This season, all eyes are on what used to be the Caldwell Theatre in Boca.
You see, a determined woman named Marilynn Wick, founder and CEO of the wildly successful rental firm Costume World, bought the vacant playhouse of the belly-up Caldwell, chiefly to warehouse and display her vast stock of theatrical wardrobe. And since the building also happens to have an auditorium, she figured she might as well produce shows, largely family-friendly classic musicals.
She opened with The Sound of Music (continuing through Oct. 20) with plans to follow it with the stage version of the movie White Christmas (Nov. 6-Dec. 22). Next up will be the tap-happy 42nd Street (Jan. 8-Feb. 9) and the slightly steamy The Full Monty (Feb. 19-March 3), about unemployed steel workers who turn to stripping to pay their bills.
The season’s one non-musical is Steel Magnolias (April 2-May 4), about life in a Southern beauty parlor. The Wick’s inaugural year ends with the Fats Waller revue, Ain’t Misbehavin’ (May 14-June 15). Matinee audiences can enjoy lunch and a museum tour before the show and the evening crowd can stick around for a post-show cabaret.
The Maltz Jupiter Theatre is coming off a sweep of last year’s Carbonell Awards and has set a new ticket sales record for the season ahead. Its strength is also tried-and-true musicals but with a directorial twist. It will be producing three Tony-winning shows: Annie (Dec. 3-22) featuring Carbonell Award winner Vicki Lewis as Miss Hannigan, A Chorus Line (Jan. 14-Feb. 2) and The King and I (March 18-April 6), directed by the ever-resourceful Marcia Milgrom Dodge.
Also on the Maltz menu are a couple of dramas: the season-opening classic thriller, Dial “M” for Murder (Oct. 27-Nov. 10) and Jon Robin Baitz’s recent Broadway hit, Other Desert Cities (Feb. 16-March 2), about a prodigal child’s return to her celebrated parents’ Palm Springs home with a novel-memoir that exposes family secrets.
Now comfortable in its attractive Clematis Street home, West Palm Beach’s only resident theater company, Palm Beach Dramaworks, continues challenging its audience with such cerebral plays as John Steinbeck’s saga of hard-luck migrant workers, Of Mice and Men (Oct. 11-Nov. 10). That will be followed by the royal family treachery of The Lion in Winter (Dec. 6-Jan. 5), Harold Pinter’s triangulated memory play, Old Times (Jan. 31-March 2) and Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate (March 28-April 27), a tale of real estate and greed. The Dramaworks season ends with British playwright Karoline Leach’s psychological thriller of mercenary matrimony, Tryst (May 16-June 15).
Across town, the Kravis Center has a promising season for its Broadway series, including two recent Tony winners — Diane Paulus’s scaled-down revival of Porgy and Bess (Jan. 7-12) and the wondrous puppetry epic, War Horse (Feb. 12-16). The season kicks off with an early holiday boost from the Radio City Christmas Spectacular featuring (who else?) The Rockettes (Nov. 29-Dec. 8). The season concludes with a triple punch of musicals — the nonsensical Sister Act (March 4-9), the ever-popular saga of Argentine social and political climber, Evita (April 8-13) and Million Dollar Quartet (April 29-May 4), the recreation of a recording session among Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. Great balls of fire, indeed.
If you are looking for Broadway stars, consider these Kravis solo concerts: Savion Glover (Nov. 7), Bernadette Peters (Dec. 14), Audra McDonald (Jan. 5), Emily Skinner (Jan. 10-11) and Mandy Patinkin (Feb. 5). And just added to the Kravis schedule is the latest girls’ night out show from Jeanie Linders (of Menopause the Musical fame), The D* Word (Oct. 17-Dec. 8), as in “ditched, dumped, divorced and dating.” Drat.
Manalapan’s Plaza Theatre has a varied season with one particularly attention-getting booking, The Nanny’s Renee Taylor in a dishy, one-woman comedy, My Life on a Diet (Jan. 16-Feb. 9), based on her best-selling book. The season opens with Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs (Oct. 10-27), followed by Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Nov. 7-24) and the relationship sketches of I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change (Dec. 5-22). Probably the company’s most ambitious offering will be the immigration musical Rags (Feb. 20-March 16), critically admired but short-lived on Broadway. The Plaza season concludes with Claudia Shear’s bawdy tribute to Mae West, Dirty Blonde (March 27-April 13).
At the Arts Garage in Delray Beach, producing director Lou Tyrrell is putting new emphasis on musicals, but hardly the old war horses of the genre.
Two of the four shows in his season are musicals and both are by Daniel Maté, 2013 Kleban Prize recipient for “most promising musical theater lyricist.” Leading off will be his song cycle The Longing and the Short of It (Nov. 1-24), an eclectic collection of numbers on love and acceptance. He also finishes the season with a slightly more conventional book musical, The Trouble with Doug (April 18-May 11), if you consider a contemporary re-imagining of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, about a guy who wakes up one day transformed into a giant talking slug, to be conventional.
In between, there are plays by two of Tyrrell’s favorite writers, Carter W. Lewis and Israel Horovitz. Lewis’s latest, The Hummingbird Wars (Jan. 10-Feb. 2), is another of his bounds-stretchers on topical issues. Horovitz serves up a triangular romance among seniors who first met during World War II, Fighting Over Beverly (Feb. 28-March 23). In addition, Arts Garage continues its radio theater series, with vintage presentations of such screen-to-stage transfers as It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca and Sunset Boulevard.
In western Boca Raton, Slow Burn Theatre is celebrating its fifth season of unconventional musicals, but with larger budgets and the company’s first Equity guest artist contracts. It opens with a show that inspired co-artistic directors Patrick Fitzwater and Matthew Korinko to form the troupe, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Next to Normal (Oct. 18-Nov. 2) about a suburban family coping with mom’s bi-polar mental condition. It follows that with a similarly dark-toned show, Parade (Jan. 31-Feb. 9), the real-life tale of a Georgia man accused of murder, wrongly convicted and ultimately hanged, with a Tony-winning score by Jason Robert Brown.
Third in the lineup is the Cold War battle played out on a 64-square board, Chess (March 21-April 5), with a score by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus. It pre-dates Mamma Mia!, but also serves as an antidote to that vacuous hit show. Slow Burn is in growth mode, going bi-county with two of its shows transferring to the Aventura Arts Center. That makes the company Carbonell-eligible for the first time ever.
At the Willow Theatre in Boca’s Sugar Sand Park, the Boca Raton Theatre Guild and The Women’s Theatre Project not only continue to share the space, they have devised a joint subscription series. For one price, you can see four of their shows — two musicals by BRTD and two plays by TWTP.
The Women’s Project brings to the area Nicky Silver’s The Lyons (Dec. 6-22), a dark comedy about a family coping with an imminent death, as well as Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins (Feb. 28-March 16), a collection of columns by the late liberal Texas journalist, portrayed by four-time Carbonell winner Barbara Bradshaw. The Guild kicks off the season with They’re Playing Our Song (Nov. 8-24), the Marvin Hamlisch-Carole Bayer Sager-Neil Simon romantic comedy about the collaboration between a composer and lyricist, then comes back with Stephen Schwartz’s Pippin (Jan. 24-Feb. 9), the tale of Charlemagne’s son that is currently enjoying a major revival on Broadway.
But that just scratches the surface for the Guild, which will produce four more shows this season in other venues. It focuses on film legend Marilyn Monroe at Coconut Creek’s Township Center with Marilyn: Forever Blonde (Nov. 21-Dec. 1), featuring Sunny Thompson in the title role. Then the show moves to Boca Raton’s Mizner Cultural Arts Center, Jan. 9-11. That is where the Guild will revive Respect: A Musical Journey of Women (Dec. 5-Jan. 5), the popular revue of top-40 songs that chart the emergence of women in society.
The Guild also intends to offer the area premiere of David Mamet’s The Anarchist (Feb. 28-March 21), featuring Patti Gardner and Jacqueline Laggy sifting through recollections of a violent political crime, at Fort Lauderdale’s Andrews Living Arts Studio. The company wraps its most ambitious season yet with the musical biography Everyday Rapture (Mizner Park Center, April 25-May 11, and Willow Theatre, May 25 – 27), performed by Margot Moreland.
The Mizner Park Cultural Arts Center is also the home of Outré Theatre Co. and Parade Productions. Outré’s second season opens with Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (Nov. 1-17) with the Outré twist of moving it to modern-day Venice, Calif. Next is a concert version of The Journey (Jan. 17-19), a new musical about five striving individuals, written by the company’s resident musical director, Kristen Long. The season continues with Noah Haidle’s dark comedy Mr. Marmalade (March 28-April 13), about a 4-year-old and her druggie imaginary friend, and it ends with the acclaimed musical Grey Gardens (May 23-June 6), about the squalid life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s aunt and cousin.
Parade continues its cautious ways in its third season, concentrating on one production, Deborah Zoe Laufer’s The Last Schwartz (Jan. 30-Feb. 23), about a Catskills clan reuniting for the memorial of the family patriarch.
In Broward County, resident theater is sparse since the abrupt closing of Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre and The Women’s Theatre Project’s move into Palm Beach County. Still, there is the prolific Broward Stage Door Theatre, which serves up a solid menu of musicals and plays in its two Coral Springs stages.
Currently, it features the genetic engineering tale Twilight of the Golds (through Oct. 27), followed by the revue of Duke Ellington music, Sophisticated Ladies (Oct. 25-Nov. 24). Next, it’s Alfred Uhry’s memory play of pre-world War II Atlanta, The Last Night of Ballyhoo (Nov. 15-Dec. 31), followed by the screen-to-stage musical, Nine to Five (Dec. 13-Jan. 19) and Beth Henley’s Pulitzer-winning comedy of eccentric Southern sisters, Crimes of the Heart (Jan. 17-Feb. 23).
Stephen Sondheim’s concept musical about relationships, Company, arrives Feb. 7-March 16, with James Sherman’s God of Isaac (March 14-April 20), about one man’s quest for the meaning of religion. Then comes the grandparents sitcom Over the River and Through the Woods (April 4-May 11) and the Allan Sherman song parodies revue, Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah (May 30-July 6).
The Stage Door also has a theater on Miami Beach, where it will transfer several of its smaller shows — Twilight of the Golds (Nov. 22-Dec. 15), Ballyhoo (Jan. 17-Feb. 2), Crimes/Heart (March 7-30) and God of Isaac (May 2-25).
But the most anticipated show in Broward County and perhaps in all of South Florida is The Book of Mormon, still the hottest ticket on Broadway after more than two years. It is the lure of the Broward Center’s Broadway season, playing for a month here (Nov. 26-Dec. 22). The center is betting you will want tickets enough to subscribe to the rest of its lackluster offerings: Chicago (Oct. 9-20), The Wizard of Oz (Jan. 7-19), Memphis (Feb. 25-March 9), American Idiot (March 25-April 6) and Ghost the Musical (April 29-May 11).
In Miami-Dade, GableStage all but owns the Carbonell Award for its productions of recent edgy New York plays, while Actors’ Playhouse specializes in large-scale musicals.
GableStage opens its season with the off-Broadway hit My Name is Asher Lev (Nov. 23-Dec. 22), about Hasidic life in post-WWII Brooklyn, based on the novel by Chaim Potok. Next, Miami native Tarell Alvin McCraney directs his own adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, in a co-production among GableStage, New York’s Public Theatre and the U.K.’s Royal Shakespeare Co.
Fresh from last season on Broadway, GableStage produces The Mountaintop (March 15-April 13), an unusual look at Martin Luther King Jr. in a fateful Memphis motel. Perhaps his biggest coup, though, artistic director Joe Adler has snagged the rights to the Tony Award-winning comedy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, a blend of Anton Chekhov and the biting comedy of Christopher Durang.
Across Coral Gables at Actors’ Playhouse, the season begins with Ruthless! (Oct. 9-Nov. 3), about the rise of an overambitious child star, followed by a regional premiere of the serio-comedy Making God Laugh (Dec. 4-29). Next is the recent Broadway play with music, End of the Rainbow (Jan. 18-Feb. 9), about the struggles of Judy Garland, and then the broadly comic Round Table musical, Monty Python’s Spamalot (March 5-30). The season ends with the latest fact-based play from Mark St. Germain (Freud’s Last Case), Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah (May 14-June 8), a clash between literary titans Fitzgerald and Hemingway in 1937 Hollywood.
The actors and writers collective Zoetic Stage has a four-show season at the Carnival Studio Theatre of Miami’s Arsht Center, beginning with company member Christopher Demos-Brown’s Fear Up Harsh (Nov. 7-24), about the military’s use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Then the group takes its first dip into the musical theater pool with Stephen Sondheim’s dark look at life’s violence-prone losers, Assassins (Jan. 30-Feb. 23). After that, acclaimed South Florida playwright Michael McKeever premieres his latest satirical comedy, Clark Gable Slept Here (March 20-April 6), about the machinations of Hollywood. Zoetic’s season ends with a recent script by Amy Herzog (After the Revolution) called The Great God Pan (May 22-June 8), about hidden truths of childhood trauma.
Also in the Carnival Studio Theatre will be Metamorphoses (Oct. 10-27), a contemporary take on Ovid’s myths, as synthesized by Chicago’s Mary Zimmerman and staged on and in a pool of water. And Rose and the Rime (April 23-May 18), about a young girl’s effort to break a witch’s curse.
In the Arsht Center’s Ziff Ballet Opera House, its Broadway series will include the Queen tribute show We Will Rock You (Dec. 10-15), the movie-based holiday musical Elf (Dec. 31-Jan. 5), the Tony-winning Irish/Czech romance Once (Feb. 4- 9), War Horse (March 4-9), the agile performance artists Blue Man Group (May 13-18) and the Evita tour (May 27-June 1).