Reviews

Flashdance’s Skill And Energy Trumps Formula And Material

With hardbodies gyrating in knife-sharp choreography to infectious music, Flashdance The Musical is a happy surprise in which undeniable skill, energy and talent trump material about as subtle as sledgehammers bashing steel plates into shape.

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BRTG’s Chicago Is Entertaining But Needs More Razzle Dazzle

A muted clarinet makes beautiful music, but sometimes what’s called for is the blare of a clarion trumpet and the insolent snap of a snare drum. That’s the problem facing the almost but never quite satisfying Boca Raton Theatre Guild production of the Kander & Ebb musical Chicago.

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Stefanie Powers Seduces Audience As Tallulah In Looped

The proof that Stefanie Powers’ reincarnation of Tallulah Bankhead had thoroughly seduced the audience at the revival of Looped was not the waves of laughter at how adroitly she tossed off playwright Matthew Lombardo’s torrent of wry and wicked quips. It was in the crystalline silence that embraced her sudden turns of introspection as Bankhead exposed the emotional pain that she masked with the outsized persona of heedless hedonism that eclipsed her real life.

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Powerful, Fresh Reimagining Of Les Miz Is Ready For Broadway

This Broadway Across America edition of Les Miserables is not some cynical attempt to wring just one more quart of milk from the cash cow. Instead, this is a legitimate revival in the deepest sense of the word that is as vibrant, passionate and new-born as a world premiere.

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AAPACT’s Amen Corner Is Flawed But Passionate Look at Faith And Organized Religion

AAPACT’S ambitious The Amen Corner is earnest and heartfelt although most of the time, the characters and their tragic spiral simply don’t feel genuine or organic. But every 20 minutes or so in this 2 ½-hour evening, the actors dig into their marrow and slingshot the play from pedestrian performances into an affecting truth that clutches the audience’s heart.

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Plaza’s WaistWatchers Ready Made For Ladies Who Lunch

There’s certainly an appetite for WaistWatchers: The Musical — a show for the ladies who lunch as a girl’s day (or night) out, which would account for one-quarter of Sunday’s audience being made up of women’s groups at the Plaza Theatre in Manalapan. (The Grove Women’s Club and Lexington Ladies were in the house at this particular Sunday matinee.)

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Thinking Cap’s The Rover Is Ambitious, Smart & Delightful

There’s more to Thinking Cap Theatre’s inventive The Rover than staging a 300-year-old play with oomph enough to keep a 21st century audience interested. What director Nicole Stodard (who is also the artistic director of Thinking Cap Theatre) has done is to craft an inventive, ambitious and quite delicious offering of England’s first professional female playwright’s navel gazing study of the dating games people play. And watching Stodard’s adaptation of Aphra Behn’s The Rover proves that the battle of the sexes hasn’t changed much since 1677.

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Christina Alexander Explores Varied Relationships In Hate! An American Love Story At MTC

Admit up front that the world premiere of Christina Alexander’s one-woman show Hate! An American Love Story is a tad unfocused, undisciplined, even sloppy theater. Then acknowledge that it’s also one of the most insightful and moving depictions that South Florida audiences have seen of the emotional viscera inside inter-racial, inter-gender relationships.

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La Sonnambula Is No Snooze Thanks To Stunning Turn By Rachele Gilmore

You don’t have to be a musicologist or opera aficionado to recognize the stunning meld of emotion and technique in the artistry of Rachele Gilmore’s performance of the title role in Florida Grand Opera’s production of La Sonnambula.

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Maltz Leaves Little Doubt

The Maltz Jupiter Theatre production under J. Barry Lewis’ direction merits being seen for three finely-crafted performances by Maureen Anderman, Jim Ballard and Julie Kleiner, plus an outstanding portrait by Karen Stephens. But thematically, it’s thrown out of whack because the deck seems stacked toward one truth and then irreversibly stacked the other way. Few people will leave this production indecisive about the priest’s guilt or innocence.

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