The South Florida theater community is in mourning after the passing of Louis Tyrrell, founding director of the Theatre Lab at Florida Atlantic University. Tyrrell died Friday, April 10, after a brief and sudden illness. He was 75. Tyrrell’s theater roots in Florida run deep. In 1974, he became the founding director of Florida Stage, a position he held for 24 years until … [Read more...]
Don’t miss Dramaworks’s loving return to ‘The Dresser’
Theater audiences are often intrigued by the intricacies of backstage life, and particularly the larger-than-life personalities who have devoted their careers to an unglamorous existence on the road. So there is little wonder that Ronald Harwood’s 1980 drama The Dresser has been met with success on both sides of The Pond, with several major revivals and a couple of filmed … [Read more...]
‘Rooted,’ at Theatre Lab, sees actors dig rewardingly deep
Botany and belief systems, both real and dubious, are at the heart of Deborah Zoe Laufer’s Rooted, her latest exploration of life’s contradictions, served up with a strong measure of whimsy. Delivering her ultimately thoughtful outlook is a trio of eccentric souls whose search for meaning has them up a tree, quite literally. Consider Emery Harris, an unschooled … [Read more...]
Green messiah: At Theatre Lab, Laufer’s ‘Rooted’ to explore mob mentality
Deborah Zoe Laufer gets a lot of ideas for her plays by listening to National Public Radio. That is certainly the case with Rooted, receiving its Florida premiere at FAU Theatre Lab, beginning this Saturday, Feb. 3. “I was listening to Radio Lab and there was a scientist, Monica Gagliano, on, talking about plant consciousness,” the idea that plants have innate … [Read more...]
Cultural Council features work by six mid-career woman artists
African art, contemporary and modern dance and the Great American Songbook all take center stage in the work of three of the six recipients of the 2022 Artist Innovation Fellowship Program sponsored by the Cultural Council for Palm Beach County. Actor and singer Elizabeth Dimon, visual artist Kianga Jinaki and choreographer Shanique Scott, along with musician Yvette … [Read more...]
The Wick’s ‘Milk and Honey’: See it for the music
In 1960, a promising young composer-lyricist was sent to Israel to soak up its atmosphere and culture in order to write a musical set in that plucky new nation. The songwriter was Jerry Herman and the show would be his Broadway debut --- Milk and Honey. It ran for a respectable 543 performances and, of course, has since been overshadowed by such Herman megahits as Hello, … [Read more...]
‘The Duration’: World premiere play deftly examines shadows of 9/11
Can it really be 20 years since the events of 9/11, a day so etched in our memories that it feels like yesterday? Perhaps by now Audrey Batten’s well-earned anger and bitterness have subsided, but in Bruce Graham’s world premiere play, The Duration — which initially takes place mere days after the destruction of the Twin Towers — her grief has the highly rational history … [Read more...]
World premiere ‘The Duration’ at Dramaworks takes on 9/11 legacy
As we continue to deal with the dark cloud of the COVID pandemic, Palm Beach Dramaworks wants us to look back 20 years to another tragic time in our history — September 11, 2001 — the day two airplanes flew into the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan and 3,000 lives were lost. It is the event that motivates Bruce Graham’s drama The Duration, receiving its world premiere at PBD on … [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...]
World premiere play revives ‘Goldbergs’ pioneer and the blacklist
Gertrude Berg, the pioneering writer-director-producer-star of radio and television’s The Goldbergs, a domestic comedy of a Jewish family in the Bronx, is all but forgotten today. In part that is why area stage actress Elizabeth Dimon wanted to commission a play about Berg and her show’s untimely demise in the dark days of the anti-Communist blacklist. In addition, the … [Read more...]