Reviews
Sidle Up To Side By Side By Sondheim At Stage Door
This critic worships the gospel according to Stephen Sondheim and knows nearly every beat of the original cast recording of 1976’s Side By Side By Sondheim. So there was cause for concern. Thankfully, no such trepidation is called for in Miami Beach Stage Door’s production of the revue playing at the Byron Carlyle Theatre.
This Show Boat Has Lovely Music But Uninspiring Acting
Warm, full-singing voices swiftly carry a happy audience down the Mississippi through a glorious score in Broward Stage Door’s Show Boat, but the acting and directing are so pedestrian that they rob the masterpiece of the magic it is capable of delivering. The magic is missing because Show Boat is more than its music. Still, audiences just wanting to hear Kern’s rich melody and sweeping underscoring tied to Hammerstein’s deceptively simple but deeply evocative lyrics will relish what Stage Door has wrought.
McKeever And Santaland Diaries Deliver Off-Beat Holiday Spirit
Indulge your inner contrarian with the new subversive Christmas tradition, the annual staging somewhere of the delightfully contrarian The Santaland Diaries. The satire about an unemployed actor forced to pay the bills by enlisting in the army of elf drones at Macy’s Santaland is being mounted this time by Parade Productions in its second season in Mizner Park in Boca Raton.
Backwoods Farce About Abuse Exit Pursued By A Bear Is A Hoot
Yards and yards of duct tape, a dead deer, a timely taser, emperor penguins, Shakespeare, a shotgun, Anderson Cooper, President Jimmy Carter and the titular ursine creature all are ingredients in this unalloyed hoot of an anti-spousal abuse comedy, Exit, Pursued By A Bear at the Theatre At Arts Garage.
Plaza Theatre’s Oddball “Luv” Allows Avi Hoffman Full Rein
Back during the Cold War, a theatrical genre flourished called the American absurdist comedy. Perfected by Herb Gardner and Bruce Jay Friedman, it took hip unconventionality to an extreme degree of kookiness, one crucial millimeter short of being a living cartoon. Perhaps the most popular entry was Murray Schisgal’s hilarious Luv, hauled out of mothballs this holiday season by the fledgling Plaza Theatre in Manalapan for an older audience that remembers the original production in 1964.
Our Theater Lovers’ Gift Guide To CDs, DVDs and Books
Over the past 52 weeks, the Theater Shelf column has evaluated a host of CDs, DVDs and books you might consider as gifts for your theater friends this season – or for yourself, for that matter. You can look over the archive using the hyperlinked index at BradHathaway.Com. As the holiday season approached, however, many more titles became available. Here is a sampling of titles that might please one or more of the people on your holiday gift list.
Bravura Turn By Janet Dacal Is Reason To See Last Five Years
A yin and yang vibe imbues Jason Robert Brown’s intriguing and imaginative two-character musical tracking the life cycle of a romance and marriage, The Last Five Years, receiving a warm, entertaining production at Actor Playhouse. But the reason to see it is the vibrant, bravura performance by former Miamian and current Broadway actress Janet Dacal.
Dramaworks’ A Delicate Balance Delivers Uncompromising Thought-Provoking Drama
A nameless terror has upended the fragile homeostasis in Agnes and Tobias’ carefully-ordered uppercrust existence, all the more frightening because its anonymity makes it uncomfortably universal for the audience at Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance. What starts in this laudable production as a play about a troubled family of privilege, which keeps our attention simply because they are engagingly hyper-articulate, then ends as a shattering indictment of self-deception and hypocrisy in human interaction.
Showtime’s [title of show] Is Theatre Geek’s Nirvana
If you’ve ever kicked in the chorus line of a community theater production of Mame, you’ll likely adore Showtime Performing Arts Theatre’s [title of show]. But if you’ve ever secretly practiced a Tony Award acceptance speech in your bathroom, then [title of show] is a must-see.
Caisley’s Happy Is Corrosive Flawed, But Intriguing Comedy About Self-Deception
New Theatre’s production of Robert Caisley’s sardonically titled Happy is not an evening you “like” watching an “emotional terrorist” spend 80 minutes mercilessly carving away a nebbish’s illusion of well-being. But even with a flawed mounting of a script that still needs work, Happy is undeniably an intriguing examination of modern man burying true feelings under a socially-acceptable but life-denying veneer.
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