Reviews

Special Theater Shelf Extra: Gorging on Gershwin

Sometimes it seems George Gershwin isn’t gone at all. Even now, Broadway is blessed with the revival of Porgy and Bess and the new Nice Work If You Can Get It. In regional theater, hardly a month goes by without …

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Naked Stage’s Turn of the Screw Is Superbly-Crafted Ghost Story

The Turn of the Screw, Henry James’ psychological thriller gets a superbly accomplished production as The Naked Stage’s first outing in almost two years featuring flawless performances by Katherine Amadeo and Matthew William Chizever, and director Margaret M. Ledford deftly creating a world of half-shadows and whispers.

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Mad Cat’s Hamlet Dog and Pony Show Makes You Laugh, Think and Scratch Your Head

Playwrights Paul Tei and Jessica Farr’s Hamlet Dog and Pony Show at ad Cat Theatreis a stylized mashup of Shakespeare, Brecht and 21st Century performance art that examines existentialism versus nihilism by setting the vacillating Dane in a fantasia of modern American politics and power. Like an atom careening around a chain reaction, it is by turns inventive, self-indulgent, exciting, boring, and, above all, sometimes insightful, sometimes incomprehensible. And entertaining.

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Kim Ehly Delivers Welcome Addition With Baby GirL

Kim Ehly’s touching and rollicking play Baby GirL, the inaugural effort of her newly-minted Kutumba Theatre Project in association with Empire Stage in Fort Lauderdale,is a wryly comic look at a young lesbian searching for her birth mother is an infectiously endearing tale of how we make our own families.

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Real Men Sing Show Tunes at Actors Playhouse is Frothy Fare Revealing Deepest Secrets

The world premiere musical comedy Real Men Sing Show Tunes…and play with puppets lazing through the summer at Actors’ Playhouse reveals men’s deepest darkest secrets, namely life-long confusion, anxiety and fear. T

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Dramaworks’ Fantasticks Is Cool Drink of Summer Lemonade

By Bill Hirschman A gentle, compassionate smile at human folly suffuses The Fantasticks when it’s produced as well as Palm Beach Dramaworks has. Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s classic chamber musical is a refreshing tumbler of iced lemonade on a …

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Run the Race With GableStage

Lawyers banter about innocence and justice in David Mamet’s incendiary play at GableStage, but the characters don’t bother to dissect long-decided issues about how the judicial system’s sausage is made. The title of the play and the real subject is Race. The double-helix construction of the twisting dialogue underscores Mamet’s thesis that bogus baggage of race relations subverts any meaningful discussion of seemingly straight ahead subjects as innocence and justice.

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Arts Garage’s Cabaret Verboten Is Brilliantly Executed But Unrelieved Cynicism

With brilliant but unrelieved corrosive cynicism, Cabaret Verborten, ausical revue at the Theatre at Arts Garage, mercilessly draws unnerving parallels between the dissolute Weimar Republic and 21st Century America, bluntly underscoring how ripe we are for fascist demagoguery in a heated election cycle.

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Broward Stage Door’s The Immigrant A Tender Family Memoir

Mark Harelik’s The Immigrant, at Broward Stage Door Theatre, has a universal message at it’s core, a fish-out-of-water story that engages the audience in the journey.

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Stage Door’s Backwards In High Heels Is Energy Packed Song-And-Dance Story

Broward Stage Door Theatre in Coral Springs presents a super-energized rendition of the nostalgic musical Backwards In High Heels that follows the life of Ginger Rogers.

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