saturday night last and you noticed her blanching and shooting her china clippers in and out more rapidly than usual, be sure she had wandered into the danger zone emanating from Joe Adler's stage where his actors were performing outrageous acts on each other. And the audience.
It was opening night of A Behanding In Spokane, Martin McDonagh's f-bomb laden, cringe-inducing ninety minutes of almost continuous laughter.
You get a hotel room from hell and Denis Creaghan, unshaven and with long white...
And then only very occasionally during the rare funny moments of Broward Stage Door's production of the musical Mack and Mabel. The original show lasted on Broadway for only 66 performances back in 1974.
Mack and Mabel is based on the relationship, starting in 1911, between Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, he the driven movie director who gave us the two-reel silent comedies, the bathing Beauties and the Keystone Kops, and she his comedy queen until she decided to become a serious star and then get hooked on cocaine. And died at 34.
The problem with this show is not only the darkly clichéd book by Michael Stewart...
I'll be the first to admit it: When I'm getting Shakespeared in a theatre I tend to get
beaten back into my seat by the inundation of Will's words, my eyes glazing and my brain struggling to comprehend the story before me. Unless of course, someone is doing Shakespeare right, rather than doing him wrong. (There's a song in there somewhere.) On opening night at New Theatre's The Tempest, there was both right and wrong and fortunately more of the former.
If you were paying attention in high school you'll remember the plot: brother (Antonio) screws...
A little background here: August 26 last I saw Mack and Mabel at Broward Stage Door Theatre. That was a mistake because although the Stage Door box office had insisted the show was officially open, up and running, and ready for critics, it was actually in the midst of previews. I did not discover this until after my review was up on miamiartzine.com.
I did not give it a good review. And that's why reviewers seldom attend previews. It's not fair to the theatre. Or the critic.
I called producer Dee Bunn to explain that incorrect information from the box office brought me to the preview and when director Michael Leeds invited...
Completely Hollywood (Abridged) at Mosaic Theatre is completely funny (unabridged). Director Richard Jay Simon cast three fine, serious actors who, in this piece, are seriously over the top, falling down, climbing up and going over again. And again. It's anything for a laugh theatre and it works.
Completely Hollywood, written by Reed Martin, Austin Tichenor and Dominic Conti, replays 197 movies in 90 minutes. Yes, that's where the “Abridged” comes in. Antonio Amadeo, Erik Fabregat and Christian Rockwell turn Mosaic's stage into a sight and sound stream of comedy, some of it subtle, most of it broad, as they give us the movies right between the...
Halfway through the opening night's performance of Wicked Sisters at The Women's Theatre Project I thought: wait a minute, I've misunderstood what's going on, this is deliberate buffoonery, they're playing a cartoon lampoon of a soap opera. But, sadly, no. This stuff was just seriously over the top.
In the far off Blue Mountains of Australia, a scientific genius has died. His widow, Meridee, has invited her three best friends for lunch (I'd hate to see her enemies). Judith, Lydia and Hester join Meridee and in an instant the usual tales abound of what a bastard the genius really was. Alzheimer's, adultery, abortion, blackmail, stolen life's work, the genitalia of young men...
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And The Comfort of Darkness is somewhat bland. This summer show at Boca Raton's Caldwell Theatre is a world premiere. It's got a lovingly elegant set, wonderful costumes, top lights and sound, good direction by Clive Cholerton and features some fine performances, but still it seems just to float along, neither particularly exciting nor particularly boring. Summer is here, outside and in the theatre.
Written by Joel Gross, The Comfort of Darkness weaves a love story around the 18th century real lives of Dr. Anton Mesmer, Maria-Theresa von Paradis, Dr. Otto von Stoerk and Franzi Osterling.
Give Joe Adler a script like Michael Weller's Fifty Words, add actors Erin Joy Schmidt and Gregg Weiner, and you'll get a ninety-five minute one act that goes by in a couple of heartbeats. You want love? You want hate? You want lust? You want weakness, strength, pride, rage, futility? Hell, you'll get just about every emotion extant when Schmidt and Weiner sit down to dinner at GableStage.
They're a married couple, Jan and Adam, spending their first night together without their young son. Champagne, flickering candles. How romantic. Well, no, not really. He's desperate for the comfort and reassurance of physical intimacy, she's a little busy right now. Hard to concentrate on tender...