Film: Its expansion delayed for a couple of weeks to maximize its impact and exposure for Oscar consideration is a small, but powerful film, Spotlight, certainly one of the year’s 10 best and a sure competitor for Best Picture honors. Spotlight is the name of the Boston Globe’s small, elite investigative team, which launches a major project to look into the city’s … [Read more...]
Theater roundup”: ‘Big Fish,’ ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,’ and ‘Picnic’
Palm Beach County has lost one of its key producing troupes, as Slow Burn Theatre Company moves its operation to the Broward Center’s Amaturo Theater. But from the selection of Big Fish as its initial offering there, and from the skilled rendering of the problematic material, the five-year-old group demonstrates that it is more than ready to leave its high school auditorium … [Read more...]
Community theater: ‘Come Blow Your Horn’ still amuses at Delray Playhouse
By Dale King Delray Beach Playhouse continues to hitch its wagon to Neil Simon’s star as it opens its 69th season with the famed playwright’s first Broadway comedy hit, Come Blow Your Horn. It closes with a matinee Sunday. The Playhouse closed its 2014-2015 season with back-to-back Simon works: They’re Playing our Song, the Marvin Hamlisch-Carol Bayer Sager collaboration … [Read more...]
Community theater: ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ gets Lake Worth Playhouse season off to charming start
By Dale King Lake Worth Playhouse jumps spiritedly into the new theatrical season with a top-notch production of Meet Me in St. Louis, the 1989 musical drawn from the fabled 1944 same-name film starring Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien. The show that has played on and off Broadway follows the Smith family — dad, mom, four daughters, a son and a grandpa. The comfortable, … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: ‘Waiting for Waiting for Godot,’ ‘Lazy Fair’
Cleverness trumps profundity in a couple of new, brief plays currently on at area theaters. Neither Dave Hanson’s Waiting for Waiting for Godot at Thinking Cap Theatre nor Mad Cat Theatre’s Lazy Fair by Theo Reyna have that much to say, but they both know how to divert and entertain, which is saying a lot for them. Hanson clearly knows his way around Samuel Beckett’s seminal … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: ‘110 in the Shade’; ‘Shorts Gone Wild 3’
The musical team of composer Harvey Schmidt and lyricist Tom Jones hit the jackpot their first time out with an intimate, endearing love story, off-Broadway’s The Fantasticks. But they wanted Broadway success, so they next adapted N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker on a larger scale, with a full, though essentially superfluous, chorus of townfolk, dramatic Agnes de Mille … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 14-16
Theater: Every generation has an image of Peter Pan, either Mary Martin, who originated the role in the 1954 Broadway musical, or such subsequent high fliers as Sandy Duncan or Cathy Rigby. We can now add Shanon Mari Mills to that list, for her energetic, athletic and full-voiced performance at The Wick Theatre in Boca Raton. She heads a lavish production directed by Michael … [Read more...]
Community theater: ‘Waist Watchers’ sparkles at Broward Stage Door
By Dale King Waist Watchers, the Musical is a delightful bit of tune-filled satiric comedy that pokes good-natured fun at women as they try to stave off the rigors of aging, weight gain, the loss of sexual appeal and other foibles of advancing years. The show that’s been bouncing around South Florida for some time is now playing at Broward Stage Door Theatre in Margate. The … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 7-9
Art: Every year, the Norton Museum of Art summer interns get a chance to curate their own show, and this year’s is focused on another hot summer, that of 1968, when the nation’s political and social structures took a series of body blows. That was the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, plus the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in … [Read more...]
Remembering Theodore Bikel (1924-2015)
By his own count, Theodore Bikel played Tevye the milkman in the enduring musical Fiddler on the Roof more than 2,000 times, more than any other stage performer. But unlike Zero Mostel, who originated the role on Broadway, the Vienna-born actor-activist-folk troubadour scrupulously avoided the Borscht Belt shtick that so frequently was attached to the character. “I’m so much … [Read more...]