By Dale King The musical Gypsy is a compendium of ultimates and ultimatums. It focuses on a quintessential stage mother who tries like crazy to squeeze stardom into her two daughters, yet she pitches a fit when the young ladies find fame and seem to leave her in the dust. The 1959 musical, based loosely on the memoirs of famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, and pulled together for … [Read more...]
Broward Stage Door’s ‘Promises, Promises’ revives spirit of Swinging Sixties
By Dale King Promises, Promises, the musical now playing at the Broward Stage Door Theatre, brings together assorted material from seemingly disparate sources. Still, the show holds together very well, particularly in the second act when the comedy kicks into overdrive and the players truly find their vocal and acting muses. The show, which completes its five-week run with a … [Read more...]
Arts preview 2015-16: The season in Broward art
By Michael Mills For years Broward County was the Rodney Dangerfield of the South Florida art world — little to no respect, especially compared with the hoitier-toitier art scenes of Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties. No more. Museums have been reinvigorated with new leadership, galleries have popped up in sometimes unlikely places, and art walks are thriving in a handful … [Read more...]
Broward Stage Door ‘gets it’ with snappy ‘Chorus Line’
By Dale King The musical, A Chorus Line, doesn’t have dazzling sets, pricey costumes or high-tech special effects. The production that turns 40 this year -- conceived and originally directed and choreographed by esteemed New York show creator Michael Bennett -- depends on the strength of its story, music and movement to deliver the goods. The version now playing at the Stage … [Read more...]
2014-15 arts preview: The season in Broward County art
By Michael Mills For years the Broward County art community has been eclipsed by Miami-Dade and even Palm Beach County, with their glitzy, high-profile events such as Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Palm Beach. Although Broward doesn’t have a Wynwood-style concentration of galleries and studios, it now has pockets of comparable art activity like FATVillage, North Beach, … [Read more...]
Community theater: Broward Stage Door’s ‘Hello, Muddah’ deserves more laughs
By Dale King For a fleeting couple of years in the early 1960s, Allan Sherman was at the top of his game in the field of creating song parodies. His 1962 album, My Son the Folk Singer, became the fastest-selling LP recording up to that time, and put Sherman on the fast track to fame. He would record seven more albums, each falling a little or a lot short of the previous. … [Read more...]
‘God of Isaac’ funny, gripping at Broward Stage Door
By Dale King The “play-within-a-play” device has worked pretty well over the years. Even William Shakespeare used it to his advantage. Playwright James Sherman employs this literary mechanism deftly in his play, The God of Isaac, now at the Broward Stage Door Theater in Coral Springs. The Isaac of this show is not Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah, and father of Jacob and … [Read more...]
FGO’s ‘Nabucco’ an old-fashioned pleasure
There is something about Florida Grand Opera’s current production of Nabucco that brings out what I imagine to be the atmosphere of its first groundbreaking performances in 1842. It may have to do with the way the set and the costumes combine with the conviction of the performers, the prominence with which the chorus is used, or the ferocity of fresh discovery that its … [Read more...]
Community theater: ‘9 to 5’ dated, but still makes a fun show at Stage Door
By Dale King Dolly Parton is more than just a dwarfish country vocalist with conspicuous curves and an explosion of blonde hair. Inside that yellow-coiffed cranium is the brain that concocted money-maker Dollywood. And it also crafted the words and music to the 2008 show, 9 to 5: The Musical, now playing at the Broward Stage Door Theatre in Coral Springs. And while the … [Read more...]
A challenging ‘Ballyhoo’ at Broward Stage Door
By Dale King The Last Night of Ballyhoo is something of an enigma. Though labeled as a comedy, it isn’t particularly funny. While its main characters focus exclusively on a popular cotillion, they generally ignore an impending world crisis, as well as discord among their fellow Jews derived simply from where they were born. Certainly, Ballyhoo, written by Alfred Uhry (who … [Read more...]