Speaking of jokes and jokers, did you hear the one about the comic book movie with a clownish, homicidal leading character that unexpectedly landed at the top of the Oscar nominations list this morning with 11 mentions? Joker, which scored nominations for best picture, director, actor, adapted screenplay and in seven other categories, becomes only the second comic book … [Read more...]
‘Bronx Tale’ derivative, but strong performances compel
Whether or not actor-writer Chazz Palminteri is concerned about ecology, he owes much of his career to recycling. Consider A Bronx Tale, which he first wrote and performed in the late 1980s, a semi-autobiographical one-man show about his coming of age in the New York borough. In the show, a young Palminteri surrogate named Calogero is caught in a tug-of-war between … [Read more...]
2019’s Top 10 in Film: Scorsese’s ‘Irishman’ leads the field
Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime will play a major qualitative role in awards and best lists, if not box office, this year. Everything looks better on a theater screen rather than your home TV, but a film like Martin Scorsese’s epic, three-and-a-half-hour The Irishman seems designed for home viewing, with its ability to accommodate bathroom and nap breaks. … [Read more...]
2019’s Top 10 in theater: ‘Streetcar’ stands out
It was an odd year at the theater in South Florida. Try as I might to include them in the year’s best, two of the region’s most reliable companies – Maltz Jupiter Theatre and GableStage – failed to make the cut of the top 10. Nor did Broward Stage Door, but that is less surprising, since the organization folded in March, after 25 years of operation and eight months after … [Read more...]
‘Villainous Company’ improbable, but actresses make it compelling
Are you in the mood for an old-fashioned parlor game of “who’s conning whom?” None of the three female characters in Victor L. Cahn’s Villainous Company are to be trusted, you see, and unless they are not what they claim to be, a lot of their dialogue rings false. Or perhaps it is playwright Cahn who is doing the conning and we in the audience are the conned. … [Read more...]
‘Christmas Story’ a family-friendly, charming departure for edgy Slow Burn
The songwriting team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul will probably long be associated with the angst-riddled Tony Award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen. But five years before it arrived on Broadway, they wrote a whimsical adaptation of Jean Shepherd’s look back on his youth at holiday time, A Christmas Story. True, little Ralphie Parker obsesses over getting a Red Ryder … [Read more...]
FAU Theatre Lab handles promising ‘Super Great’ deftly
The first thing you need to know about Stephen Brown’s new play, Everything is Super Great, is that the title is facetious. In fact, nearly everything is pretty awful for the four disconnected characters that populate this “comedy about what’s missing.” For each of them has a void in his life, a missing person or a stunted relationship that keeps his or her existence … [Read more...]
‘Play That Goes Wrong’ long overstays its slapstick welcome
Since theater is a live event, that means that on any given evening anything – good or bad – could happen. But with the play currently at the Kravis Center’s Dreyfoos Hall, if something unexpected went wrong, you would never know it. That is because the show playing through Sunday is called The Play That Goes Wrong, an Olivier Award-winning British import based on one … [Read more...]
Dimon’s star turn gives Dramaworks its best-ever new play
Quick, name a pioneering comic actress from the early days of television. Chances are you mentioned Lucille Ball, but before we loved Lucy there was Gertrude Berg, who not only starred in The Goldbergs — the first exposure to Jewish family life for many Americans — but she wrote, directed and produced the entire series, as she had previously done on radio for two decades. … [Read more...]
Maltz does what it can with weak, flimsy ‘Drood’
While Charles Dickens is inarguably one of the great writers of the English language, the mystery genre was never his forte. Still, late in his life, he began a tale of murder, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which remained unfinished because he passed away after penning the first six installments. Although no autopsy was performed, based on the musical that Rupert Holmes … [Read more...]