The Kravis Center has been understandably dark for the past 14 months, shuttered by the indoor social distancing requirements of the COVID-19 pandemic. If only it could find a show that fits the current health and safety criteria, the West Palm Beach arts complex could open its doors again. Maybe “open its doors” is the wrong term, for the center’s first glimmer of … [Read more...]
FAU Theatre Lab gets gift to start playwriting program
By Christina Wood Florida Atlantic University’s Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters recently announced the establishment of the Myrna Gordon Skurnick Theatre Lab Playwriting Program and Creative Writing MFA Fellows. Since its founding in 2015, Theatre Lab, the resident professional company of FAU, has pursued its mission to inspire, develop and produce new … [Read more...]
Solve the greatest art mystery of recent times: Who stole the Gardner paintings?
One of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the 20th century is the 1990 theft of Rembrandts, Vermeers, Manets and other old master paintings, valued at $500 million, from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. But from now through May 16, the Kravis Center invites you to crack the case by interrogating characters who represent the actual suspects, in an outdoor, socially … [Read more...]
LW Playhouse mounts powerful, compelling ‘Next to Normal’
By Dale King Next to Normal – the musical now being staged at the Lake Worth Playhouse – pulls no punches in its powerful portrayal of a woman haunted and dismayed by mental illness and the misery it inflicts on her loved ones. The show is frank and overt, focusing not only on the woman’s unpredictable behavior, but also on the plenitude of pills she consumes, the … [Read more...]
Dramaworks returns, virtually, with Dickinson show ‘Belle of Amherst’
There are two plays that feature Emily Dickinson and by early April Margery Lowe will have played the reclusive poet in both. Three years ago, the area actor appeared at Palm Beach Dramaworks in the world premiere of Edgar and Emily, Joseph McDonough’s fanciful and improbable meeting of Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. Lowe returns to the character April 2- 6 in the better … [Read more...]
Sharp Delray Playhouse cast sizzles in ‘Stage Struck’
By Dale King The Delray Beach Playhouse has historically done a very good job producing mystery thrillers. Wait Until Dark comes to mind immediately. So does Agatha Christie’s A Murder Is Announced, which opened the 2018-2019 season. And folks with a longer theatrical memory may recall Blackout, an original work that premiered at the DBP in 1988 and encored just a few … [Read more...]
Kravis books 2021-22 Broadway season, certain it will be back
Dark for nearly a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center has announced firm dates for its seven-show 2021-22 Broadway series, beginning this November. The schedule includes two previously announced shows that had to be postponed when the performing arts center shut last March, Come From Away (now booked for Nov. 16-21) and Summer: The … [Read more...]
Sharp cast shines in ‘Deathtrap’ at LW Playhouse
By Dale King Deathtrap, the wryly comic mystery by author/playwright Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, Stepford Wives), is at once easy and hard for a reviewer to critique. The 1978 production won a Tony for Best Play, and begat a 1982 movie about the selfsame playwriting duo from the stage production that longs to create a ragingly successful Broadway thriller, even if blood … [Read more...]
Appreciation: Jan McArt, the act who can’t be followed
To paraphrase a famous quote by Jerome Kern about Irving Berlin: “Jan McArt has no place in South Florida theater. She is South Florida theater.” Certainly she was producing and appearing in stage shows from Key West to Boca Raton when there was no other theater in the region to speak of. Most particularly, she built and ran the Royal Palm Dinner Theatre in Boca for 24 … [Read more...]
Remembrance: My ‘date’ with Cloris Leachman
It is a given that Cloris Leachman was a superb actress, as her Oscar for 1971’s The Last Picture Show, her eight Emmys for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Phyllis and other television roles attest. And then there are her silly and sublime collaborations with Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety. But Leachman, who died Wednesday of natural causes at … [Read more...]