Tag Archives: Christian Vandepas

Island City Wrestles Challenging Suddenly Last Summer

Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer presents a considerable challenge for theaters to pull off with its quirky characters, its quirkier premise and its total abandonment of theatricalized naturalism in favor of unabashed symbolism. Island City Stage should be commended for the courage to tackle this work at all and considerable praise for wrestling it to an acceptable draw.

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Slow Burn Takes A Welcome Return Trip Home To Avenue Q

Thomas Wolfe warned that you can’t go home again, but Slow Burn Theatre Company’s revival of its 2012 production of Avenue Q is a welcome and joyful return to the neighborhood and the ol’ gang.

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Thinking Cap Theatre’s Director And Cast Add Color To ‘Mud’

Tension is at the heart and soul of Thinking Cap Theatre’s Mud, a three-hander by Maria Irene Fornes, now at The Vanguard in Fort Lauderdale.
Director Nicole Stodard puts her stamp on the dramatic 17-scene play, most noticeably bringing a brightness to a dingy world through creative staging, an impeccably interesting soundtrack, and finding three actors who are willing to go out on a limb with her.

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Cancel The Cookout: Don’t Miss Ground Up & Rising’s Scorching Our Lady of 121st Street

We’ve written a paragraph like this only two or three times: Stop what you are doing. Stop reading this review. Go to the phone or online and order tickets right now for Ground Up & Rising’s superb production of Stephen Adly Gurgis’ Our Lady of 121st Street.

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Difficult But Intriguing Musical ‘A Minister’s Wife’ At GableStage

When a company like GableStage takes risks so many others will not, there’s bound to be some triumphs, some failures, and mixed results as in A Minister’s Wife. The local artists give everything they have to pull off this intriguing chamber musical. It’s more the strange choice of a fascinating but flawed property that isn’t easy to love.

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Island City Stage’s ‘Joan Crawford’ Cranks Up The Camp

Island City Stage gives the first full performance of Michael Leeds’ Who Killed Joan Crawford, a comedy mystery about male friends invited to a birthday party dressed as Crawford characters.
Break out the martinis. It isn’t perfect, but it’s still a helluva lot of fun

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Looking Back At South Florida Theater’s 2015: Taking Chances Financially And Artistically

2015 produced a wild variety of snapshots to paste in the theatrical scrapbooks: a male Dolly Levi, a homicidal dimwit slicing carrots, a kidnapper forcing her captives to learn nonsense, a tsunami engulfing a Japanese village, a green-gunked survivor of toxic sludge singing love songs to his blind librarian girlfriend. You know, just another year for regional theater in South Florida.

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Dogfight Features Talented Cast, But A Problematic Script

By Hap Erstein In the same way that Slow Burn Theatre Company’s artistic director Patrick Fitzwater has a good eye for spotting performance talent, he also is savvy at identifying worthy new composers and lyricists. Sometimes, however, his ability to …

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The Recommendation Satisfies In Its Subtleties At Ground Up

By Michelle F. Solomon Miami’s Ground Up & Rising production of Jonathan Caren’s The Recommendation is compelling on so many levels. Yet, what makes it so formidable doesn’t have much to do with the actors on stage; it’s more about …

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Can You Spell Hilarious Or Poignant? Slow Burn’s Bee Can

Slow Burn Theatre Company gives the perennial favorite The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee as excellent a production as we’ve seen of it, hitting the perfect balance between the hilarious and poignant, marked with a child’s exuberance for living and an adult’s compassion for the angst over the process of losing innocence.

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