If you don’t watch carefully, South Florida theater companies will move around on you. Celebrating its 25th season, Stage Door Theatre has relocated from Margate to Lauderhill, a move westward and a little south, but also a move up in the world to the gorgeous new $11.6 million, 1,100-seat Lauderhill Performing Arts Center. And the nomadic Primal Forces troupe has moved … [Read more...]
Wick’s ‘Jerry’s Girls’ iffy, but Herman’s songs hold up
In its five seasons of existence, The Wick Theatre has gone to the well of composer-lyricist Jerry Herman and his audience-friendly shows four times, but with mixed results. Its current production, the musical revue Jerry’s Girls, is aided considerably by the rewriting and restructuring from its director, Lee Roy Reams, only to be let down by its ostensible box office star, … [Read more...]
Anton happy to be one of ‘Jerry’s Girls’ at The Wick
The shows of Broadway composer-lyricist – Hello, Dolly!, Mame, La Cage aux Folles – have been some of the most popular productions at The Wick Theatre. So it was not surprising that the Boca Raton playhouse chose to end its season with the musical revue Jerry’s Girls – a celebration of Herman’s prolific output – and to import Lee Roy Reams to direct it. Reams, who … [Read more...]
Score, singing rescue Wick’s ‘Brigadoon’ from missteps
Long before lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe cemented their places as musical theater icons with My Fair Lady and Camelot, the scored their first Broadway hit with an original romantic fable, Brigadoon. Although it ran a respectable 581 performances in the 1947-48 season, it has since been overshadowed by the songwriting team’s other shows and is … [Read more...]
Directors seek fresh angles for two 1940s chestnuts
The Maltz Jupiter Theatre and the Wick Theatre are both grappling with a dilemma. Each has selected a classic musical – 1949’s South Pacific and 1947’s Brigadoon, respectively – because of its intrinsic dramatic and musical quality. But how do you approach such a show, knowing that your audience has probably already seen it, often many times over? To director Gordon … [Read more...]
Three first-class principals drive Wick’s ‘Singin’ in the Rain’
Many shows have been adapted from popular movies, but few, if any, have been so slavishly copied as Singin’ in the Rain. Notice, for instance, that instead of a credit for the musical book, the program lists “Screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green,” an indication of how little the film’s script has been changed. And while that screenplay worked like gangbusters in … [Read more...]
Wick brings beloved ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ to the stage
In polls of moviegoers and film critics, 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain is invariably voted the best movie musical of all time. Similarly, the stage adaptation of the love story surrounding the early days of Hollywood talkies has been voted the show that Wick Theatre audiences most want to see. So in the spirit of giving them what they want – and in an effort to, as the film and … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 1-3
Music: Any number of fine pianists visits South Florida each year during the season, and a series of lesser-known but still formidable players are on hand each winter to perform recitals at Lynn University in Boca Raton. But Saturday night, one of the best pianists of an older generation, Peter Serkin, will join that series in a recital at Amarnick-Goldstein Concert Hall. His … [Read more...]
Stellar cast in ‘She Loves Me’ gives Wick a gem for holidays
Don’t feel obligated to buy anything for The Wick Theatre but, boy, has it got a holiday present for you. It’s She Loves Me, the melody-rich musical romance set in a Budapest perfume store, based on the same source material as the 1939 film The Shop Around the Corner and the contemporary remake, 1998’s You’ve Got Mail. The show’s final scene takes place on Christmas … [Read more...]
‘Drowsy Chaperone’ sends up theater, and its audience
Most new musicals are based on material from another medium, these days largely from the movies. But 2006’s five-time Tony Award winner, The Drowsy Chaperone, is a genuine original, a show about an apartment-bound guy fixated on musicals, who loves to play his cast recordings of vintage shows and imagine what they must have looked like onstage. On this particular occasion, … [Read more...]