Andrew Rosendorf, playwright of Cane, at Florida Stage.By Hap Erstein
After a successful summer debut at the Kravis Center, Florida Stage unveils its first subscription season in the Rinker Playhouse, including several world premieres. Meanwhile, there is a new Miami company with its own troupe of actors, the Caldwell continues to dig out of its money woes with a second look at a Carbonell-winning show it is developing, the Maltz Jupiter cracks into the premiere business with a new musical fresh from South Korea, and even Palm Beach Dramaworks features a new play, which debuted this summer off-Broadway, after readings at the intimate West Palm studio space.
Florida Stage utilizes its new height limit on its opener, Andrew Rosendorf’s historical epic Cane (Oct. 27-Nov. 28), the first in an ambitious 10-play Florida Cycle. Straight from its 1st Stage reading series comes Goldie, Max & Milk by Karen Hartman (Dec. 15-Jan. 16). Maybe “straight” is not the right word for this comedy about a single lesbian who gives birth, but is clueless about motherhood. Also on tap are two plays by Florida Stage favorites, Michael Hollinger’s Ghost-Writer (March 2-April 3) and Carter W. Lewis’s The Cha-Cha of a Camel Spider (May 4-June 5).
The other big story of theater season is the birth of a brand-new company, Zoetic Stage, to be run by former City Theatre artistic director Stuart Meltzer, with the support of two skilled playwrights, the mega-prolific Michael McKeever and lawyer-turned-writer Christopher Demos-Brown. To populate their plays and others, the company has gathered a repertory company of some of the region’s best performers, such as Carbonell Award winners Irene Adjan, John Felix, Laura Turnbull and Tom Wahl.
Specific dates and venues are still to be determined, but it looks like the group’s debut, a new comedy by McKeever, South Beach Babylon, will be mounted at Miami’s Arsht Center in December. It’s about the personal sacrifices of making art, as seen in the weeks leading up to the Art Basel exhibition. Also on Zoetic’s schedule is Stunning by David Adjmi, a clash of cultures between a Syrian Jewish couple in Brooklyn and their African-American maid (winter 2011). Brown unveils his newest script in the spring, Wrongful Death, about a female personal injury lawyer trying to land the case of her career.
With two Carbonells in its hip pocket, Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre Company brings back the sensuous dance musical Vices: A Love Story (Nov. 7-Dec. 12), somewhat reworked and restaged, for those still kicking themselves about missing it a summer ago. The new year leads off with Law & Order writer Gina Gionfriddo’s psychological comedy, Becky Shaw (Jan. 2-Feb. 6). But before the Caldwell season started, artistic director Clive Cholerton returned to the brilliant trunk of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim for another concert musical, the nostalgic, but staunchly unsentimental Follies, which ran Oct. 7-10.
Jim Brochu as Zero Mostel in Zero Hour. While sticking to its strength of musicals, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre kicks off its season with a special two-week engagement by Jim Brochu, with his acclaimed one-man show Zero Hour, on the life and hard times of Zero Mostel (Oct. 14-24). The regular season opens with the classic jury room drama, 12 Angry Men (Nov. 2-14), before premiering an original coming-of-age musical called Academy, which had a way-out-of-town tryout at a musical theater festival in South Korea (Dec. 7-19).
Also on the Maltz schedule are more conventional choices, like The Sound of Music (Jan. 11-30), a bio-show called Jolson at the Winter Garden (Fen. 22-March 13) and the reconstructed Gershwins musical, Crazy for You (March 29-April 17).
Speaking of musicals, the west Boca troupe Slow Burn Theatre begins its second season here with its brand of explosive cult shows, leading off with The Rocky Horror Show (Oct. 14-30). The group follows that with Kander and Ebb’s Tony winner, Kiss of the Spider Woman (Jan. 27-Feb. 6) and Blood Brothers (April 21-May 1).
West Palm’s Palm Beach Dramaworks will be moving to the Cuillo Centre next year, but meanwhile it continues dusting off the classics for its cerebral audience in its current 85-seat digs. The company opens with George Bernard Shaw’s romantic-triangle comedy Candida (Oct. 8-Nov. 21), and later tackles Dinner With Friends (Feb. 25-April 17), Donald Margulies’ dissection of a broken marriage and its aftermath, and Martin McDonagh’s grisly Irish tale, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (May 6-June 19). It diverges a bit from its usual menu, with a fictional encounter between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, a new play called Freud’s Last Session (Dec. 17-Feb. 6), fresh from off-Broadway.
The Kravis Center, of course, has its own Broadway series of national tours, headed by a new production of the soul-rock hit Dreamgirls (Nov. 23-28), a redesigned Beauty and the Beast, Disney’s first show on Broadway (Jan. 4-9), and Mel Brooks’ screen-to-stage transfer, Young Frankenstein (Feb. 1-6). Also on the series are the landmark West Side Story in the current multi-lingual revival (March 8-13) and The Color Purple (May 10-15).
Sarah Stevens and Trey Gerrald in Spring Awakening.(Photo by Joan Marcus)
Also on the Kravis schedule are a couple of one-night bookings – Monty Python’s Spamalot (Dec. 26) and Spring Awakening (March 2). Long popular with Kravis audiences is the Aquila Theatre, which again brings its fresh take on two stage stalwarts, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (Jan. 20-21) and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Jan. 22-23), both in the Rinker Playhouse.
The other two road show complexes, Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Center and Miami’s Arsht Center, offer their own Broadway series. Broward has several overlapping shows with the Kravis, plus Rock of Ages (Dec. 28 - Jan. 9), Les Miserables (Jan. 18-30) and Hair (June 7-19). The Arsht has the season’s exclusive on Jersey Boys (March 2-20) and another Tony-winning best musical, In the Heights (March 29-April 3).
Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre has another adventurous slate of plays for its 10th anniversary, including Collected Stories, Donald Margulies’ tug-of-war between a celebrated author and her protégé (Nov. 11-Dec. 5); The Irish Curse, a new comedy about male body image and the anguish of not measuring up (Feb. 10-March 6); and Stephen Belber’s Dusk Rings a Bell (March 31-April 24), the tale of two people who meet again after 25 years and a distant adolescent fling.
Broward Stage Door Theatre in Coral Springs has just completed a run of the seldom-seen Jerry Herman musical Mack & Mabel and has a couple of other offbeat choices ahead. Next up is On the Town (Oct. 20-Dec. 5), the Broadway debut of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green in a show about a 24-hour shore leave in New York City, and next spring the theater tackles Light in the Piazza (Feb. 25-June 19), the story of a slow-witted American girl’s romance while on tour through Italy, with a challenging score by Adam Guettel.
Coral Gables’ New Theatre still has some holes in its schedule, but what is set sounds promising. For it’s 25th season, it offers Fizz by Rogelio Martinez (Nov. 19-Dec. 12), a history of New Coke, one of the biggest product debut flops in corporate America, and The Radiant by Shirley Lauro (March 25-April 7), about the life and career of Marie Curie, the pioneering female scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner.
Actors Playhouse in Coral Gables is branching out from its usual diet of mainstream musicals, opening with a world premiere by Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuban-American Nilo Cruz, The Color of Desire, a lyrical love story set against the intrigue and tumult of 1960 Havana (Oct. 6-Nov. 7). In the spring (March 9-April 10), it produces the Florida premiere of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, an epic comic drama of a family approaching total meltdown.
Lovers of musicals need not be worried they are being abandoned, though. They will be able to catch Oliver! (Nov. 17-Dec. 26), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Jan 19-Feb. 13), and Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (May 11-June 5), a comic send-up of the classic film, with a soundtrack that mimics the great Bernard Hermann.
Flexing its muscles, the perennial Carbonell Award-contending GableStage of Coral Gables has announced a strong season ahead, full of acclaimed plays fresh from New York. Its season begins with the latest from Irish dark humorist Martin McDonagh, A Behanding in Spokane (Oct. 23 - Nov. 21), a twisted tale of a man on a quest for his severed hand and the two two-bit con artists eager to sell him what he is after, whether they have it or not.
Also among the company’s highlights are Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts (Feb. 26 - March 27), a slice of Chicago life from the author of Bug and Pulitzer winner August: Osage County, and Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) (April 30 - May 29), a look back at the barbaric treatment of 19th-century women who were diagnosed as “hysterical.”