“Yes, it really rains onstage!” That was the promotional tagline for the stage adaptation of Singin’ in the Rain and the most interesting thing about Jennifer Lane’s Harlowe, a listless little play about healing, currently receiving a watery world premiere production at Florida Atlantic University’s Theatre Lab. As the audience enters the intimate Lab space, a … [Read more...]
At GableStage, a somber, powerful ‘The Children’
Lucy Kirkwood has life-and-death issues on her mind in her clever, thought-provoking drama The Children, but she is wily enough to wrap her themes inside a very human character study. And at GableStage, which is giving the work its area premiere, director Michael Leeds brings this somber little play to life with Laura Turnbull, Angie Radosh and David Kwiat – three of the … [Read more...]
Community theater: Jerry Herman revue delights at DB Playhouse
By Dale King Showtune, a marvelous collection of melodies crafted by Broadway composer and lyricist Jerry Herman, is entertaining near-full houses at the Delray Beach Playhouse. A half-dozen vocalists — some DBP veterans, others newer to the stage at the east end of Lake Ida Park — are assigned the task of bringing Herman’s works to life. The quick-moving program is … [Read more...]
Maltz’s ‘West Side Story’ has fresh take, all of show’s original power
Classic shows from the ’50s and ’60s – the so-called golden age of musical theater – keep being revived and often given a directorial spin to add a new viewpoint or to fall more in line with contemporary attitudes. Think of the modern opening touch in the recent Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, the more Shavian ending wordlessly attached to My Fair Lady or the new, … [Read more...]
Close to perfect ‘Fences’ stuns at Dramaworks
William Hayes has long wanted to produce August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Fences, but felt he had to wait until Palm Beach Dramaworks was capable and ready to take on such a challenge. Boy, is the company ready now. Onstage through April 21 is a virtually perfect rendering of Wilson’s 1950s play in his 10-play cycle that charts the evolving black experience … [Read more...]
Gardner helps lift Simon’s minor ‘Gingerbread Lady’ at Primal Forces
Nine years after he made his Broadway debut with the wisecracking Come Blow Your Horn, long after he was proclaimed the commercial theater’s reigning king of comedy, Neil Simon made a drastic tonal shift with the darkly dramatic The Gingerbread Lady. This tale of an alcoholic nymphomaniac and her emotionally needy friends did have glimmers of the serious Simon of his later … [Read more...]
Reduced-forces ‘Sweeney’ still packs fierce punch at Zoetic Stage
Ever since Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s bloody brilliant, massive, large-cast Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street arrived on Broadway in 1979, subsequent takes on the show have grappled with how to deliver its oversized emotions and exquisite score on a reduced scale. That presents an enticing challenge for a director, as Patrick Fitzwater of Slow Burn … [Read more...]
Broadway baby: ‘School of Rock’ cast member, 10, tells of life on the road
Like many a New Yorker, 10-year-old Alyssa Emily Marvin considers South Florida to be her second home. After all, her great-grandmother was a longtime volunteer at the Kravis Center until recently and her cousin is a rabbi at Temple Beth El in Boca Raton. And on Wednesday, Alyssa makes her Kravis debut as Marcy, one of the kid rocker back-up singers in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s … [Read more...]
Young playwright gets world premiere at FAU Theatre Lab
Playwright and novelist Jennifer Lane recalls exactly what the initial motivation was for her to write Harlowe, which is having its world premiere Friday at Florida Atlantic University’s Theater Lab. It was years ago, while she was in Columbia University’s graduate playwriting program. She was falling behind in her work and the program director was growing impatient with … [Read more...]
Dramaworks does its first August Wilson, taking swing at ‘Fences’
In its 18 years of producing great American plays, Palm Beach Dramaworks had never done one by August Wilson, but that is not veteran local actress Karen Stephens’ fault. She had long been lobbying for his 1987 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner, Fences, the tale of former Negro League baseball player Troy Maxson and his uneasy relationships with wife Rose and son … [Read more...]