By Dale King If your fancy runs to lively, energetic stage productions, See How They Run is likely your cup of tea. As with most British farces, the operative word in the title is “run.” And that’s what the characters do in this raucous, whimsical story at the Delray Beach Playhouse. For its second show of the season, the Playhouse taps an interesting cadre of performers … [Read more...]
Archives for December 2019
‘Ray & Liz’: A bleak slog through the bogs of English misery
The setting of Richard Billingham’s debut feature Ray & Liz is a council flat in England’s Black Country, a series of boroughs so named because of the coal mines and other heavy-industry dross that congested its air and sickened its population of people too poor to live anywhere else. It’s a moldering, putrid place, and you can almost smell it through the screen. The … [Read more...]
FAU Theatre Lab handles promising ‘Super Great’ deftly
The first thing you need to know about Stephen Brown’s new play, Everything is Super Great, is that the title is facetious. In fact, nearly everything is pretty awful for the four disconnected characters that populate this “comedy about what’s missing.” For each of them has a void in his life, a missing person or a stunted relationship that keeps his or her existence … [Read more...]
‘Play That Goes Wrong’ long overstays its slapstick welcome
Since theater is a live event, that means that on any given evening anything – good or bad – could happen. But with the play currently at the Kravis Center’s Dreyfoos Hall, if something unexpected went wrong, you would never know it. That is because the show playing through Sunday is called The Play That Goes Wrong, an Olivier Award-winning British import based on one … [Read more...]
Hart’s art draws boomers, Dead fans to Boca gallery
Wentworth Gallery in the Boca Raton Town Center Mall bears little resemblance to the venues where San Francisco-launched act the Grateful Dead cultivated its following of Deadheads, a throng that grew between formation of the band in 1965 and the death of founding guitarist/vocalist Jerry Garcia in 1995. But former Dead drummer Mickey Hart’s forays into visual art … [Read more...]
McKeever’s ‘fable’ of unexpected love on stage at Levis JCC
The Levis JCC Sandler Center has kicked off its 2019-20 black box theater lineup with local playwright Michael McKeever’s Charlie Cox Runs with Scissors, presented by West Boca Theatre Company and running through Dec. 22. “We’re thrilled to present ‘Charlie Cox Runs with Scissors’ as our stellar season opener,” says Alan Nash, assistant director for the Sandler Center. … [Read more...]
Miami Art Week, Part 2: Beach sculpture, Thomas room beat banana
By Sandra Schulman The main draw of Miami Art Week has been the Art Basel Miami Fair at Miami Beach’s sleek and spacious new convention center. The doors blew open Wednesday morning for a preview look. The improved layout is pretty grand, with two open living room lobby areas for sitting and regrouping. Some of the biggest-name booths sit around these areas, making it … [Read more...]
Dimon’s star turn gives Dramaworks its best-ever new play
Quick, name a pioneering comic actress from the early days of television. Chances are you mentioned Lucille Ball, but before we loved Lucy there was Gertrude Berg, who not only starred in The Goldbergs — the first exposure to Jewish family life for many Americans — but she wrote, directed and produced the entire series, as she had previously done on radio for two decades. … [Read more...]
Maltz does what it can with weak, flimsy ‘Drood’
While Charles Dickens is inarguably one of the great writers of the English language, the mystery genre was never his forte. Still, late in his life, he began a tale of murder, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which remained unfinished because he passed away after penning the first six installments. Although no autopsy was performed, based on the musical that Rupert Holmes … [Read more...]
Leads, production make ‘Music Man’ at Wick a winner for holiday
The flim-flam man who gets himself bamboozled is a staple character of the musical theater. Think of Max Bialystock of The Producers, Lawrence Jameson of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and especially Harold Hill of The Music Man. That last one, the creation of composer-lyricist-book writer Meredith Willson, is an enduring conning icon who arrives in River City, Iowa, intent on … [Read more...]