Measured by the usual hard-hitting fare at GableStage, Matthew Lopez’s The Legend of Georgia McBride isn’t much of a play, but it does have the makings of one hell of a drag show. Sure, you could argue that the 90-minute evening is a celebration of the tawdry lower depths of show business and a look at how one unlikely cross-dresser gets in touch with his feminine side, but … [Read more...]
Raucous ‘Riverside’ at GableStage jolts, compels
Were it not for Joe Adler and his adventuresome GableStage, we would probably not be exposed to the raucous, humor-laced urban tales of Stephen Adly Guirgis and South Florida would be poorer for it. Adler has a taste for writers whose work is provocative and edgy, qualities he previously found in Guirgis’s Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train and The Mother*****r with a Hat. He is … [Read more...]
2016-17 Season Preview: Theater
“You can’t keep a good man down,” goes the saying, and Lou Tyrrell is the proof. After championing new work at Florida Stage, he moved his operation to Delray Beach with Theatre at Arts Garage, a smaller version of the company he ran for almost 25 years. Last season, he moved a little further south to the campus of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, still introducing … [Read more...]
At GableStage: A career on the skids, told with triumph
GableStage produces plays year round, so it is often hard to tell where one season ends and the next one begins. Still, it is currently easy to sense that the summer is upon us by the lightweight, albeit entertaining, fare on view at the Coral Gables playhouse through the end of the month. The Carbonell Award-laden company usually goes in for hard-hitting, often political … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 14-16
Art: An exhibit titled County Contemporary: All Media Juried Show, composed of 44 works by 36 Palm Beach County artists using a wide range of media, is on display beginning today at the main gallery of the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County in Lake Worth. Mark Richard Leach, the executive director of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., … [Read more...]
GableStage’s ‘Ruined’ is brutal but first-rate viewing
Pulitzer Prizes for drama are usually awarded for plays that reflect American life, yet Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, a remarkable and hard-edged tale of civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its collateral damage inside a bar/brothel caught in the crossfire, won the 2009 Pulitzer for its view of the human — and inhuman — condition that knows no national boundaries. … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Jan. 6-10
Theater: It is not easy getting attention for a play when the mainstream media will not even print the title, but Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherf**ker with the Hat (C’mon, Wheel of Fortune fans, you can figure it out) managed to eke out a respectable run on Broadway last season and be nominated for Best Play. It is described as a high-octane verbal cage match about love, … [Read more...]
Weekend picks: Dec. 25-28
Dance: This is normally the time of year when we'd expect to see Ballet Florida's Nutcracker in Marie Hale's indelible, lovely production. Ballet Florida, sadly, is no more, but there is still a Nutcracker at the Kravis over Christmas. The Moscow Classical Ballet's version of Tchaikovsky's immortal 1892 ballet opened Christmas Eve, and continues tonight and Saturday. The … [Read more...]
GableStage’s ‘reasons’ mines white-hot emotions
Neil LaBute’s reasons to be pretty, with which he made his overdue Broadway debut last season, is considered more gentle than his usual exercises in the gender wars. Maybe so, but you would never know it from the opening tirade by a young, attractive woman who goes ballistic at her boyfriend and breaks up with him. His crime? She heard from a girlfriend -- and he eventually, … [Read more...]