Author Archives: Bill Hirschman
Dramaworks’ 1776 Provides Lessons All Too Relevant Today
in these terrible times of violence, deprivation and polarization, the resonances in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ imaginatively reinvented production of 1776 are deafening. Amid the laugh lines, the dancing and the drama, there is a challenge to us across two and half centuries to deal with our current trials with the same virtues that our forefathers did.
An Unusually Apropos 1776 For Our Times At PB Dramaworks
A deeply polarized citizenry, partisans with irreconcilable ideas about the role of government, a stalled deliberative body, confusion, anxiety. Sound familiar? The current political climate has spurred Palm Beach Dramaworks to reinvent that July perennial musical 1776 to highlight the similarities between us and the Founding Fathers in its production July 1-24.
Report From New York: A Poignant Slice Of Small Town Dreams In Waitress
While the production of Waitress faithfully follows the schematics of Adrienne Shelly’s charming 2007 film, it does exactly what a musical should do: use the added tools of melody, lyrics and dance to amplify, augment and dig deeper into the human condition in ways that declaiming lines from a script cannot do, no matter how deft the thespians.
Updated Story: New Theatre Announces It is Closing, In Part To Eroding Audience
New Theatre, one of the most high-profile Florida theaters for 30 years and developer of the Pulitzer-winning Anna in the Tropics, is closing, its board of directors announced Thursday. The cause appears to be economics although the specifics have not been disclosed. Artistic Director Ricky J. Martinez actually resigned May 23.
Report From New York: Folky Bright Star May Be Fading On Bway, But Look For It Locally
The new musical Bright Star is a 21st Century celebration of the folk tradition complete with plucky heroines, gentle humor, unbending fundamentalists, facile fiddling, profound personal tragedies and the eventual reconciling redemption with a distinct but not overbearing reliance on faith in a higher power.
Evening Star’s Shakespeare Abridged Is 90 Minutes, 125 Minutes Of Comic Anarchy
The running time for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) (Revised) is advertised at 90 minutes On opening night at Evening Star Productions, it ran two hours. This is a testament to how downright hilarious this production is, the advantage of an an audience of partisans to interact with, and a yin-and-yang vibe of sloppy undisciplined anarchy.
Crazed Chameleons Dominate Vanguard’s Parallel Lives
The Vanguard meant no self-aggrandizement posting photos of Lucy and Ethel, Carol and Vicki, across their set for the hilarious sketch comedy, Parallel Lives. But it’s apt. Because Elena Maria Garcia gets to prove once again that she may well be the finest comic actress to grace local stages over the past two decades. And it doesn’t hurt that partner in crime Casey Dressler is on the fast-track in the same category.
Soul of Motor City Delivers The Detroit Sound At Stage Door
Greying Boomers may instinctively resist that the music of their lives is being repackaged into stage revues with little or no story the way Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer’s songbooks have been for the past two decades. But when it’s done with as much skill and verve as Broward Stage Door’s The Soul of Motor City, it’s hard not to get swept up.
Beauty And The Beast Redux Redux Redux Still Effective
There’s a virtue, I suppose, in reliability. When you go to see something with Disney’s name in the title whether it’s the Pirates of Caribbean Ride in Orlando, Anaheim, Toyko or Paris, you know what you’re getting. So it is with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast making what is likely its seventh visit to South Florida,.
Floridian Miles Wilkin Honored With Tony For Bringing Broadway Across America
For about three seconds Sunday night, the Tony Awards broadcast a pre-recorded glimpse of Miles C. Wilkin and slipped in a sentence saying that he was receiving a “Special Tony Award. But Wilkin, a native Floridian now returning to live in South Beach, has been one of the people who transformed the quality and amount of theater that the rest of the country has seen in their communities over four decades.
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