Palm Beach ArtsPaper staff DELRAY BEACH — Boca Stage, the independent theater company founded by Keith Garsson, will relocate to the black box theater at the Delray Beach Playhouse in October. Boca Stage, formerly known as Primal Forces, has been notable for bringing offbeat, little-known plays to South Florida. Its past four seasons have been presented at the Sol … [Read more...]
Female ‘Odd Couple’ falls flat at Boca Stage
In his heyday, Neil Simon would write a new play each season. In 1985, however, when he didn’t have a good idea for a play, he rewrote one of his finest, funniest comedies, The Odd Couple, changing the gender of the characters and tinkering with many of his previously well-crafted laugh lines. While he never asked me for my opinion, I would have advised him with that … [Read more...]
At Boca Stage, ‘Grand Horizons’ goes for the laughs
In the prologue to Bess Wohl’s Grand Horizons, before we learn that Nancy and Bill French have passed their 50th anniversary, we watch as they wordlessly ready their breakfast as a team, the familiar exercise of a much-married couple. So it is more than a little surprising when the first words out of her mouth are “I think I would like a divorce.” Responding without … [Read more...]
Powerful ‘Time Alone’ at Boca Stage charts two kinds of imprisonment
Anger and pain are the shared emotions that link widow Anna Jackson and convicted killer Gabriel Wayland. They also share the stage — but never the same space — in Alessandro Camon’s powerful play of dueling monologues, Time Alone. Beyond their well-earned rage, these two lost souls have another unexpected connection, revealed only in the final moments of the 90-minute … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2022-23: The season in theater
Now that the COVID 19 pandemic is in the rearview mirror – we hope – South Florida’s theaters are looking ahead to their first full season of productions in several years. So below is a look at what is scheduled, taken in geographic order from north to south, from Jupiter to Coral Gables. Last season, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre was hit with a double whammy of COVID and … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2022-23: The season in theater
Now that the COVID 19 pandemic is in the rearview mirror --- we hope --- South Florida’s theaters are looking ahead to their first full season of productions in several years. So below is a look at what is scheduled, taken in geographic order from north to south, from Jupiter to Coral Gables. Last season, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre was hit with a double whammy of COVID … [Read more...]
Maltz gets underway in new house; companies announce 22-23 season
After two postponed productions and a third delayed by a week, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre opened in late March with critical acclaim for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and for its renovated and expanded playhouse. With much of the stress of construction deadlines over, producing artistic director Andrew Kato paused long enough to discuss the new, improved theater and the upcoming first … [Read more...]
Words matter, and are the matter, in Boca Stage two-hander ‘The Sound Inside’
It is no accident that Bella Baird, the central figure in Adam Rapp’s compelling, though arch, play The Sound Inside, is a professor of creative writing at Yale University. For Rapp, himself a former novelist, needed a character obsessed with literature, meticulous with words, someone whose self-conscious dialogue sounds carefully composed, as if written down before it is … [Read more...]
The Civil War, played for laughs: Boca Stage’s sharp, funny ‘Ben Butler’
Comedy depends on the element of surprise. And the most surprising thing about Ben Butler, Richard Strand’s Civil War tug-of-war over a runaway slave who seeks asylum at a Union army post, is that the dire situation is played for laughs. The play is full of verbal wit, delivered with verve by a capable four-member cast at Boca Stage, under the crafty direction of the … [Read more...]
‘Luna Gale’ at Boca Stage tackles big issues, underwhelmingly
Following closely upon its satire of Big Pharma, Rx, Boca Stage now takes a jaundiced look at the bureaucracy of the social safety net in Rebecca Gilman’s Luna Gale. At the play’s center is a stressed-out, overburdened Cedar Rapids social worker named Caroline, whose caseload includes meth addicts Karlie and Peter, parents of the title baby. We first encounter them in an ER … [Read more...]