When Bruce Adolphe is in the middle of writing a batch of Piano Puzzlers for American Public Media’s Performance Today, he’s always listening for ideas. One came along while the composer and his daughter Katja were watching a Fred Astaire film in which the song-and-dance legend was performing Irving Berlin’s Cheek to Cheek. Suddenly, Adolphe realized that part of the Berlin … [Read more...]
Nostalgic ‘Dr. Radio’ slight but entertaining
Composer-lyricist-musical director Christopher McGovern has been involved with most of the musicals at Florida Stage in the last few years, including writing songs in period style to complement the hits associated with Ginger Rogers (Backwards in High Heels) and Jimmy Cagney (Cagney!). But with the exception of a site-specific mini-musical penned to be performed in a bowling … [Read more...]
New West Boca theater troupe to bow with ‘Bat Boy’
Welcome to the area the Slow Burn Theatre Company, a new professional troupe that is the passion project of Patrick Fitzwater and Matthew Korinko, two former St. Louis performers-directors who moved here in 2008 and have wanted to start their own stage operation ever since. They will be the first to acknowledge that the shaky economy does not make this an ideal time to begin … [Read more...]
Sure, ‘Nine’ is stagy, and that’s one reason it’s so good
Prior to its Christmas Day expansion across the country, Rob Marshall’s screen version of the Broadway musical Nine -- itself an audacious adaptation of 8½, Federico Fellini’s 1963 statement of cinematic writer’s block -- had only opened in New York and Los Angeles, where it had already received a barrage of negative reviews. Well, do not believe those pans, which not only … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 18-20
Theater: Opening tonight is Palm Beach Dramaworks’ much-anticipated production of Michael Frayn’s Tony Award-winning Copenhagen, a cerebral look back at a mysterious 1941 meeting between two nuclear physicists that may have changed the course of World War II. Based on fact, but then stretched into supposition, it concerns Germany’s Werner Heisenberg, his Danish mentor Niels … [Read more...]
‘Cannibal’ provides silly, gory fun at Promethean
The opening announcement at The Promethean Theatre is a sprightly caution that the following show will contain “blood, puke and pus.” Eeew. Well, they didn’t need to warn us about the blood: The back wall of the stage is already splattered with the stuff before we even enter the Wild West world of the black-box playing space at Nova Southeastern University. Still, the … [Read more...]
Carbonell Awards in jeopardy
Saturday, Nov. 22, 2008 The topic on the minds of most of the South Florida theater community at the moment, that has heated flurries of e-mails zapping back and forth through cyberspace, is the proposed suspension and likely subsequent demise of the controversial Carbonell Awards. Without consulting with or giving advance notice to the army of volunteer nominators and … [Read more...]