Mark Della Ventura and David Michael Sirois vie for the affections of Ashley Price in Love Burns at Thinking Cap Theatre

By Bill Hirschman

Seeing life through the prism of offbeat characters such as the oddballs populating the absurdist comedy Love Burns sometimes helps us perceive the modern world more clearly than any naturalistic drama.

The two daffy playlets produced by Thinking Cap Theatre are bitingly funny and sharply critical in their depiction of what passes for romance among twenty-somethings in the 21^st Century. We’re laughing at them, but we’re also a little worried at the characters’ shallow definition of love.

That’s likely exactly what playwright Cherie Vogelstein wants you to walk away thinking after chuckling steadily at these two pieces, Date With a Stranger and All About Al.

Director Nicole Stodard and a quartet of fine actors deftly play these strange situations and beyond quirky denizens with fearless abandon – and at a speedy clip.

Both extended skits occur at a Starbucks-like coffee house, the new townhall meeting place for post-Millenial social interaction, presided over by a barista (Shira Abergel) who introduces and closes each act crooning a song while playing a ukulele.

In the first play, a creepy health club salesman  (David Michael Sirois) starts to hit on a lovely young woman (Ashley Price) who seems normal until she starts stealing sugar dispensers off the tables. Then she starts to come on to him with an aggressiveness that defies belief – and he responds in kind.

In the next 20 minutes or so, the two will race – and we mean race — through the entire arc of a modern relationship. Every twist and turn from the tentative exploration of each other’s personalities to the ugly breakup just sprint by. The script jets through a score of recognizable stages in an affair. The fact that they whiz past rational transitions just digs the satirical knife in deeper, lampooning how predictable and shallow relationships have become. But the lack of those transitions is indeed hilarious, especially in the deft hairpin turns by Price and Sirois.

The second act is only slightly less crazed. Sirois plays a self-absorbed handsome young man awaiting the appearance of his girlfriend (Price) so he can break up with her. Into the same coffee shop comes an old friend (Mark Della Ventura), a lovable schlub who wears Cookie Monster pajama bottoms in public and who has recently broken up with his girlfriend. He makes Sirois explain why he’s breaking up the relationship and then forces him to practice the breakup script for him before the woman arrives. Needy and lonely, Della Ventura’s character second guesses and punctures the bogus nature of Sirois’ complaints about the woman. Eventually, he makes Sirois change his mind, but for the wrong reasons.

Sirois and Della Ventura are close friends and colleagues in real life and their smooth banter, the linchpin to Sirois’ own play Brothers Beckett, is among the evening’s strengths.

Credit Stodard with helping the actors excavate every nuance and every laugh in Vogelstein’s script, and sending it flying by you as if the words and emotions were facets of a door-slamming farce.

The entire evening is not even 90 minutes including an intermission in which you can buy coffee, wine and pastries from the barista station on the set in Empire stage’s tiny living room-sized auditorium. But best of all, Abergel serenades you with a short set of offbeat tunes in keeping with the evening’s theme. She has a rich lovely voice perfectly complemented by her work on the ukulele and guitar, plus an occasional whistled bridge. Among the numbers is a lovely, but unnerving song in which a woman says she’s glad her boyfriend hit her when she was unfaithful because it proves he loves her. “Creepy,” she acknowledges.  And in tune with everything else in this evening’s world view.

Love Burns through May 26 by Thinking Cap Theatre, performing at Empire Stage, 1140 N. Flagler Dr., Fort Lauderdale (north of Sunrise just east of the railroad tracks) 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Tickets $25 and includes a 15-minute intermission with live music. Call (954) 678-1496 or visit ThinkingCapTheatre.com.

954-678-1496 or ThinkingCapTheatre.com

A film of the original London incarnation of the current New York comedy hit, One Man, Two Guv’nors is playing at 1 p.m. May 19 and 20 at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Avenue.

A live performance (complete with audience and intermission) of the National Theatre’s door-slamming farce starring James Corden was filmed in digital high-definition and is rebroadcast, a technique now popular with productions  at the Metropolitan Opera.

Tickets are $16 and available on-line along with other details at gablescinema.com, as well as promotional clips from the production.

The New York edition with much of the same cast has been nominated for six Tony Awards.

The acclaimed National Theatre production of Frankenstein will be seen in a similar manner on June 23 and 24.

Thomas Sadoski and Stockard Channing in Other Desert Cities / Photo by Joan Marcus

Or Coming To A Theater Near You
(Or Not)

By Bill Hirschman

Welcome to our semi-annual scouting trip for shows likely to appear in South Florida in a local production or national tour — or shows you should make a point of seeing/avoiding on your next trip. Among them:  Leap of Faith (starring Miami’s Raul Esparza), Other Desert Cities (announced for Actors Playhouse next season),  Peter and the Starcatcher (based on books by the Herald’s Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson), Once, Nice Work If You Can Get It, The Columnist, End of the Rainbow, Venus in Fur and a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire (with an African-American cast). See links at the bottom of each story for previous reviews in the series.

Today’s Review: Other Desert Cities

Critics overuse the word “stunning” in reviews. Even well-travelled connoisseurs have only been stunned by a piece of art a couple of dozen times in their lives. Stunned is when your brain’s synapses have been so overwhelmed that you have trouble getting out of your seat.

I’m not sure the current Broadway remounting of Lincoln Center ’s production of its 2010-2011 Other Desert Cities is one of those times, but its thespian aerialist act high above your heads comes as close as you’re likely to see for a while.

Actors Playhouse in Coral Gables plans to produce the show next January and if they hadn’t done such a first-rate job with August: Osage County in 2011, you’d wonder if they have a chance of mastering this multi-layered play that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and has been nominated for five Tony Awards including best play.

Playwright Jon Robin Baitz takes that staple, the dysfunctional family drama, and amps up the thematic value by linking the group’s shortcomings to the social-political landscape of the past few decades. With a scientist’s observation and a cleric’s compassion, Baitz dissects the same elements of ethics, truth, family and loyalty as Arthur Miller did in All My Sons.

The treacherously craggy and deep emotional sea trenches are navigated so expertly and nimbly by director Joe Mantello and a superb cast that you question how anyone else can hope to equal it.

This current troupe, mostly holdovers from the off-Broadway run, have been in previews and performances for this edition since October. That the show can be this fresh come late spring says something about their professionalism and craft. Deep into its run, the audience benefits from the actors having had time to excavate all the meanings and discover all the techniques to put them across.

The story is set in the elegantly tasteful living room of an expensive ultra-modern home in Palm Springs, California, the ultimate enclave of the one-percent.

This is the 2004 Christmas gathering of the Wyeth clan, a wealthy Republican family headed by Lyman, an actor-turned-ambassador (Stacy Keach), and his wife Polly, a screenwriter turned socialite (Tony-nominated Stockard Channing). Coming from humbler origins, they have eagerly paid a price to live in the top tier of The American Dream, becoming intimates of such people as Nancy Reagan. The war in Iraq isn’t going well and the world is gripped by fear of terrorism, but the Wyeths are iconic poster children for an Establishment who eagerly drank the Kool Aid. But don’t dismiss them lightly: There is steel and intelligence under the angora.

Also staying in the house for an indeterminate period is Polly’s acerbic sister Silda (currently played by Tony-nominated Judith Light, but played by Linda Lavin in an earlier incarnation). As liberal as her sister is conservative, she has been wrung out by her battle as a recovering alcoholic. She has sins of her own to atone for, but she provides the outsider’s commentary in such lines as “Palm Springs isn’t a refuge; it’s King Tut’s tomb.”

Visiting, too, is the hip young son Trip, a reality TV show writer (we saw Matthew Risch, but the role’s originator Thomas Sadoski is back in the part now).

And finally, the linchpin: the return of the prodigal daughter Brooke (currently played by the role’s first occupant off-Broadway, the well-named Elizabeth Marvel, who replaces the woman who opened the show on Broadway, Rachel Griffiths).

Brooke is a one-book novelist who had a nervous breakdown and has led a somewhat Bohemian life in the wake of a family tragedy involving a deceased son. Like the rest of the family, she has weathered tough times emotionally and psychologically. But she has come out the other side with a weary but amiable false front to show the world.

She has come home to announce she has finished a book loosely based on a family tragedy and scandal. Well, not so much a novel, as a purgative memoir that will expose such skeletons as how her parents’ emotional coolness and inflexible politics drove the other son to suicide after he was implicated in a radical bombing. She wants, sort of, her family’s blessing for a tell-all confessional, something they can hardly imagine is being requested let alone expected.

More secrets emerge in the ensuing struggle of combatants who know each other’s vulnerable spots, including at least one surprise that turns the play inside out – and thereby reveals another layer of themes, which to discuss would likely constitute a spoiler.

Overall, the key values being examined in painfully clear-eyed detail are ethics, truth, family and loyalty – many of the same elements dissected in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.  Several times, someone or other says with complete sincerity, “I love you, but….”

In that, the work echoes a half-dozen other plays about dysfunctional families including Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Delicate Balance. But Other Desert Cities is, in fact, its own creature, both a political and relationship play. Among many other virtues, it connects human flaws that make for family discord to those that create an ethically-challenged Establishment responsible for recent wars and the economic meltdown.

Did I mention this is a terribly funny play? Some of the humor comes from the witty zingers that this articulate, literate and creative quintet can sling as if they were 21^st Century residents of a Noel Coward comedy. And a good deal of laughter also comes from Baitz’s well-observed insights into the abrasive friction of people who know each other all too well.

Mantello’s ensemble is in perfect sync with Baitz’s script. Channing gives a brittle topspin to her judgmental quips that exposes Polly’s underused intelligence. Marvel’s rueful observations come with a frozen smile that really signifies the sad expectation that nothing will ever go right for Brooke, certainly not this weekend.

Light, a well-known TV actress who has been proving for years that she has enviable theater chops, transforms herself into this self-destructive sister who has nowhere else to hide but the bosom of this family. Doubtless, Lavin was fine in the role, but Light need take a backseat to no one.

Keach, another actor whose sterling stage credits are often forgotten by audiences, exudes a solid and dependable exterior that Lyman struggles to maintain, the very symbol of his achievements. But he, too, is at first baffled and then shattered by Brooke’s seeming intransigence about the collision of fidelity to artistic truth versus loyalty to the family’s well-being.

A nod is due Tony-nominated John Lee Beatty for his send up of the upscale abode, all white and cream walls and furniture, a stylish but freakishly artificial Christmas tree, rock walls and a trendy fireplace funnel hanging from the ceiling.

This is one show to be hotly anticipated in South Florida next season, but if you can catch in New York, don’t pass it up.

Previous reviews in the series:
Leap of Faith, click here.
Once, click here
End of the Rainbow, click here
A Streetcar Named Desire, click here.

By Bill Hirschman

There’s hope.

Admit it, we’ve all been fighting off a pessimistic depression with the collapse of Florida Stage, the graceful exit of Promethean Theatre, the hiatus of Rising Action, Women’s Theatre Project and Naked Stage, and the limbo of the Caldwell Theatre.

But the past week of theatergoing in South Florida has provided several vital signs that our Fabulous Invalid shouldn’t be placed on the critical list, just kept under observation.

Exhibit one: Monday’s night fundraiser for Outré, a tiny company founded by Skye Whitcomb and Nori Tecosky who have the ridiculous belief that someone can start a theater company in this economy amid declining attendance, evaporating government support and miniscule patron donations.

Their moving edition of Larson’s pre-Rent tale of young people pursuing their artistic dreams forced you to admit that if they can pull off such a smooth, assured and no-excuses production, maybe it’s the doubters who should be hedging their bets.

Shout outs to director Whitcomb, musical director Emmanuel Schvartzman, assistant director Jason Fisher in the tech booth, guitarist Javier Urrutia, percussionist Nick Trotogott,  Nova Southeastern University for providing the hall, but above all a trio of amazing performers: the affecting Michael Westrich as the hero in Larson’s semi-autobiographical story of a composer trying to find a foothold in musical theater, Sabrina Lynn Gore as his dancer girlfriend yearning for a more stable life and Clay Cartland as his gay best friend who has forsaken an artistic life for material success in an ad agency.

Believing (or just hoping) that an audience exists for thought-provoking theater, the company plans to open its first season of fully-staged productions sometime in November with Andrew Lippa’s cult musical The Wild Party. Even the company’s courageous selection of works is heartening.

Exhibit two: In the Outré audience Monday were Patrick Fitzwater and Matthew Korinko, co-founders of the fledgling Slow Burn Theatre operating in west Boca Raton. Last month, their financially challenged company produced a triumphant and rapturously received production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. The fact that it was both an artistic and popular success once again puts the lie to the idea that the only market for theater are patrons afraid of anything written after 1965.

Exhibit three: This weekend, the new South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center imported the Asolo Repertory Theatre’s production of Hamlet, Prince of Cuba in an  English version heavily redacted by Michael Donald Edwards and a separate Spanish translation by Miami’s Nilo Cruz. The English version didn’t feel especially Cuban-inspired other than the music and costumes, but the production that set the play in 1898 Havana was satisfyingly solid. And it was a real pleasure to hear actors with classical training giving Shakespeare his due, including former Miamian Frankie Alvarez as the Melancholy Cubano. The lovely new facility wasn’t exactly overrun with ticket buyers, but there was a reasonably healthy turnout Saturday night.

Exhibit four: The audience’s positive reaction this weekend to the offbeat comedy  Becky’s New Car at Actors Playhouse showed that mainstream audiences will respond to shows they’ve never heard of, even ones that veer into darker territory, if they are carried off with style and skill. Equally encouraging was the conversation with Playhouse board chairman Larry Stein who confirmed that while Hairspray this season wasn’t the money-maker he’d hoped, the far more challenging musical about a bipolar housewife, Next To Normal, had been a hit with audiences who flocked to the show based on word of mouth as well as critical raves.

Exhibit five: We caught up Wednesday with Death and Harry Houdini, the stylized mesh of theatrical disciplines resulting in the kind of experience you can only have in theater. The entire run of the co-production of the House Theatre of Chicago and the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts’ Theater Up Close series had sold out and the production was shoehorning in two extra performances at the end of the run on May 20. Aside from Mad Cat Theatre, Thinking Cap and PlayGround Theatre, few local companies take a chance with such flagrantly theatrical work. We can hope that Houdini’s success (albeit helped along by the cachet of a magic show) will encourage more Florida theaters to attract audiences by indulging in what TV and film can’t deliver.

Exhibit six and beyond: It will be a few more days before we can get to see Thinking Cap’s two shows that opened this weekend on the Empire Stage, Love Burns and Radio Plays.  But it’s yet another example of a tiny company trying to establish a beachhead against all sane odds. And while it’s far, far more mainstream, on Thursday we saw the Barry Manilow songbook revue I Am Music at the new Plaza Theatre in Manalapan. Producer Alan Jacobson, who plans to continue with such safe fare, also announced a season that will take on Driving Miss Daisy and the aforementioned Next to Normal.

And if you look back a couple of weeks, there’s GableStage’s production of Time Stands Still or the just-closed A Measure of Cruelty, inspired by the Michael Brewer burning tragedy, the first new play commissioned by Mosaic Theatre.

No one is wearing rose-colored eyewear. We also saw some pretty mediocre work as well in the last few weeks. No question, these are unnerving times for those who want to see the arts thrive, not simply survive.

But listening Monday night to Outré’s cast singing about theater as a kind of sacred pursuit, all I could think was how much I want to see what these folks do next. And how they might just be here to do it.

Laura Turnbull as the heroine in Becky's New Car at Actors Playhouse

By Bill Hirschman

There’s a marvelous moment in Becky’s New Car when the accelerating farce of mistaken assumptions and white lies suddenly swerves smack into the territory of serious consequences.

Even though you and the heroine knew a painful collision was inevitable, the laughs have been so plentiful that the sobering reality comes as a mild shock.

Steven Dietz’s play at Actors Playhouse presents a mildly dissatisfied suburban Everywoman, barely aware she is ripe for a mid-life crisis, who is suddenly faced with an opportunity to lead a double life.

What she expects to be a brief taste of a fantasy – like Cinderella planning a single appearance at the Prince’s ball before returning to the scullery – becomes a seductive spiral that leads to hard lessons about choices.

Dietz’s insightful script, David Arisco’s assured direction and a deceptively deft cast led by the ever-engaging Laura Turnbull as Becky deliver a thoroughly entertaining comedy that will give your mind something substantial to mull over long after the house lights come on.

Becky Foster is a smart, articulate 21^st Century woman working as an office manager/title clerk at a car dealership and smoothly running a household for her husband of 28 years, Joe (Ken Clement), and her son Chris (Ryan Didato), a psychology grad student living at home.

Working alone late one night, Becky is approached by Walter (Allan Baker), an affable if daffy widower who wants to buy nine cars as thank you presents to the employees of his outdoor advertising firm. Walter is amazingly rich, infectiously endearing and emotionally at sea as he continues to mourn the death of his wife.

He misunderstands one thing Becky says and assumes that she, too, is a lonely widow. Although she tries to correct the impression, she never manages to get the truth out as he impulsively invites her to become friends and then more than friends.

Dietz deftly sets up the proverbial slippery slope as Becky gets drawn deeper into an ever-more hectic juggling act. In this corner is her real life with Joe, Chris and the neurotic colleague at work (Francisco “Pancho” Padura). In the other corner is Walter’s Neverland estate with his lovely daughter Kenni (Anne Chamberlain) and a down-on-her-luck heiress (Kim Ostrenko).

Since this is farce, Dietz’s ensuing string of complicating coincidences never seem too preposterous, just hilarious, as the two lives careen toward each other like Keystone Kops cars headed for a collision. And then suddenly, it’s not so damn funny.

Arisco is perfectly at home helming this mixture of gentle comedy and modern angst. He keeps the evening moving smoothly and unerringly toward the quickening climax and the honest aftermath in the morning light.

He revels in Dietz’s erasure of the fourth wall by having Becky talk to us as a narrator as if we were just sitting in her living room for a cup of coffee while she cleans up after her family. Arisco and Dietz have Becky interact with folks in the front row, asking them to pitch in to put a bucket under a roof leak and help her collate some paperwork. The only time the technique felt forced was when Becky brings audience members on stage to help her change clothes.

As far as the cast, once again, Turnbull is so bloody good that only her colleagues will appreciate how her seemingly naturalistic style hides so much craft that the result borders on alchemy. Her Becky is so immensely likeable that we happily ignore the fact that she’s flirting with being unfaithful. Turnbull has earned praise for her scathing dramatic turns in Actors Playhouse’s August: Osage County last season and Palm Beach Dramaworks’ The Effect of Gamma Rays… this season. So it’s easy to forget how skilled a comedienne she can be, blessed with flawless technique.

Double that praise for Clement’s portrayal of the steadfastly decent blue-collar husband. Under Arisco’s direction, he exhibits superb comic timing and a deadpan delivery that can wring a laugh out of almost any line he chooses. But belying that doughy clown’s face, his real achievement is communicating Joe’s pain underneath his facile quips and stoic expression.  Once we stop laughing in the last 15 minutes, it’s Clement who brings the betrayal and its price tag on the whole family back into focus.

Baker, seen here primarily in those light summer revues favored by the Playhouse, creates a delightfully idiosyncratic multi-millionaire who you want to protect from the vagaries of the cruel world.

The rest of the cast is just as solid: Playhouse veteran Padura gets to veer out of control in silly rants, Didato (fresh off Brooklyn Boy) convincingly exudes that unwarranted condescension that young adults feel toward their parents. Ostrenko renders a portrait of a rue-filled Scarlett O’Hara puzzling out a life after Tara. And Chamberlain (who triumphed last month, ironically, as Cinderella in Into the Woods) invests Walter’s daughter with warmth and intelligence.

Dietz, a resident of Seattle and Austin, is one of the most-frequently produced playwrights in regional theater, whose Yankee Tavern debuted  at Florida Stage in 2009.

A bit of backstory: This is the 12^th production of Dietz’s 2008 play slated around the country this season; the total tops 50 productions in regional theaters and college campuses, according to Charles Staadecker. The real estate broker should know. He commissioned the play as a present for his wife’s 60^th birthday and together they have attended opening nights at 24 of them – including the one Friday at Actors Playhouse.

Staadecker and his wife, Benita, who sat on the board for ACT Theater in Seattle which premiered the work, travel the country proselytizing that theater lovers with the means should encourage new works by commissioning plays as gifts.

“I’m a good salesman,” Charles said in the lobby before the show began. He’s been pretty persuasive. Working since then with ACT to create the New Works for the American Stage program to match patrons to playwrights, their efforts have led to 19 commissions.

“You don’t have to be a Vanderbilt or a Medici to do this. We’re just hard working people. Instead of taking a trip to Europe, we do this, make something that leaves a legacy and makes a difference,” Staadecker said.

They are currently banding with friends to split up the estimated $25,000 cost of commissioning another new play. Sharing the burden costs each backer about $3,000 a year for two years or $250 a month – less than the cost of leasing a car, he said with a salesman’s smile.

Becky’s New Car  runs through June 3 at the Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables. Performances 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sundays and one Wednesday, May 16. Tickets $40-$48. Visit actorsplayhouse.org or call 305-441-4181.

Since South Florida companies have developed, rehearsed and exported so many musical revues to seagoing auditoriums, a turnabout was inevitable.

In this case, the “S.S. Barry Manilow” songbook  I Am Music! has tied up at the new Plaza Theatre in Manalapan.

Your reaction to this entry depends precisely on your enjoyment of the cruise ship level of manufactured entertainment. A lot of people in the Plaza opening night left downright enraptured. More demanding audiences are going to be, well, more demanding.

Barry Manilow is a secret guilty pleasure for a million Boomers and, judging by the audience Thursday, their parents. Manilow is a talented composer, lyricist, producer, arranger and musical director with an unapologetic pop romantic sensibility and a bent for anthems and ballads that echo an earlier era. I admit to having five on my iPod.

All of Manilow’s greatest hits are here; you can make up the set list yourself.  If you really are a fan of Manilow, you’ll miss his particular honey-smooth smooth tone and flawless phrasing. If you just want to hear lovely songs and didn’t make out to his voice on the radio in the backseat, you likely won’t mind.

That raw material was irresistible to creator/ director Kevin Black, who honed his creative teeth, in fact, developing shows for cruise lines. I didn’t know that fact until I Googled him after the show. But I would have bet you all a steak dinner at Ruth’s Chris that was the case even before I turned on the computer.

Black has the formula down cold: four singers, four dancers, large Pepsodent smiles, soulful gazes that rarely meet the audience’s and an endless parade of spangled, sequined costumes that sort of fit. A karaoke feel suffuses the evening since the singers often stand still and hold microphones to their mouths as they croon to a lush soundtrack of canned music, sweetened with digital background singers. There is no scenery, just images projected onto a screen covering the back wall depicting a backstage, snowfalls, etc., etc.

With one exception, the singers are all competent if not inspiring. Ditto for the dancers’ energetic if not always synchronized execution of choreography by Black, John Hensley, Isabel Trelles and Ben Bagby

Everyone’s working hard and this is not an untalented bunch. None of this is awful. It just feels synthetic and manipulatively crafted like second-rate Disney.

The asterisk here is the aforementioned Bagby. He’s in a different show and that’s a compliment. Doing quintuple duty as co-choreographer, musical arranger, musical director, singer and dancer, Bagby has the precision, polish and verve of a veteran Broadway song-and-dance man that the others are aiming for. As the love child of Johnny Mathis and Ben Vereen, he kicks the show up a notch or four when he’s the focus of a razzamatazz number such as “Dancin’ Fool.”

Still, credit the others with some moderately heartfelt moments: Craig Strang on “Trying to Get the Feeling Again,” Marisa Guida on “The Old Songs,” and Miami native Mimi Jiminez on “Somewhere Down the Road.” All four deserve a bow for pulling off the tongue-twisting challenge of the brilliant words and four-part arrangement of “American Bandstand.”

Andrea Cavrich, Lisa Malservi, Fallon D’Eliseo and Floridian Teddy Talbot all throw themselves into the dance movements.

There isn’t a book so much as a premise of sorts: a bunch of singers and dancers who knew each other years earlier meet to put on a new show! That narrative arc lasts about 10 minutes unless you count the rueful ballads sung to each other that imply everyone on stage had a derailed love affair with someone else in the cast. By the second act, when they simply perform the show, any pretense of a narrative has been left at the concession stand. But then again, how many songbook revues do tell a story besides Jersey Boys?

A side note: This show has no relation other than the source material to the Manilow musical songbook revue, I Write the Songs, created and produced by Gary Waldman and Phil Hinton at the Atlantis Playhouse in 2004.

One profound sadness unrelated to the merits of the show: This is third production at the Plaza Theatre, the brainchild of producer Alan Jacobson. He has scheduled revues through the summer and then a mixed slate for the coming season including Driving Miss Daisy and Next to Normal. You have to applaud his commitment and wish him well.

But this is the space that the late Florida Stage occupied for so many years. Ghosts float through the auditorium, fleeting glimpses of truly great evenings of theater, ones you put up against others in your theater-going memory book. It’s enough to make you cry.

I Am Music! The Songs of Barry Manilow runs through May 27 at The Plaza Theatre, 262 South Ocean Boulevard, Manalapan (the Ocean Blvd. bridge is closed for two years; come across the Intracoastal Waterway by Lake Road on the north or Boynton Beach Blvd. from the south). Performances 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, and 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Tickets $42.  Call (561) 588-1820 or visit theplazatheatre.net.

The theater described the 90-minute show in which a quartet of performers chronicle “the 21st century joys and frustrations of raising children, from bleary-eyed late night feedings and private school kindergarten interviews, to nail-biting driving lessons and prom night.”

The book and lyrics are by Sandy Rustin, and the music and lyrics are by Dan Lipton and David Rossmer.

The play is based on the book Playing It Straight by Milton Ford, who will be present at the reading. Ford interviewed 200 men who were hiding their homosexuality but who were married at one time and had children. The play focuses on one such couple.

The reading features actors Alex Alvarez, Jose Elosegui, David Kwiat and Deborah Sherman, and is directed by Patrice Bailey.

The event is free and open to the public.

McConnell, one of the region’s most respected actors, directors and producers, has been awarded the Randolph A. Frank Prize for the Performing Arts citing an artist “whose artistry enhances the quality of life here in Palm Beach County,” the prize board of directors  announced this month.

Blanchette, dean of theater at the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Jr. School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, won the prize honoring a performing arts educator recognizing 35 years in education including 19 at Dreyfoos. She plans to retire from the school system in June.

Bell, a Dreyfoos school graduate and currently operating the Lunge Dance Collective in New York, received the Emerging Artist Prize.

McConnell has worked  in South Florida for more than a quarter-century, working with almost every large and small company in the state including GableStage, Florida Stage, Mosaic Theatre, Palm Beach Dramawork, Actors Playhouse and Florida Rep, as well as performing at other houses around the country from American Stage in St. Petersburg to Flat Rock in North Carolina.  His work has been recognized with numerous awards and nominations including  the Carbonell. He was the artistic director of TheatreWest and is currently a director and producer of AirPlayz, live interactive productions of radio plays in theatres that are simulcast via the web across the world.

Blair Underwood and Ari Nicole Parker in A Streetcar Named Desire / Photo by Ken Howard

By Bill Hirschman

Welcome to our semi-annual scouting trip for shows likely to appear in South Florida in a local production or national tour — or shows you should make a point of seeing/avoiding on your next trip. Among them:  Leap of Faith (starring Miami’s Raul Esparza), Other Desert Cities (announced for Actors Playhouse next season),  Peter and the Starcatcher (based on books by the Herald’s Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson), Once, Nice Work If You Can Get It, The Columnist, End of the Rainbow, Venus in Fur and a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire (with an African-American cast). See links at the bottom of each story for previous reviews in the series.

Today’s Review: A Streetcar Named Desire

In playwriting class, they advise you to figure out whose story is being told and then ensure that they are the focus of the narrative arc. There’s no doubt that Tennessee William’s classic drama belongs to Blanche DuBois and, by extension, the actress playing her.

But the play cannot fully succeed without a strong antagonist in Stanley Kowalski and that’s where many productions fall down. Not in this new African-American edition directed by Emily Mann.

As unassailable as television actress Nicole Ari Parker is as the wounded Southern belle, the entire production leaps like it was hit with a cattle prod every time Blair Underwood erupts into a scene.

Cliches come to mind only because they are so precisely accurate here: Underwood has the speed, grace and feral blitheness of a panther. Mann has him enter a room throwing his clothes in a ball in a corner, slamming open doors and taking complete ownership of the room. Ironically, his charisma and fine acting chops underscore how comparatively little Underwood seems to have to do.

For Mann, this play wheels around Blanche like the Big Dipper turns around the North Star.  Parker’s Blanche flails her arms as if she was looking for a life preserver or even the silhouette of a ship on the horizon. She creates someone whose chronic self-delusion is only a way to preserve her life-sustaining pride; she is completely conscious that she acting as she wishes things were, not what they are or have been. She rarely looks directly at anyone as if fearing the visual element of human interaction would confirm that she’s not living in genteel environs anymore.

The sexual conflict doesn’t feel as inevitable as Stanley says it is just before the rape. But there is an unavoidable collision coming from the opening “meeting” because Mann and the actors create two people whose shared ruling passion is preserving their own deceptively endangered pride – and neither can survive the other’s existence.

The real star of the show is Mann whose vision of a multi-ethnic down-at-the-heels French Quarter is so perfectly realized that it never feels false for a moment. The travails of blue collar poverty have bonded African Americans, Creoles, Hispanics and whites in an unusually egalitarian neighborhood where poker games and back-porch interaction know no color line. It’s not the ethnicity, but something about this feels different, like a skilled crooner putting a slightly different spin on a familiar standard.

Mann has made very few changes to the text to accommodate the racial changeover (the name Kowalski is never heard). In fact, Williams’ poetic dialogue sounds perfectly authentic in these actors’ mouths. Mann  has been mulling over such a production for many years, but was intrigued by the African-American production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof  that was produced by the same man she enlisted, Stephen Byrd.

Mann, the artistic director at the McCarter Theatre Center who directed the Broadway version of  Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics, has a sure hand in the directorial basics of pacing and staging, but also for inventive grace notes. They can be as tiny as Blanche wiping off a pencil that Stanley probably used, to vignettes of community life including a jazz funeral that fill the time as the set is-redressed between scene changes.

She also has done a pretty solid job in casting. Mitch is played by Wood Harris, best known as the stone-cold drug kingpin Avon Barksdale in HBO’s television masterpiece The Wire. Despite having limited theater experience, the tall, lanky actor convincingly portrays an affable, loose-limbed suitor and pal who never seems like the Mama’s boy that most actors interpret him as.

Daphne Rubin-Vega, best known as Mimi in Rent and the Broadway production of Anna in the Tropics, satisfactorily renders Stella and even makes credible the emotional as well as physical connection of a well-bred lady to a man she’d likely have ignored in her youth.

Rubin-Vega only falls a shade short when Williams asks her to deal with the aftermath of the rape. It’s almost an impossible assignment when Stella seemingly refuses to believe her sister’s account because Stella so desperately needs to be with Stanley. In the best performances, Stella also must wonder deep down whether she is betraying her sister and will likely wonder for the rest of her life what kind of man she has chosen.

Eugene Lee, one of the deans of modern set design (ranging from Wicked to Saturday Night Live) has once again created a gloriously evocative and intricately detailed environment. The Kowalskis’ two-room apartment and the glimpses of the community surrounding them are as dilapidated as Belle Reve must be. Paul Tazewell’s costumes are period perfect and say volumes about the characters. He even puts Stanley’s Army jacket in a closet, recognizing that Stanley takes great pride in that part of his past life. But a real triumph, overlooked by the Tony nominators, is Edward Pierce creating myriad moods simply by morphing the light, everything from a honey-colored sunset to that harsh bedroom light that pitilessly exposes the truth.

Previous reviews in the series:
Leap of Faith, click here.
Once, click here
End of the Rainbow, click here