There is a breed of theatergoers who are prejudiced against – and will eager tell you they cannot abide – musicals. Understandably, they gravitate to stage companies like Palm Beach Dramaworks, which built its considerable reputation on the production of classic American plays. But through some calculation that summertime is more fitting for lighter fare, the West … [Read more...]
For Dramaworks, ‘Spitfire Grill’ is the little musical that could
A stage company like Palm Beach Dramaworks, known for “theater to think about,” could hardly make a lightweight choice for its first musical produced within a subscription season. So it selected The Spitfire Grill, a 2001 off-Broadway show based on an acclaimed – but also little seen – independent film about hope and redemption. “‘Spitfire Grill’ is probably one of the … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Jan. 4-6, 2019
Film: At 85, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is having a very good year at the movies. First came RBG, the documentary of her personal and professional life, which could tire out a person half her age. And now, opening this weekend at area theaters, is a feature film – On the Basis of Sex – which focuses on the Brooklyn-born glass ceiling buster as she challenges the … [Read more...]
Playwright Kessler tackles family conflict in world-premiere ‘House on Fire’
Although Lyle Kessler has been writing plays for the past 35 years, he is still best known for his early unconventional family play, Orphans, which has been produced around the world and was made into a 1987 feature film that starred Albert Finney. But Kessler has a new play that he feels can eclipse Orphans, another offbeat family drama called House on Fire, developed … [Read more...]
‘Indecent’ opens Dramaworks season in powerful style
“Indecent” is both the title of Paula Vogel’s impressionistic chronicle of a 1907 melodrama by novice playwright Sholem Asch, as well as the critical and legal opinion of the work once it arrived on Broadway in the early 1920s. While Vogel’s play serves as a production history of Asch’s God of Vengeance, it is also much more – a portrait of survival of a piece of … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 3-5
Theater: Oklahoman Woodrow Wilson Guthrie is the subject of a stirring musical revue, Woody Guthrie’s American Song, which celebrates this poet of the people who began by celebrating the nation but grew increasingly political as the Great Depression widened the economic inequities in the country. At Palm Beach Dramaworks, director Bruce Linser pulls together a multi-talented … [Read more...]
At Dramaworks, a sparkling tour of Woody Guthrie’s America
Oklahoma-born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, champion of the underclass and the union movement, was a genuine poet, though he was never comfortable with that label. He wrote simple, hummable songs that celebrated this nation, but as the Great Depression consumed the country and exposed economic inequities, his tunes took on a tone of angry protest and confrontation. That … [Read more...]
Dramaworks to celebrate timely troubadour
By Sandra Schulman Woody Guthrie was many things – a poet, songwriter, occasional hobo. The new summer musical at Dramaworks, Woody Guthrie’s American Song, follows Guthrie’s coast to coast life using his songs and quotes straight from his journals. The main character of Guthrie is never named; instead, the three stages of his life “are called The Searcher, the Folk … [Read more...]
Dramaworks’s ‘Equus’ packs powerful punch
From a small newspaper item about a teenage boy who inexplicably blinded a stable of horses, playwright Peter Shaffer spun a tale of psychology and mythology, of passion and pain, a detective story that seeks the teen’s motives but becomes just as interested in the demons plaguing the doctor who tries to wean him to normalcy. The play is Equus – the Latin word for … [Read more...]
Weekend picks: May 19-20
Film: While The Avengers and Deadpool 2 duke it out for the box office booty, see instead a small, human unconventional love story with no superheroes. It is called Anything – OK, a terrible, generic title – but it concerns a recent widower in Mississippi (John Carroll Lynch) who moves to Los Angeles at the urging of his meddlesome sister (Maura Tierney), and settles in tawdry … [Read more...]