By Erik Kvarnberg Palm Beach Dramaworks sets eighth new play festival WEST PALM BEACH — Palm Beach Dramaworks is offering its eighth annual Perlberg Festival of New Plays this month at the company’s Clematis Street home. From Jan. 9 to 11, playwrights will unite with a number of actors and directors to read through works in progress. Last season’s festival led to two … [Read more...]
The season in theater, 2025-26: A rich offering of Broadway standouts and provocative world premieres
By Sharon Geltner Area stages are planning an exciting season of TV stars, Netflix writers, off-Broadway actors, European festival standouts, and innovative productions. The contrasts range from Broadway musicals and brand names such as Neil Simon and Stephen King to Southeastern United States premieres of thought-provoking plays. Below, in geographical order, from north … [Read more...]
Veteran South Florida theater critic Hap Erstein dies at 76
Harris Alan Erstein, known to his decades of readers and to family, friends and colleagues as Hap, died Saturday in Aventura. He was 76. Erstein had long suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was taken ill Monday night after a showing of the latest Jurassic Park film and transported to Aventura Hospital. Doctors there were able to stabilize him, but his … [Read more...]
At Dramaworks: ‘Dangerous Instruments’ is a harrowing look at a broken system
From the opening alarm bell signifying an institutional lockdown, Gina Montet’s Dangerous Instruments, now playing at Palm Beach Dramaworks, foreshadows the all-too-familiar inevitability of gun violence in America. Told as a gripping case study of a young, mentally troubled boy and his mother’s battle to save him from being dismissed by an inadequate social services system, … [Read more...]
‘Camping With Henry and Tom,’ at Dramaworks, a trip worth taking
Suppositional history is a specialty of playwright Mark St. Germain, as he demonstrated in Freud’s Last Session, The Best of Enemies and Camping with Henry and Tom, plays of fiction that bring together notable real-life characters, unconstrained by any knowledge of what actually occurred at their meetings. A case in point is Camping With Henry and Tom, which explores a … [Read more...]
New-play festivals at Dramaworks, FAU promise to energize theater conversation
The audience is an integral part of the new play development process, as two area stage companies — Palm Beach Dramaworks and Florida Atlantic University Theatre Lab — can attest. Both have festivals of new work that consist of readings and talkbacks of evolving scripts, some of which will graduate to be fully produced in subsequent seasons. Coming up soon is Dramaworks’ … [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...]
Dramaworks brings back ‘The Dresser’ for 25th anniversary season
Twenty-one years ago, Palm Beach Dramaworks was a fledgling troupe trying to gain an audience and critical attention in the county’s crowded cultural scene. As its co-founder and current producing artistic director William Hayes recalls, the company turned a corner towards those goals by mounting Ronald Harwood’s World War II backstage tale, The Dresser, is which Hayes appeared … [Read more...]
First-class ‘Lost in Yonkers’ at Dramaworks sees star turn for actress’s Bella
As word association goes, if I said “Neil Simon,” chances are you would respond “comedy.” After all, there has been no more commercially successful purveyor of comedies in American history. Yet some of his best plays came in the latter half of his career when Simon learned to hold back on punch lines and wade into deeper, more heartfelt, dramatic waters. … [Read more...]
‘Trying’: Overlong play at Dramaworks rescued by impressive performances
Even the greats of government service will eventually succumb to the physical and mental ravages of age. So it is with Francis Biddle, the former attorney general under Franklin Roosevelt and chief American judge of the Nuremberg war trials. By the time we meet him in Joanna McClelland Glass’ biographical play Trying, he is 81 and a decrepit shell of his former self. … [Read more...]