By Dale King Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the author’s legendary tale of a wretched money-hoarding soul who finds lifesaving redemption with help from ghostly apparitions who appear to him on a fateful Christmas Eve in 1840s London, is back in Palm Beach County, offering a spirited lift to folks looking forward to the arriving holiday season. The famed fable opened … [Read more...]
First-class ‘Rent’ opens LW Playhouse’s 71st season in high-energy style
By Dale King Lake Worth Playhouse brings forth a Broadway blockbuster — the breakthrough musical Rent — as its official 71st season opener at the venerable showhouse in downtown Lake Worth Beach. LWP already presented a special performance of West Side Story to get the audience juiced for its autumnal theatrical kickoff. Set in the East Village of New York City, Rent is … [Read more...]
Lake Worth Playhouse offers strong, compelling ‘West Side Story’
By Dale King A community theater needs considerable fortitude to shoulder the task of preparing, casting, designing backgrounds and costumes for and assembling a cast of actors, dancers and singers to present an enduring theatrical production known and appreciated for its classic story and generational appeal. The folks at Lake Worth Playhouse decided early on to bite the … [Read more...]
Lake Worth Playhouse season ends with smart, energetic ‘Newsies’
By Dale King Newsies takes a high-energy, somersault-flipping, song-filled dip into a generally factual, historic event — a work stoppage involving newspaper delivery boys, called “newsies” — at the end of the 19th century. The show, a thought-provoking, entertaining and entrancing tale about industrious street kids with a genuine interest in righting wrongs — … [Read more...]
LWP serves up another fine whodunit in ‘Dial M for Murder’
By Dale King Lake Worth Playhouse has spent the last couple of seasons polishing up its capacity for presenting thought-provoking, plausible and entertaining murder mysteries. The theater company earned plaudits last year for its adaptation of Agatha Christie’s popular murder mystery Mousetrap. A year earlier, it kept the audience entranced with an edge-of-your-seat … [Read more...]
LW Playhouse’s ‘Guys and Dolls’ winningly shows off large, able cast
By Dale King After recently toying with a variety of theatrical genres, Lake Worth Playhouse has chosen to kick off the 2023 portion of its 70th season with a tried-and-true classic, Guys and Dolls. This stage staple centers on Depression-era gamblers and their women, referred to without objection as “dolls” and “broads,” whose major goal in life is to marry and raise … [Read more...]
‘Fun Home’: LW Playhouse gives breakthrough musical a fine reading
By Dale King Lake Worth Playhouse has officially opened its 70th season with a probing, thought-provoking production of Fun Home, a true-to-life musical theater adaptation of cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic novel memoir of her passionate search to find a connection between her and her deceased father – both of them gay. With music by Jeanine Tesori and a book … [Read more...]
LW Playhouse’s ‘Heathers’ brings offbeat story vividly to life
By Dale King Lake Worth Playhouse continues to exercise its theatrical muscle by bringing unorthodox plays to its main stage in downtown Lake Worth Beach. Since the COVID pandemic eased, show planners have presented such quirky entries as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a gender-bending two-person performance, and We Will Rock You, an idiosyncratic collection of tunes by the … [Read more...]
Lake Worth Playhouse’s ‘Wizard of Oz’ tracks movie and book classic agreeably
By Dale King For most of us in the age-55-and-over bracket, a visit to “the merry old land of Oz” used to be a once-a-year excursion provided by one of the three sole TV networks that broadcast the classic 1939 film of author L. Frank Baum’s fanciful story, The Wizard of Oz, on our 12-channel, antenna-on-the-roof television sets. Today, folks can find the same video … [Read more...]
‘Atlantis’: A pitiless Ukrainian postwar dystopia — from 2019
Whether programmed by coincidence or intention, today’s opening of Atlantis at Lake Worth Playhouse offers, like most great science fiction, a harrowing and prescient reflection on our present moment. Director Valentyn Vasyanovych’s sophomore feature, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, is set in Eastern Ukraine in 2025, “one year after the war.” It’s … [Read more...]