Author Archives: Bill Hirschman
Spoiler Alert: Mystery Abounds In Premiere Of Broken Snow
Revelation after revelation – none of which the playwright wants us to spoil – are exposed like the proverbial peeling of an onion until the underlying secret lays naked in the world premiere of Ben Andron’s Broken Snow at the J’s Cultural Arts Theatre in North Miami Beach.
Stage Door’s Nine Nearly A Ten
Broward Stage Door’s production of the musical Nine, based on Fellini’s 8 1/2, is a fine evening of exuberant music and even more soaring voices.
Vocal Skill And Power Dominate Verdi’s Masked Ball At FGO
Opera is all about technique, spotlighting it, honoring it, celebrating it. So when Florida Grand Opera took on one of the most demanding works in the entire canon, Verdi’s A Masked Ball, it wisely hired accomplished singers whose polished skills are as dazzling by themselves as watching Olympic figure skaters.
24-Hour Theatre Project Rises Once Again At Theatre Lab
A worn-out Hillary Clinton balked at putting on makeup before her first major address since the election. An alien queen who owns a pop-up bar came to claim its dead lounge singer. One play ends when the cast rebels at the lame ending supplied by the playwright. You know, just your average run of the mill premises on display in eight plays presented Monday in the one-night-only 24-Hour Theatre Project now sponsored by Theatre Lab.
Dear Adults: Matilda the Musical Is Much More Than Kids’ Fare
Matilda the Musical, with a national tour that’s made a stop at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale, may star a cadre of kids, but it is no Annie. I say that in the most positive way possible. The thought of sitting through 2 ½ hours of a children’s show wasn’t on the top of my list, but from the opening number, Matilda zapped that idea right out of my head.
Houdini Defies Death One More Time In Return To The Arsht
(The following is an updated review from 2012 plus a feature story written about this same production’s original visit to the Arsht four years ago. Most of the cast is the same, but several magical effects have been tweaked or …
Women Rule Across The 1960s In The Wick’s Retro Revue Beehive
Beehive, yet another innocuous transitorily entertaining revue tracing music sung by women through the 1960s, highlights, intentionally or not, one trenchant observation. The same early Baby Boomers who started the decade enthusiastically singing along to Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” ended up wailing with Janis Joplin’s “Cry Baby.”
Slow Burn’s Aida May Not Top Your Wish List, But The Pop Opera Burns Down The House
If American Idol produced a Broadway musical with choreography often found behind a diva in a stadium tour, the result would resemble Slow Burn Theatre Company’s production of Aida. The result is often entertaining and occasionally moving. But the entire effort is unapologetically drenched in a late ‘90s pop sensibility that is by turns earnest and kitschy, insightful and shallow, deft and manipulative.
The Meaning Of Life’s A Joke In Evening Star’s Waiting For Godot
In Waiting For Godot, that classic of the Theater of the Absurd, nothing is more absurd than Man’s insistent search for some meaning in life. In Evening Star Productions’ courageous run at this Everest of a play, their response is broad comedy suffused into the intentionally pointless and protracted slog that is Beckett’s brilliant but unsettling manifesto of existentialism.
‘No Way To Treat A Lady,’ About A Serial Killer Is Just A Light Musical Comedy — Really
There have been few musicals about a homicidal maniac. As far as peppy musical comedies with the accent on comedy, there’s only been one about a schizophrenic serial killer, No Way To Treat A Lady. Broward Stage Door has taken on this off-beat tuner about a put-upon detective tracking a failed actor who dons different personas to get in the apartments of lonely ladies he plans to strangle.
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