With COVID safely in the rear mirror and audiences back attending theater, the 2023-2024 South Florida season looks quite promising, with full schedules, numerous world premieres and several companies celebrating significant anniversaries. Here’s how the theater scene is shaping up, moving geographically from north to south. With its playhouse expanded, the Maltz … [Read more...]
Wick production winningly revives enduring charms of ‘Damn Yankees’
Baseball and musicals are two purely American institutions, so why not put them together, reasoned songwriters Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. The year was 1955, and they had just struck gold with The Pajama Game, so Broadway was eager to see what they would come up with next. Improbably — in the way that most ideas for musicals seem improbable until they work — they became … [Read more...]
‘Nostalgia and heart’: Stars say you gotta have ‘Damn Yankees,’ at the Wick
Polled for their preferences in musicals, the Wick Theatre’s audience has consistently ranked 1955’s Damn Yankees very high. What is it about this Tony Award-winning show based on Douglas Wallop’s tongue-in-cheek novel, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, that is so appealing? Jeffrey Moss, who directs the Wick’s production that begins performances Thursday, sums it up … [Read more...]
Wick’s ‘Anything Goes’ a vintage bubbly delight
When the sublime, sophisticated songsmith Cole Porter collaborated with Brits P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton on the enduring confection Anything Goes, the time was 1934, seven years after Show Boat demonstrated that musicals could take on weighty material. Porter and his writing team – which eventually included play doctors Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse – knew perfectly … [Read more...]
With strong central performance, Wick’s ‘Cinderella’ still works its magic
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, which first enchanted TV audiences in 1957, is based on a fairy tale by Charles Perrault that has been captivating children of all ages since it was first written in 1697. Nevertheless, when the musical was poised to make its Broadway debut in 2013, playwright Douglas Carter Beane was enlisted to give the script a makeover, injecting … [Read more...]
The Wick’s ‘Milk and Honey’: See it for the music
In 1960, a promising young composer-lyricist was sent to Israel to soak up its atmosphere and culture in order to write a musical set in that plucky new nation. The songwriter was Jerry Herman and the show would be his Broadway debut --- Milk and Honey. It ran for a respectable 543 performances and, of course, has since been overshadowed by such Herman megahits as Hello, … [Read more...]
Wick goes big with Herman’s Israel love story, ‘Milk and Honey’
Avi Hoffman did not take long to decide when the offer came from Boca Raton’s Wick Theatre to be in Milk and Honey, Jerry Herman’s 1961 Broadway debut. He has a special affection for this musical about a romance between a middle-aged couple, set against the turmoil of the early days of the state of Israel. For starters, he grew up in Israel, living there from 1969 to 1977, … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2022-23: The season in theater
Now that the COVID 19 pandemic is in the rearview mirror --- we hope --- South Florida’s theaters are looking ahead to their first full season of productions in several years. So below is a look at what is scheduled, taken in geographic order from north to south, from Jupiter to Coral Gables. Last season, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre was hit with a double whammy of COVID … [Read more...]
Maltz gets underway in new house; companies announce 22-23 season
After two postponed productions and a third delayed by a week, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre opened in late March with critical acclaim for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and for its renovated and expanded playhouse. With much of the stress of construction deadlines over, producing artistic director Andrew Kato paused long enough to discuss the new, improved theater and the upcoming first … [Read more...]
Accomplished cast lifts slight Sedaka musical at Wick
Neil Sedaka was a prolific singer/songwriter of the 1950s and 1960s, but few of his catchy hit tunes could be described as theater music. Yet for the past 15 years, thanks to that frequently popular subgenre known as the jukebox musical, he has enjoyed a new revenue stream from a show of his collected songs called Breaking Up Is Hard to Do. The title also happens to be the … [Read more...]