Is the stage half empty or half full? Depends on your improvisational skills, David Christopher would say. While some consider it theater’s ugly cousin, Christopher, an actor, instructor, and one of the founding members of the Just the Funny Improv Comedy Theater Company, contends that improv is an essential part…
Skeletons in the corner, jittery women in crisply pressed nurses’ uniforms, doors that are shifting entries to alternative realities … if you think this is theater of the absurd, think again. You have entered one of theater’s most loved but problematic genres: the thriller. From Sleuth to Deathtrap, theatrical thrillers…
This is not a common subject for the stage, screen, or most anyplace else. But Cuillo Centre for the Arts’ current production, Menopause: The Musical, is a cabaret-style musical about what feminist Gail Sheehy termed “the Silent Passage” and what aunts, mothers, and grandmothers for generations have referred to in…
Chances are the woman sitting next to you has been raped: One out of three women in the United States are sexually assaulted by age eighteen. Of all rape cases that are prosecuted, only two percent result in conviction. The average rapist rapes 29 times. These are all statistics that…
It’s not every day that a play about death resuscitates the English language. The word wit as a noun has all but vanished from the English language only to be replaced by the shallower derivative, the adjective witty — a witty joke, a witty game show host, a witty comment…
From Bosnia to Bessie Smith, Florida Stage’s 2000-2001 season consistently has shown how music helps shape historical moments and our lives. The theater’s final production of the summer, At Wit’s End, is no exception. This musical comedy uses live piano accompaniment throughout to re-create one of the most culturally vital…
The audience at the 26th Street Theatre’s production of William Finn’s musical Falsettoland can be as idiosyncratic as the play itself. In South Florida (and especially in Broward and Palm Beach counties), where theater audiences usually consist of retirees age 65 and older, a recent Sunday’s full house consisted of…
The Mad Cat experience Here in My Car may not be for everyone, but it may be for you. The best way to tell is not whether you’ve acquired a studied cool or nerdy hipness; it’s really more a matter of semantics. To find out if you qualify to get…
Most plays begin when the actors first appear, but Hollywood Playhouse’s Game Show: The Comedy You Play starts the moment you walk into the 200-seat theater. David K. Sherman has done an excellent job of setting the stage for this entertaining blend of interactivity and comedy. The brightly colored podiums…
The plot of David Hare’s The Blue Room might be described as “six degrees of penetration.” In the play’s opening scene, an off-duty cab driver gets it on with a prostitute. Next the cab driver seduces a French au pair, then the au pair has a sexual encounter with a…
A bearded man in olive drab spews out a fist-pounding diatribe. A couple gyrates brutally as if trapped in a sadistic rumba. A young man stands motionless with a black box over his head. A girl with a red scarf around her neck pulls it over her face in one…
Ominous techno music engulfs the expectant audience at the Museum of Art Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale. The stage is barren except for a black office chair and desk. The desk is covered with a black cloth. As if the title of the play, The Penis’ Responses to the Vagina Monologues…
Like apparitions rolling in from the sea, four rafters descend down the aisles from the back of the darkened Colony Theater toward the stage. Pedro (Luis Alberto Garcia), a soldier, crouches and peers excitedly through a telescope. Octavio (Gerardo Riveron) enters with a compass. Devoto (Jorge Hernandez), dressed as a…
Wherever there’s a vagina holding forth, a penis in need of countering dialogue must be close by. It’s no surprise, then, that on the heels of Eve Ensler’s critically acclaimed and commercially successful play The Vagina Monologues comes Dean C. Dauw and his play, Penis’ Responses to The Vagina Monologues…
When Sonia (Connie SaLoutos), an aspiring lyricist, 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.” Ironically adjectives like commercial have plagued…
With the first International Monologue Festival barely finished and the sixteenth International Hispanic Theatre Festival just beginning, South Florida audiences are reveling in one of our greatest assets: the abundance of talented local artists who work in Spanish and Portuguese. The International Hispanic Theatre Festival, which runs from June 1…
Early on in Florida Stage’s The Pavilion, the narrator looks out at the audience and declares, “This is a play about time.” Normally such an audacious statement might undercut the play’s actual content, but The Pavilion delves into the concepts of time, memory, and perception so thoroughly, and often eloquently,…
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…
Leave the tent and bug spray at home; there’s a better camp already set up at Miami Light Project Light Box Studio. The theater is now hosting two one-acts written by William Busch, an off-Broadway cult figure known for his high-camp style, and cleverly directed by Heath Kelts. Sleeping Beauty…
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/wrestling 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 cup of Earl…
