By Dale King If your fancy runs to lively, energetic stage productions, See How They Run is likely your cup of tea. As with most British farces, the operative word in the title is “run.” And that’s what the characters do in this raucous, whimsical story at the Delray Beach Playhouse. For its second show of the season, the Playhouse taps an interesting cadre of performers … [Read more...]
FAU Theatre Lab handles promising ‘Super Great’ deftly
The first thing you need to know about Stephen Brown’s new play, Everything is Super Great, is that the title is facetious. In fact, nearly everything is pretty awful for the four disconnected characters that populate this “comedy about what’s missing.” For each of them has a void in his life, a missing person or a stunted relationship that keeps his or her existence … [Read more...]
‘Play That Goes Wrong’ long overstays its slapstick welcome
Since theater is a live event, that means that on any given evening anything – good or bad – could happen. But with the play currently at the Kravis Center’s Dreyfoos Hall, if something unexpected went wrong, you would never know it. That is because the show playing through Sunday is called The Play That Goes Wrong, an Olivier Award-winning British import based on one … [Read more...]
McKeever’s ‘fable’ of unexpected love on stage at Levis JCC
The Levis JCC Sandler Center has kicked off its 2019-20 black box theater lineup with local playwright Michael McKeever’s Charlie Cox Runs with Scissors, presented by West Boca Theatre Company and running through Dec. 22. “We’re thrilled to present ‘Charlie Cox Runs with Scissors’ as our stellar season opener,” says Alan Nash, assistant director for the Sandler Center. … [Read more...]
Dimon’s star turn gives Dramaworks its best-ever new play
Quick, name a pioneering comic actress from the early days of television. Chances are you mentioned Lucille Ball, but before we loved Lucy there was Gertrude Berg, who not only starred in The Goldbergs — the first exposure to Jewish family life for many Americans — but she wrote, directed and produced the entire series, as she had previously done on radio for two decades. … [Read more...]
Maltz does what it can with weak, flimsy ‘Drood’
While Charles Dickens is inarguably one of the great writers of the English language, the mystery genre was never his forte. Still, late in his life, he began a tale of murder, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which remained unfinished because he passed away after penning the first six installments. Although no autopsy was performed, based on the musical that Rupert Holmes … [Read more...]
Leads, production make ‘Music Man’ at Wick a winner for holiday
The flim-flam man who gets himself bamboozled is a staple character of the musical theater. Think of Max Bialystock of The Producers, Lawrence Jameson of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and especially Harold Hill of The Music Man. That last one, the creation of composer-lyricist-book writer Meredith Willson, is an enduring conning icon who arrives in River City, Iowa, intent on … [Read more...]
For cast, ‘Music Man’ is a feel-good show with heart
By Hap Erstein Frequent Wick Theatre director Norb Joerder has forgotten how many times he has staged Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. But he can recall a lot of the prominent performers who have played the traveling salesman who cons town after town into buying instruments and band uniforms for their music-challenged youngsters. “This is probably my eighth or … [Read more...]
Sluggish pace mutes the laughs in MNM’s ‘Forum’
Stephen Sondheim was a mere 32 years old when the first show with his music and lyrics, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, opened on Broadway. A farce based on a convoluted storyline by the ancient Greek jokester Plautus, the audience-friendly musical has none of the psychological complexities that Sondheim would become known for, but plenty of his quirky melodies … [Read more...]
World premiere play revives ‘Goldbergs’ pioneer and the blacklist
Gertrude Berg, the pioneering writer-director-producer-star of radio and television’s The Goldbergs, a domestic comedy of a Jewish family in the Bronx, is all but forgotten today. In part that is why area stage actress Elizabeth Dimon wanted to commission a play about Berg and her show’s untimely demise in the dark days of the anti-Communist blacklist. In addition, the … [Read more...]