Celebrating its 25th anniversary season, Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival reaches for its namesake playwright’s best known — and best — work, Hamlet. And though the company is still reeling from the loss of its most skilled actor, director and dramaturg, Kevin Crawford, the current production points to a future for the classical troupe beyond him. Kyle Schnack, a reliable … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: ‘Hamlet,’ abridged; ‘Rain’; ‘Cat Lady’
We have to acknowledge that audience attention spans have decreased dramatically in recent years, which makes one wonder how Shakespeare’s plays would be different if he were writing for today’s impatient theatergoers. Offering an answer is Miami-born playwright-director (The Brothers Size) Tarell Alvin McCraney, a former writer-in-residence for Great Britain’s Royal … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 23-25
Dance: The holidays are upon us, and that means so is The Nutcracker. When the Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky finished the score for the ballet in 1891, it was as part of a double-bill with his one-act opera, Iolanta. Tchaikovsky didn’t much like what he’d written, but Tsar Alexander III, who came to a dress rehearsal for the first performance in December 1892, loved it, … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2012-13: Loss of theaters doesn’t slow promising season
The past season saw the second shoe drop in Palm Beach County. Boca Raton’s 37-year-old Caldwell Theatre Company closed its doors, soon after Florida Stage ended its operations, and area theatergoers are still reeling from both abrupt losses. Add Broward County’s now-defunct Promethean Theatre ― or rather subtract it ― and the theatrical landscape is substantially thinner as … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: Crisp, sharp ‘Race’; uneven ‘Baby GirL’
David Mamet is known for crafting fragmentary street dialogue. But when appropriate, he can also be hyper-articulate, as he is in Race, with the ping-ponging smart, and often smart-ass language of the two law partners ― one white, one black ― considering how to defend an uber-wealthy client accused of raping a black woman in a hotel room. The incident has distinct echoes of the … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: From a classic French novel to contemporary American whimsy
Hardly broken and certainly not in need of fixing, the hugely successful epic musical of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables turned 25 a couple of years ago, so producer Cameron Mackintosh celebrated the milestone of the international hit by lavishing a new, redesigned and restaged production on it. The work of directing team of Laurence Connor and James Powell is more conventional … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: Life as a wrestling ring, or a cabaret, old chum
At one end of Palm Beach County, at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, we are told that “Life is a cabaret, old chum.” At the other end, at Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre, it turns out that life is actually more like professional wrestling. The latter news flash comes from Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist that examines the scripted … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: From ‘Red’ to the ghoulish black of ‘Addams Family’
“What do you see?” demands intense abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko, referring to the massive red canvas with two darker red vertical lines that dominates the stage. He is speaking to his new assistant, a would-be artist named simply Ken, hired to do all manner of grunt work, freeing up Rothko to ruminate, cogitate, bellow and, only occasionally, paint. And he is … [Read more...]
Theater roundup 2: Provocative ‘Clybourne’; a star turn for Gless
African-Americans have federally sanctioned civil rights and the nation voted a black man into the White House. So we must have made substantial advances towards racial equality and co-existence since Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 stage drama, A Raisin in the Sun, haven’t we? Not necessarily, suggests playwright-provocateur Bruce Norris in his cynical satire Clybourne Park, which … [Read more...]
Theater roundup 1: ‘Sound of Music’ without syrup; a rethought ‘Les Miz’
There must be some theatergoers who have never seen Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, but not many. Performed perpetually by high schools and community troupes, it would be hard to miss, and then there’s that syrupy, Oscar-winning move version that keeps showing up on cable TV. Director-choreographer Marc Robin gave himself quite a challenge when he approached the … [Read more...]