South Florida may be experiencing another abrupt theater closing. Still suffering from the sudden shuttering of Florida Stage and the Caldwell Theatre Company in the past two years, here comes another unexpected closing. And for once, it seems to have nothing to do with a shortage or funding or audience. Sunday evening, the executive and artistic director of Plantation’s … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Sept. 22-23
Theater: This weekend, Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre offers the area premiere of Nikolai Gogol’s The Diary of a Madman, in the new adaptation by, among others, Oscar and Tony Award winner Geoffrey Rush, who scored a personal performance triumph with the play in New York last season. Here, Ken Clement plays the lowly civil servant in tsarist St. Petersburg, teetering on the brink … [Read more...]
Palm Beach County theaters triumph at Carbonells
Most of the best in South Florida’s professional theater last year happened in Palm Beach County. That is the impression left by the 36th annual Carbonell Awards for theater excellence in the region, presented Monday evening at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale. Three Palm Beach County theaters -- the Maltz Jupiter, Palm Beach Dramaworks and the … [Read more...]
Mosaic’s ‘Dying City’ a gripping, vital two-hander
Talk about switching gears. After planning to produce the entertaining, but empty British farce Boeing-Boeing, Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre abruptly changed course to present instead Christopher Shinn’s shifting, shifty contemporary drama, Dying City. It was a smart move for artistic director Richard Jay Simon, who traded up to a powerful play by an important emerging writer. … [Read more...]
Mosaic’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ a heady evening of Stoppard
Over 40 years ago, Czech-born journalist-turned-playwright Tom Stoppard burst onto the world stage with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his hommage to Samuel Beckett and the emptiness and impotence of his characters. Ever since, however, Stoppard has been stuffing his plays with heady ideas and dialectical notions, moving from nothingness to cerebral overload. He … [Read more...]