Reviews

Parade Productions’ Brooklyn Boy Is Mildly Funny, Mildly Moving But Flawed Evening

Avi Hoffman’s performance as a troubled writer, struggling to deal with success but escape his past, is one of the virtues in the promising but flawed inaugural offering from Parade Productions, a professional company performing in Mizner Park. There’s a lot of talent here working very hard, but not a lot of electricity emanating from the elegiac, mildly funny, mildly moving tale.

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FGO’s Rarely Performed Puccini La Rondine Benefits From Stirring Lead Actress

Say what you will about artifice and overheated emoting, few art forms other than Harlequin novels can touch opera for depicting idealized love. What fascinates about Florida Grand Opera’s production of Puccini’s rarely-seen La Rondine is how the fantasy of love collides with the realities of social-climbing and the class system

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Slow Burn’s Urinetown Will Make You Laugh ‘Til You… Well…

Slow Burn Theatre’s production of Urinetown the Musical marks another milestone in the young troupe’s evolution as a reliable purveyor of edgy, offbeat musical theater that few other mainstream companies have the courage to produce.

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Area Stage’s Snoopy! The Musical Lacks Bark, Bite

Yet, Snoopy! The Musical at Area Stage, the second of two musicals derived from the popular comic strip, Peanuts, just doesn’t have the same pedigree. Its songs are repetitive, its characters are caricatures and its messages are targeted to the Sesame Street crowd.

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Actors Playhouse’s Outstanding Next to Normal is Anything But

Perhaps God invented musicals just so someday we could be thrilled and troubled and moved and enriched by next to normal, Actors Playhouse’s finest work since Floyd Collins in 2003.

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NE 2nd Avenue Is Funny And Insightful Look Inside Multi-Cultural Miami

Teo Castellanos’ NE 2nd Avenue at the Arsht Center, funny and profound literally at the same time, is a sociological-anthropological field trip as if Castellanos was a hip-hop Margaret Mead. It takes us on a tour of the adjacent neighborhoods on the titular boulevard highlighted by encounters with a variety of inhabitants.

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Promethean’s Boeing Boeing is a Door-Slamming Chuckle

Boeing Boeing is a 1962 farce with doors that slam, swing, shut slowly, burst open in ones, twos and probably threes. Promethean Theatre and its house director Margaret M. Ledford, benter new territory with an out and out comedy that requires skill and discipline. As proven by the copious laughter in the hall, they acquit themselves well.

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Caldwell Theatre’s Chad Deity Has All The Right Moves

The Caldwell Theatre’s hilarious satire The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kristoffer Diaz sneaks a critical rabbit punch at the solar plexus of society. The milieu of “professional” wrestling should not dissuade serious theatergoers, although the faux spectacle including brief grappling bouts will entertain anyone but a killjoy. The copious comedy is laced with cutting social commentary about demagogues exploiting our prejudices about race and nationality to make money or gain power.

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Maltz’s Cabaret is Thrilling Left Turn Into Adult Musical Theater

With its new edgy production of Cabaret, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre takes an often thrilling left turn into adult, thought-provoking theater that this home of mainstream crowd-pleasers rarely attempts. This near-clone of the Roundabout Theatre’s 1998 revisionist revival – the Sam Mendes/Rob Marshall vision of a sleazy Hell on Earth with nipple rings – is among the finest work this company has yet produced.

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GableStage’s Motherf**ker Is Hilarious, Gritty, Profane and Thought-Provoking

Editor’s Note: We’re in high theater season when we have three to five openings a week. If you don’t find the review you’re looking for in the center column, check out the list of recent reviews in the upper left-hand …

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