Features
Color Blind Casting Poses No Obstacle To Filipino-American Dancing As British Billy Elliot
Initially, it’s impossible to ignore that 15-year-old actor J.P. Viernes leaping and soaring through the musical Billy Elliot is not a typical youngster in a downtrodden unsophisticated mining village in northeast England in the 1980s. John Peter Viernes, with a broad grin and flashing eyes, is inescapably a Filipino-American with caramel-colored skin and half-moon eyes. But by all accounts, his infectious charisma, joyous dancing and sheer acting skills successfully banish most audience members’ resistance to the color-blind casting within a few minutes.
Boeing Boeing Marks Long-Term Partnership For Promethean & Nova’s Theater Department
Book-learning and collegiate productions provide theater students the basics of the craft they hope to follow, but The Promethean Theatre is providing Nova Southeastern University students with real world experience that is far more rigorous and revealing than class work.
Caldwell’s Chad Deity Is Unlike Any Show You’ve Ever Seen — Unless You’re A WWE Fan
It’s a safe bet that hardly any theatergoer in South Florida will have seen a play like The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity when it opens this week at the Caldwell Theatre Company. After all, rarely do rehearsals require actors learn World Wrestling Entertainment moves that while bogus are actually downright dangerous to the execute. Or where the director is flipped in the air by a burly athlete and lands flat on his back.
Talkin’ in the Green Room With: Eric Alsford
In this edition, we talk with Eric Alsford is one of the best-known music directors in South Florida, usually shuttling from one job to another here, in New York and at regional theaters across the country. Among his current assignments is preparation for a massive undertaking that he has sought for months: Actors Playhouse’s production of the musical Next To Normal slated for Jan. 18-Feb. 12.
Edgy Mad Cat Troupe Staging Children’s Theater? Sort Of
The very idea that Mad Cat Theatre—the embodiment of edgy, adult fare in South Florida – is doing what some might misclassify as children’s theater simply doesn’t compute. The explanation is that Macbeth & the Little Monster is not some rose-colored Disney fairy tale, even though a mother reinvents the Shakespearean tragedy as a bedtime story for her son. Angela Berliner’s play opening Dec. 28 is very determinedly designed to appeal to all ages, said director Paul Tei.
Maltz’s Joseph Uses Technology to Wrangle a Cast of 240 — Kids
In what may be the first massive melding of junior thespians and advanced technology, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s staff has employed cyberspace and digital information to manage the logistical nightmare of creating and training eight separate children’s choirs for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

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