Reviews

Stage Door’s “Pompadour” Is Eclectic But Not Exciting Stroll Down Memory Lane Of Pop Hits

By Bill Hirschman Pompadour, the new musical subtitled Hits, Harmony and Hairspray bowing at Broward Stage Door, is what it is and is what it wants to be. So the question that only you can answer is whether it’s what …

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Report From New York: King Charles III Is Season’s Crowning Drama But It’s Leaving Soon

This is the power of the play King Charles III: Six weeks after seeing it, I found myself at intermission of a local show last weekend still raving about it to other audience members. So much for the ephemeral nature of theater.

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The Hills Come Alive With Fresh Take On The Sound of Music

How do you solve a problem of taking a 56-year old American musical classic and making it fresh for a modern audience? If you’re director Jack O’Brien, you lovingly dust the tarnish off of The Sound of Music and imbue it with a freshness that’s as crisp as the snow-covered Austrian Alps.

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Holiday Spirit Litmus Test: The Grinch Returns To Broward

The tour of Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas is a reliable litmus test of just how deep into or disaffected you are with the holiday spirit.

This definitively children’s musical with a few sugar plum crumbs thrown to the adults in tow will likely increase the cheery level of those already in a cheery mood and do little to make merry those fighting the holiday blahs

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Report From New York: Allegiance The Musical Could Have Been Far More Incisive

Allegiance, the story of a Japanese-American family rent apart by their internment in World War II, has the potential to be a great play. Unfortunately, it’s a musical.

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Fledgling Marquee Theater’s Songs For a New World Bares The Souls Of Young Adults

Marquee Theater Company’s production of Jason Robert Brown’s Songs For A New World slices open the studied flat affect of the “Whatever” generation to expose inner lives as vibrant, complex and tumultuous as that of any group before them.

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Kinky Boots Has Hot Star But Otherwise Not Much Of A Kick

The national tour of Kinky Boots was a well-polished evening of musical comedy with soulful ballads and glitzy production numbers, but this construction felt so manipulative, so by-the-numbers as if it, too, came off a factory production line.

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Hard-Working Cast Can’t Save The Trial Of Ebenezer Scrooge

Actors Playhouse’s production of The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge has a talented cast working hard under the direction of David Arisco, but good grief, what a waste of the resources of Mark Brown’s lame script. For one hours and forty minutes (including intermission), the audiences waits and waits for a single new riff in the Scrooge story, even a shred of logic explaining Brown’s basic premise.

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Dramaworks’ History Boys Celebrates Intelligence And Education For Its Own Sake

Nearly everyone in the Palm Beach Dramaworks’ superb production of The History Boys is in love with unleashing flash floods of verbiage in an orgy of ideas illustrated by their addiction to quoting a pantheon encompassing W.H. Auden and Frederick Nietzsche in rapid fire banter

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Maltz’s Reimagined Billy Elliot Flies Like The Spirit Of Its Hero

The Maltz Jupiter Theatre has successfully re-imagined Billy Eliot the Musical into winning edition that is more effective than the national company that toured South Florida a few seasons back.

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