Reviews

FGO’s Classic Carmen Features Director’s Imaginative Touches

Oddly, for all the technical artistry that the assembled talents are displaying in Florida Grand Opera’s thoroughly satisfying 10th run at Georges Bizet’s deathlessly popular masterwork, it is the imaginative touches of director Bernard Uzan and his insistence that they singers act that makes this edition memorable.

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Slow Burn Takes A Welcome Return Trip Home To Avenue Q

Thomas Wolfe warned that you can’t go home again, but Slow Burn Theatre Company’s revival of its 2012 production of Avenue Q is a welcome and joyful return to the neighborhood and the ol’ gang.

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Sweet Charity’s Optimistic Hope Is A Strange Fit For This Week

Sweet Charity is a fundamentally flawed showcase that virtually no one has ever pulled off satisfyingly, but Broward Stage Door director Michael Leeds makes a solid enough stab at it that a receptive undemanding audiences won’t mind having spent a few hours in its pleasant company.

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Riverside’s Johnny Cash Revue Ring Of Fire Walks The Line

In Riverside Theatre’s polished production of the musical revue Ring of Fire, four pitch perfect voices and a host of skilled musicians bring to life the legacy of America’s greatest home-grown troubadour, Johnny Cash. And what a gathering of talent.

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Sublime Acting, Extravagant Design Grapple With Stolid Structure In The Audience

The Audience, the West End sensation turned Tony winner , conjures 10 meetings, between Queen Elizabeth II and her prime ministers. The play’s regional premiere at Maltz Jupiter Theatre, is like watching an interstitially linked short-play collection. And like every shorts compilation, some of the pieces delight while others plod.

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Zoetic Stage Debuts Premiere of McKeever’s Emotion-Filled After

There’s something thrilling about seeing a world premiere play unfold. And when the playwright is one of South Florida’s great hopes to get an original play to the Great White Way, there’s even more of excitement to see his latest work.
That was the energy that prevailed over the production of Michael McKeever’s After at Zoetic Stage.

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Chekhov’s Sisters Waiting To Exhale In Beckett’s New Jersey

Deborah Zoe Laufer’s world premiere The Three Sisters of Weekhawken is, indeed, funny in its daffy way, but this imaginative mashup of Chekhov’s meditation on yearning refracted through Beckett’s existentialism and a shred of Neil Simon has a serious and eventually moving moral about the perils of paralyzing procrastination.

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Thinking Cap Theatre’s Director And Cast Add Color To ‘Mud’

Tension is at the heart and soul of Thinking Cap Theatre’s Mud, a three-hander by Maria Irene Fornes, now at The Vanguard in Fort Lauderdale.
Director Nicole Stodard puts her stamp on the dramatic 17-scene play, most noticeably bringing a brightness to a dingy world through creative staging, an impeccably interesting soundtrack, and finding three actors who are willing to go out on a limb with her.

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Emotions & Sound Swell On Epic Scale In Slow Burn’s Hunchback

A near epic vision unfolds in Slow Burn Theatre Company’s brave, ambitious and dark The Hunchback of Notre Dame resulting in the one of the most powerful musicals seen in South Florida in recent years featuring two memorable performances, a hardworking ensemble and orchestra, evocative production values and an invaluable choir flanking the stage.

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Playhouse’s Million Dollar Quartet Kicks Out The Jams

It almost should go without saying that the rock ’n’ roll blisters the paint off the walls of Actors’ Playhouse’s balcony theater in its thoroughly satisfying edition of Million Dollar Quartet.

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