Author Archives: Bill Hirschman

Seeking A Path Through The Past In Redwood Curtain

Lanford Wilson’s wistful and whimsical play Redwood Curtain postulates that the past we stock our psyche with becomes something integral to our being that has to be faced down if we are to move beyond it. It gets a well-meaning outing from the fledgling Primal Forces Production. It’s an intriguing evening that starts the brain cogitating about the themes, but as theater it doesn’t land solidly.

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Coconut Grove Playhouse Resurrection Finally Get Watershed Approvals

More than a decade after efforts began to rescue the financially failing Coconut Grove Playhouse, the Miami-Dade County Commission voted to hire an architect to design a $20 million theater complex and approved signing a long-term agreement with the existing GableStage to operate and manage the facility.

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Words Are The Heroines In Thinking Cap’s Vita And Virginia

In theory, Vita and Virginia details the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. But the real romance is a profligate, glorious love affair with words, with language, with literate expression.
Superb performances luxuriate like bodies lounging on the elegant chaises in Thinking Cap Theatre’s measured production.

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Satire Skewers Pursuit Of Celebrity In The Little Dog Laughed At Island City

Can a meaningful relationship blossom in a world where cynicism and self-interest seem to trump integrity and burgeoning affection? Island City Stage’s production of Douglas Carter Beane’s hilarious and touching The Little Dog Laughed explores the conundrum set amid the pragmatism of 21st Century seekers of fortune and fame in the shallows of a celebrity-centric culture.

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Evening Star’s The Addams Family Gamely Delivers The Goofy Giggles In A Flawed Script

There’s enough giggles and grins in Evening Star Productions’ The Addams Family delivered by these game, committed thespians to keep this production mildly diverting, but they still are finding their artistic chops and they still are chained to a script and score that devolves from the strychnine into the saccharine.

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Breaking News: Two-Theater Coconut Grove Playhouse Proposal Taken Off The Table

A citizens’ group that pushed for 14 months for a larger, more ambitious complex for the Coconut Grove Playhouse resurrection project has shelved its plan indefinitely because the Miami-Dade County administration opposes the idea, the group’s leader said Thursday morning.

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Slow Burn Theatre’s Ambitious Rent Pays Off In Spectacle

Slow Burn Theatre Company’s Rent is ambitious, daring, electric and 2 1/2 hours of non-stop rock ‘n’ roll — a no-holds barred, take chances, go-out-on-a-limb spectacle. But when stripped of the spectacle, the characters, some facing death, with others living in the shadows of HIV/AIDs, lack life.

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Where’s Whoopi? Sister Act Is Button-Pushing Mediocrity

Sister Act is not a terrible musical; it even has amusing and mildly entertaining passages. But the national tour at the Arsht Center is also a head-shaking mediocrity that begs an answer to why talented theater veterans wasted their time – and ours – on it.

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Theatre Critics Award Steinberg And Osborn Playwriting Award

The American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA) has selected Rebecca Gilman’s Luna Gale as the recipient of the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, recognizing playwrights for scripts that premiered professionally outside New York City during 2014. …

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The Magnificents Is Old Fashioned Entertainment

The Magnificents, The House Theatre of Chicago’s production that’s playing inside the intimate Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center, is pure and simple and classic entertainment.

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