American writers may have made a poor showing in the Nobel sweepstakes these past few decades, with only the joke award to Bob Dylan last year to show for all their scribbling. Yet since the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s shiniest literary trophy, was opened to Yanks (and anyone else writing in English) in 2013, American writers have shouldered their way to prominence. George … [Read more...]
Archives for October 2017
Dramaworks’s ‘Little Foxes’ a showcase for powerful performances
Is it just me or do most plays produced these days – even those written long ago – seem to echo our current political situation? Neither the family in uneasy economic straits in The Humans nor the tale of a business bully who goes to Washington in Born Yesterday actually mention Donald Trump by name, but it is hard to watch either and not think of The Orange One. The same … [Read more...]
Boca’s Playgroup returns to house favorite to open season
Unlike Mark Twain’s famous line about the weather, everyone talks about the lack of new plays in the theater, but Boca Raton’s The Playgroup LLC is doing something about it. “We’re really a bunch of writers,” says the company’s executive director and founder, Joyce Sweeney. “We started out as a playwrights’ reading group and we then evolved into putting on plays. Our brand … [Read more...]
‘Tarzan’ not worth Slow Burn’s effort
When a theater company’s mission is to explore underappreciated Broadway musicals, it is probably inevitable that at some point it would select a show without any previously unrealized assets. For Slow Burn Theatre Company, that time is now and the show is Tarzan, the Musical. Give director-choreographer Patrick Fitzwater credit for investing such resources and energy into … [Read more...]
‘Diva whisperer’ Jay-Alexander to share star stories at FIU’s Jewish Museum
When you’ve devoted your career to producing and directing the shows and concerts of such incomparable stars as Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Bernadette Peters and Julie Andrews, you collect some colorful stories. And this Thursday evening at Miami Beach’s Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU, Richard Jay-Alexander, dubbed the “diva whisperer,” is ready to share them. The … [Read more...]
Monologuist Fogel amiably covers a midlife crisis in ‘’Til Death’
There is a vast gap between a theater piece and a stand-up comedy act, but Peter Fogel is the latest performer aiming to bridge that divide with his solo show, ’Til Death Do Us Part … You First! The result is far more the latter than the former, but that does not prevent the evening from being 90 minutes of amiable humor. As the title suggests, this largely … [Read more...]
‘Drowsy Chaperone’ sends up theater, and its audience
Most new musicals are based on material from another medium, these days largely from the movies. But 2006’s five-time Tony Award winner, The Drowsy Chaperone, is a genuine original, a show about an apartment-bound guy fixated on musicals, who loves to play his cast recordings of vintage shows and imagine what they must have looked like onstage. On this particular occasion, … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire opens with brilliant, vigorous Monteverdi
Claudio Monteverdi was a man ahead of his time, a trailblazer in the then-new form of opera and a composer who approached his mostly vocal output with fealty to the words and a concern for their expressive power that was paramount. To begin its 16th season of concerts, the Seraphic Fire choral group presented about an hour’s worth of excerpts from Monteverdi’s 1640 … [Read more...]
‘Faces Places’: Varda’s road picture is life-affirming, joyous
Agnès Varda’s first film in nine years is, like 2008’s The Beaches of Agnès, rooted in her past, while also addressing her finite future. Faces Places is a stylized road movie co-directed with JR, a pseudonymous Parisian street artist, but the echoes of Varda’s French New Wave origins ripple across the journey. The 33-year-old JR, as the 88-year-old Varda’s voice-over … [Read more...]
Canvas outdoor art show coming to Lake Worth
The week before Art Basel descends on Miami on Dec. 7, the Canvas Outdoor Museum Show will descend upon the city of Lake Worth from Nov. 26 to Dec. 2. Founded in 2015 by art curator Nicole Henry, the event has run in West Palm Beach for the past two years. Canvas artists will turn the city’s streets into an outdoor museum, with giant murals, shipping containers, art … [Read more...]