Keith Garsson bounces back with a sexy season of Primal Forces, Palm Beach Dramaworks produces two world premieres, Slow Burn serves up its first non-musical and in case you haven’t had enough inclement weather this hurricane season, The Wick promises to make it rain inside its theater. All in all, it looks like a promising 2017-18 at area stages. Here’s a preview, in … [Read more...]
FAU Theatre Lab launches New Play Festival this month
Florida Atlantic University’s Theatre Lab ends its second full season – its first with a slate of fully produced plays – with a New Play Festival, May 10-14, in Parliament Hall on FAU’s Boca Raton campus. The festival kicks off with an evening of short plays selected from submissions by participants in the master classes of the Playwrights Forum, led by associate artistic … [Read more...]
FAU grad students offer gripping ‘Judas Iscariot’
By Dale King Grad students in the Master of Fine Arts program at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton wrap up their 2016-2017 season this weekend with an intensely dramatic retelling of a 2,000-year-old-story with critical contemporary consequences. In fact, the play, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, is steeped in passion, and unfolds at a slow, often painful pace, … [Read more...]
Pianist Biegel clowns, shines in P.D.Q. Bach at SoFla Symphony
The American composer Peter Schickele has had a remarkable career in which he has managed to have his own compositional triumphs and an entirely separate career in musical parody, in which his compositional triumphs have been much more dubious. But that’s the sort of thing you’d expect me to say when we’re talking about Schickele’s creation, P.D.Q. Bach, whose scattered … [Read more...]
FAU’s ‘Spitfire Grill’ finds winning balm in Gilead
By Dale King The Spitfire Grill, the lively contemporary musical that completes its two-weekend run at the Studio One Theatre on the campus of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton on Sunday, is not a humorous show, despite the up-tempo, often knee-slapping rhythm of its score and an aw-shucks ending that drops on the audience like the plummeting temperature of a … [Read more...]
Chekhov meets Beckett in Laufer’s provocative ‘Three Sisters of Weehawken’
What do you get when you cross an iconic play by Anton Chekhov with those of Samuel Beckett, by way of Christopher Durang and his puckish touch? Such a stew would probably resemble Deborah Zoe Laufer’s The Three Sisters of Weehawken, an amiably nutty and ultimately touching new work now receiving its world premiere at Florida Atlantic University’s Theatre Lab. As her title … [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...]
Season Preview 2016-17: Art in Palm Beach County
This season, brace yourselves for an identity crisis. The art and artists being featured are driven by it. Clearly, creativity thrives in the absence of a defined self. In an attempt to come up with something highly personal and unique, artists are pulling deeper than ever from within them. Equipped with more free admissions, night operating hours and themes suited for the … [Read more...]
‘Not In My Town’: New opera makes a strong impact
In a politically unsettled time, it’s helpful to have artworks that take on the issues of the day and give us something to think about. Not In My Town, a new opera by Wilton Manors-based composer Michael W. Ross, is nothing if not politically engaged. The story of the 1998 torture-killing of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, was part of the impetus for a … [Read more...]
Shepard hate-crime opera set for world premiere
When a selection of scenes from South Florida composer Michael W. Ross’s new opera, Not In My Town, were performed in June at Fort Lauderdale’s Sunshine Cathedral, it came only days after the massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Since the subject of the opera is the 1998 murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, it was an almost-instantaneous … [Read more...]