Reviews

Actor goes from Zero to 70 in Mostel play

Not since George C. Scott has an actor impersonated righteous outrage with the skill and intensity that Jim Brochu brings to Zero Mostel’s paint-blistering jeremiad against colleagues naming names during the 1950s in Zero Hour. Brochu’s railing against the betrayal …

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Timeless choreography and humanity make for an energized “West Side Story” at the Broward Center

What still stuns in this revival of West Side Story, 54 years on, is how Jerome Robbins uses the movement of human bodies to tell stories. For the huge percentage of Broadway audiences unfamiliar with modern dance or ballet, Robbins”genius …

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Stage Door’s “Plaza Suite’ scores its comic points

  Plaza Suite has been staged a multitude of times since its Broadway debut in 1968, the subsequent introduction to the masses on film in 1971, and a television adaptation in 1987. The challenge today for any theater group that …

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“The Irish Curse” measures up quite well at Mosaic Theatre

For every man who has been dragged to the theater unwillingly to see a play about female bonding, the miseries of menopause, or overdrawn soliloquies describing what’s going on “down there,” The Irish Curse is their revenge. For the uninitiated, …

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Versatile Miami City Ballet at their finest in varied program

Miami City Ballet’s versatility was showcased with the program of three contrasting works by George Balanchine, Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp, which opened Friday night at the Arsht Center. In a week that saw the announcement of the company’s three-week …

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Crowning Glory: Gospel musical is uplifting and entertaining

The relationship between black women and their hats is explored in Crowns, an uplifting, enlightening and entertaining musical written by actress-playwright Regina Taylor, and now playing through Sunday at the Carnival Studio Theater in the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami. …

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Not high art but “High Dive” provides an amusing evening at New Theatre

  High Dive is the shaggiest of shaggy dog stories, but with Barbara Sloan as the storyteller Saturday at New Theatre, it was akin to spending a delightful hour listening to an unusually entertaining luncheon partner. Sloan is the narrator …

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“Spider Woman” needs work to ensnare audience in its web

The performing arts are among the few serious creative endeavors that operate under a stopwatch—the endless gestation of Moscow Art Theater drama or Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark apart. At some prearranged point, the show must go on, ready or …

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Jewish wiseguy comes to life in Aventura

While Meyer Lansky may not have become a household name like Al Capone or “Lucky” Luciano, the Jewish-American mobster is consistently ranked as one of the Top 10 gangsters of all time. Yet if you listen to his side of …

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“Spelling Bee” proves wry and endearing, even with appallingly ignorant audience members

The authors of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee know that inside the most self-assured, accomplished adult are hidden the whispers we endured on the cusp of adolescence that insisted we were misfits eternally doomed to be outsiders. The …

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