Features

On The Boards Podcast: FAU’s Richard Gamble Talks About Summer Rep And Theater Education in the 21st Century

Bill Hirschman’s interview with FAU Associate Professor Richard Gamble who talks at length about FAU’s 27th Summer Festival Rep (A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Side By Side By Sondheim and The Man Who Came To Dinner) and looks more generally at how theater arts is being taught on the collegiate level.

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Adam Who? Slow Burn’s The Wedding Singer And Clay Cartland Do It Their Way

There’s not one but two elephants in the room, actually in the auditorium, as Slow Burn Theatre Company prepares to take on the 2006 stage musical version of The Wedding Singer , which opens Friday for a brief two-weekend run in Boca Raton.

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Playing A Dolphin, Dracula and Mothra In Same Show: Everyday Challenge At Summer Shorts

Imagine you’re Ken Clement in City Theatre’s Summer Shorts opening this week. One minute he’s a dolphin, a few minutes later he;s Dracula and still later he has to find his inner Mothra. Performing in the annual festival of short plays, a rite of summer now in its 18th edition, requires talents they don’t dwell on in drama school.

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Theatre At Arts Garage and Dramaworks Stage Concert Musicals This Summer

If this seems to be a summer jammed with play readings across the region (at least 18 set so far and we have more to announce over the next few days), musical theater fans will be penciling in dates on their calendars as well, as early as tomorrow night. Palm Beach Dramaworks and the Theatre at Arts Garage are mounting “concert versions” of musicals – classics in Dramaworks’ case and new works at the Garage in Delray Beach.

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Talkin’ In The Green Room With: New Theatre’s Ricky J. Martinez

Actor, playwright, designer, dancer, choreographer, artistic director of New Theatre and probably a few other job descriptions we’ve left out, Ricky J. Martinez is one of the most hyphenate artists in mainstream theater in South Florida. It’s what the affable and passionate Martinez calls being a “theatrician.”

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On The Boards Podcast: Alan Jacobson On Starting Plaza Theatre In A Tough Economy

The latest podcast entry is Bill Hirschman’s interview with Alan Jacobson, founder and artistic director of the Plaza Theatre in Manalapan, about opening, and maintaining, a successful arts organization in difficult economic times.

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Mad Cat’s Comedy Looks At Fashionista Isabella Blow

Editor, consultant and fashion icon Isabella Blow lived a tumultuous life that encompassed trend-setting style, two marriages plagued by infertility, championing designers like Alexander McQueen who then left her behind, coping with her brother’s drowning, battling ovarian cancer, trying electro-shock therapy to counteract depression and attempting suicide several times. So, of course, Mad Cat Theatre Company is turning her life into an entry in the annual South Beach Comedy Festival for two shows on Wednesday, April 17.

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Avi Hoffman Takes on 5,000 Years Of War In Outre’s An Illiad

Playing a 5,000-year-old poet decrying humanity’s addiction to rage and violence, clothing his warning in a modern retelling of Homer’s epic tale of the Trojan War, this is not your grandma’s Avi Hoffman sitting here. But it is Hoffman sitting here in rehearsal, striving to learn 47 pages of dense script as the sole storyteller in Outré Theatre Company’s An Illiad slated to open Friday at The Studio at Mizner Park.

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Stefanie Powers Hopes To Channel Tallulah in Looped

Stephanie Powers is stepping in as the emergency replacement for the lead part in a play in which she has 80 percent of the lines, doing it with less than two weeks’ rehearsal, and re-creating an iconic celebrity she personally knew in Looped, the slightly fictionalized account of Tallulah Bankhead’s comic and tragic – and substance abuse affected — attempt to dub one line of dialogue for her last movie a few years before she died.

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Talkin’ In The Green Room With: Karen Stephens

Karen Stephens’ ability to submerge herself in disparate characters was highlighted in her stunning tour de force playing 14 characters in 90 minutes in Sarah Jones’ Bridge & Tunnel which she has performed several times in the state. But just as impressive is her skill to disappear into less flamboyant characters, people who might live next door to you, such as the pragmatic mother she just finished portraying in Doubt at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre.

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