By Dale King MNM Productions is a small but driven contemporary theater company that’s latched on to the black-box-style, 300-seat Rinker Playhouse at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, and intends to stay a while. Its two producing partners, Michael Lifshitz and Marcie Gorman-Althof, have given wing to risk by announcing plans to present one of the best-loved and … [Read more...]
At the theater: A whimsical ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’; ‘Old Broads’ mines creaky jokes
Having gone through the Bard’s more popular plays in its first 26 years, Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival opts for less familiar territory this summer with an early comedy by its namesake playwright, Love’s Labour’s Lost. In it, the King of Navarre decrees that he and his three close pals will have no contact with women for three years, devoting themselves instead to their … [Read more...]
Dramaworks’s ‘Sweeney Todd’ will have a steampunk sensibility
Over the past eight years, Clive Cholerton has directed several of Stephen Sondheim’s challenging musicals, first at the now defunct Caldwell Theatre and more recently at Palm Beach Dramaworks. Although he considers the 1979 “musical thriller,” Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, to be the composer-lyricist’s masterpiece, Cholerton had shied away from producing … [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...]
PB Shakespeare Festival tackles ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’
After 26 years of free, outdoor Shakespeare by the Sea, Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival tackles for the first time Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Bard’s early comedy about a noble experiment in love that goes terribly awry. Trent Stephens returns to adapt and direct the dark comedy that concerns a few headstrong lords who vow to swear off women for three years to concentrate on … [Read more...]
Entr’acte’s energetic troupe ideal for ‘Putnam County Spelling Bee’
By Dale King The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a send-up of those silly, nerve-wracking, angst-producing, word competitions that caused us no end of anxiety in our youth. The production now playing at the newly opened PGA Arts Center in Palm Beach Gardens provides an entertaining evening of fun, songs and smartly written parody. The 2005 musical that went on … [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...]
Appreciation: Michael Hall, South Florida theater pioneer
One of the true pioneers of South Florida professional theater has died. Michael Hall, 77, co-founder and artistic director of Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre company, died June 15 of complications from pancreatic cancer. With seed money from James R. Caldwell, founder of the Rubbermaid kitchen utensils company, Hall was encouraged to create a not-for-profit playhouse in … [Read more...]
Wick’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ delightful treat for summer
As managing executive producer Marilynn Wick readily concedes in her pre-show speech, she has purposely aimed her summer show, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, at youngsters and at developing an audience of tots. Then she has chosen well, with one of the Mouse Factory’s most popular animated features, transformed into the company’s first Broadway venture in 1994, a … [Read more...]
At 12, Gardens’s Ben Krieger already a stage veteran
What had you accomplished by the age of 12? Worked a paper route? Opened and run a lemonade stand? Ben Krieger of Palm Beach Gardens, 12, is already a veteran stage performer, having appeared in three national tours of Broadway shows. This Tuesday night, when he opens in Finding Neverland at the Broward Center, he will have notched some 250 performances in the past two … [Read more...]