Lawyer-turned-playwright Christopher Demos-Brown, a co-founder of Zoetic Stage, is one of the area’s most prominent dramatists. That status took a quantum leap upward when this South Florida favorite son took his ripped-from-the-headlines play, American Son, to Broadway in late 2018. While some of the reviews were brutally negative, the production managed to play 97 … [Read more...]
Michael McKeever: South Florida’s own prolific playwright
It is rare that the name Michael McKeever comes up without the adjective “prolific” attached to it. In the 21 years since the Davie playwright’s work was first produced in South Florida, he has written 27 full-length plays and countless short plays, probably between 20 and 24, by his offhanded estimate. Because he enjoys performing, McKeever often appears in his own plays … [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...]
Stripped-down ‘1776’ reveals show’s thinness
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, the hip-hop hit musical about the first secretary of the Treasury and its massive success, has forever relegated Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s 1776 to be “that other show about our Founding Fathers.” Yet this tale of how the contentious Continental Congress debated declaring independence from Great Britain is Palm Beach … [Read more...]