Features

Mad Cat’s Comedy Looks At Fashionista Isabella Blow

Editor, consultant and fashion icon Isabella Blow lived a tumultuous life that encompassed trend-setting style, two marriages plagued by infertility, championing designers like Alexander McQueen who then left her behind, coping with her brother’s drowning, battling ovarian cancer, trying electro-shock therapy to counteract depression and attempting suicide several times. So, of course, Mad Cat Theatre Company is turning her life into an entry in the annual South Beach Comedy Festival for two shows on Wednesday, April 17.

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Avi Hoffman Takes on 5,000 Years Of War In Outre’s An Illiad

Playing a 5,000-year-old poet decrying humanity’s addiction to rage and violence, clothing his warning in a modern retelling of Homer’s epic tale of the Trojan War, this is not your grandma’s Avi Hoffman sitting here. But it is Hoffman sitting here in rehearsal, striving to learn 47 pages of dense script as the sole storyteller in Outré Theatre Company’s An Illiad slated to open Friday at The Studio at Mizner Park.

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Stefanie Powers Hopes To Channel Tallulah in Looped

Stephanie Powers is stepping in as the emergency replacement for the lead part in a play in which she has 80 percent of the lines, doing it with less than two weeks’ rehearsal, and re-creating an iconic celebrity she personally knew in Looped, the slightly fictionalized account of Tallulah Bankhead’s comic and tragic – and substance abuse affected — attempt to dub one line of dialogue for her last movie a few years before she died.

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Talkin’ In The Green Room With: Karen Stephens

Karen Stephens’ ability to submerge herself in disparate characters was highlighted in her stunning tour de force playing 14 characters in 90 minutes in Sarah Jones’ Bridge & Tunnel which she has performed several times in the state. But just as impressive is her skill to disappear into less flamboyant characters, people who might live next door to you, such as the pragmatic mother she just finished portraying in Doubt at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre.

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Doubt Is The Point At The Maltz

Audiences members should leave the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s production of Doubt: A Parable arguing whether Father Flynn did or didn’t abuse a child, and some will be unable to make up their minds — which is the theme of the play and the reason for the title. Doubt is the point.

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Wicked Flies Into Broward To Enchant Local Fan Seventh Time

Thirty minutes before curtain at the Broward Center Wednesday, Miranda Palumbo ecstatically grinned as a clerk at the Oz Dust Boutique stuffed a grey hooded sweater jacket into a Wicked shopping bag along with some other memorabilia while her mother paid $94.

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Irreplaceable Playbills, Costumes And Ephemera Rescued From Coconut Grove

In the six years since the Coconut Grove Playhouse shuttered, irreplaceable theatrical history has festered in a fetid, crumbling structure, endangered by everything from larcenous-minded vagrants to Florida’s infamous mold-rich climate.
But in a third-act development worthy of a melodrama, Actors Playhouse in Coral Gables and the University of Miami library’s special collections division have rescued some of the Grove’s treasures.

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Podcast: Tyrell Talks About Arts Garage & The Future Of Theater

As part of our On The Boards podcasts in cooperation with Arts Radio Network, Florida Theater On Stage’s Bill Hirschman sits down for a conversation with Arts Garage Artistic Director and founder Lou Tyrrell for a comprehensive discussion about the season, the challenges of presenting new work, and the state of theater today. Arts Garage presents the world premiere this weekend of Israel Horovitz’s Gloucester Blue.

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Zev Buffman Sees No Mystery In Producing Agatha Christie’s The BBC Murders In Florida

South Florida impresario and veteran Broadway producer Zev Buffman foresees a future for stage theater — in radio. Not just for any theater, but orphans like the Parker Playhouse that are too big for local theater troupes and too small for Broadway tours. And he wants to do it in part by reviving the genre of mystery/thriller plays. Local audiences will see his first foray this month with his production of Agatha Christie’s The BBC Murders, four radio plays lost for a half-century, uncovered by Buffman’s detective work and adapted by grafting full-fledged theater techniques onto a vintage radio drama foundation.

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Tarell McCraney’s Hamlet Is First Step Toward Dream Of A Winter Festival In Miami

By Bill Hirschman “I’m doing all right as long as I don’t pass out.” It’s November and Tarell Alvin McCraney has sandwiched in a trip back to his hometown to prep his January 12 production of Hamlet at GableStage and …

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