A stage company like Palm Beach Dramaworks, known for “theater to think about,” could hardly make a lightweight choice for its first musical produced within a subscription season. So it selected The Spitfire Grill, a 2001 off-Broadway show based on an acclaimed – but also little seen – independent film about hope and redemption. “‘Spitfire Grill’ is probably one of the … [Read more...]
Stage Door’s new venue outshines uneven ‘La Cage’
You want the good news first? The 26-year-old Stage Door Theatre has moved from Margate, across Broward County, to a gorgeous new $11.6 million playhouse, the 1,100-seat Lauderhill Performing Arts Center. With ample wings and fly space, plus all the bells, whistles and amenities that its former home lacked, the complex should be the envy of every other resident company in South … [Read more...]
At Dramaworks, a sparkling tour of Woody Guthrie’s America
Oklahoma-born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, champion of the underclass and the union movement, was a genuine poet, though he was never comfortable with that label. He wrote simple, hummable songs that celebrated this nation, but as the Great Depression consumed the country and exposed economic inequities, his tunes took on a tone of angry protest and confrontation. That … [Read more...]
Dramaworks to celebrate timely troubadour
By Sandra Schulman Woody Guthrie was many things – a poet, songwriter, occasional hobo. The new summer musical at Dramaworks, Woody Guthrie’s American Song, follows Guthrie’s coast to coast life using his songs and quotes straight from his journals. The main character of Guthrie is never named; instead, the three stages of his life “are called The Searcher, the Folk … [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...]
MNM mounts respectable ‘Company’ at Rinker
That sound you hear is the third shoe dropping in a surprisingly Stephen Sondheim-rich summer in South Florida. Following FAU Festival Rep’s Into the Woods and Palm Beach Dramawork’s current steampunk Sweeney Todd comes MNM Productions with the master of ambivalence’s take on marriage, 1970’s Company. In addition to launching an extremely fertile decade for composer-lyricist … [Read more...]
FAU Festival Rep’s ‘Sense’ and ‘Woods’ entertain and nourish
The best theater pieces involve characters who want something very badly. Perhaps that is what links Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical, Into the Woods, which are the cornerstones of this year’s Festival Rep on Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton campus. In the former, two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, yearn for … [Read more...]
Happily ever after? FAU’s ‘Into the Woods’ takes on the question
In the often lightweight genre of musicals, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim has tended towards the grim, in shows about a homicidal barber, presidential assassins and America’s opening and despoiling of Japan. Then there is his Grimm musical, Into the Woods, written with his Sunday in the Park with George collaborator James Lapine. Its first act, which interweaves several … [Read more...]
‘Omnium Gatherum’ gripping at FAU’s Studio One
By Dale King At its core, the intense drama Omnium Gatherum is a contemporary mix of tragedy and travesty. The tale of seven guests and a hostess feasting on a gourmet meal at a luxurious Manhattan dinner party while the recollections of a hellish day in American history hang like a dark pall and gush from a dungeon-like lower hallway, tests the audience’s ability to absorb … [Read more...]
Even the revue is beautiful: Songs of Kander and Ebb at the Rinker
Busy as an adjunct theater professor at Florida Atlantic University, Lynn University and Broward College during the school year, Bruce Linser has to confine his freelance directing to the summer months. No sooner had he opened his production of Once Upon a Mattress at FAU’s Festival Rep, then he began rehearsals for The World Goes ’Round, MNM Productions’ revue of songs … [Read more...]