It may be unfair, but one is judged by the company one keeps, and GableStage is currently in very good company. Long a booster of Miami-raised playwright-director Tarell Alvin McCraney, the Coral Gables theater is currently presenting this hot property’s latest audacious venture, his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. But at least as important as the work — … [Read more...]
Hot water bottles at the theater: How Britain coped in wartime
The current exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art, Keep Calm and Carry On: World War II and the British Home Front, is a paean to two kinds of British spirit: Fighting and forward thinking. Despite the many hardships of war, the political and cultural leadership of the country found ways to “muddle through’’ by setting up new ministries to cope and plan a vision for the … [Read more...]
Postcard from New York No. 1: A Saturday doubleheader
I am up in New York for a week to take a bite of the Broadway season, 12 shows in nine days. Ah, the sacrifices I make for the sake of my readers. By most accounts, it is a dismal year for musicals, with lots of screen-to-stage transfers, but little inspiration in the bunch and certainly no Book of Mormon -- still the hottest ticket in town a year later -- among them. We'll … [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...]