Reviews

The Pursuit Of Dreams At Stage Door’s Broadway Bound

Broward Stage Door’s Broadway Bound may not land perfectly all the time, but these theater pros deliver a no-excuses-needed effort that works often and effectively and ultimately satisfies.

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Edgy ‘Cirkopolis’ Wows, Entertains at the Arsht

Cique Eloize’s Cirkopolis cast has in common with their itinerant ancestors is the determination to thrill audiences with death-defying feats of agility, daredevil tricks and silly clown antics.

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Style And Script Clash Through Ground Up ‘s The Good Father

By John Thomason Since its return to regular summer programming in 2014, Miami’s Ground Up & Rising has been specializing in a particular strain of western theater: the austere, bone-scraping two- (or three-) hander, minimally produced and ferociously acted. Christian …

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Report From New York: The Reason To See The Humans When Visiting Broadway

Sometimes the confluence of talent that occurs in a New York City production creates something that won’t be duplicated elsewhere. South Florida has proven that a regional production actually may be better in its own way, but it cannot replicate that specific recipe for alchemical magic. Within two years, you’ll see the same thing with The Humans.

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Tight Harmonies Transport the Audience Back to the 1950s In The Wick’s Forever Plaid

The Wick Theatre has nearly mastered the musical revue genre by hiring solid talent and adding in a few extra production values – all of it evident in this summer’s frothy paean to middle-class America’s music of the 1950s, the venerable Forever Plaid.

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Dramaworks’ 1776 Provides Lessons All Too Relevant Today

in these terrible times of violence, deprivation and polarization, the resonances in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ imaginatively reinvented production of 1776 are deafening. Amid the laugh lines, the dancing and the drama, there is a challenge to us across two and half centuries to deal with our current trials with the same virtues that our forefathers did.

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Report From New York: A Poignant Slice Of Small Town Dreams In Waitress

While the production of Waitress faithfully follows the schematics of Adrienne Shelly’s charming 2007 film, it does exactly what a musical should do: use the added tools of melody, lyrics and dance to amplify, augment and dig deeper into the human condition in ways that declaiming lines from a script cannot do, no matter how deft the thespians.

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Report From New York: Folky Bright Star May Be Fading On Bway, But Look For It Locally

The new musical Bright Star is a 21st Century celebration of the folk tradition complete with plucky heroines, gentle humor, unbending fundamentalists, facile fiddling, profound personal tragedies and the eventual reconciling redemption with a distinct but not overbearing reliance on faith in a higher power.

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Evening Star’s Shakespeare Abridged Is 90 Minutes, 125 Minutes Of Comic Anarchy

The running time for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) (Revised) is advertised at 90 minutes On opening night at Evening Star Productions, it ran two hours. This is a testament to how downright hilarious this production is, the advantage of an an audience of partisans to interact with, and a yin-and-yang vibe of sloppy undisciplined anarchy.

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Crazed Chameleons Dominate Vanguard’s Parallel Lives

The Vanguard meant no self-aggrandizement posting photos of Lucy and Ethel, Carol and Vicki, across their set for the hilarious sketch comedy, Parallel Lives. But it’s apt. Because Elena Maria Garcia gets to prove once again that she may well be the finest comic actress to grace local stages over the past two decades. And it doesn’t hurt that partner in crime Casey Dressler is on the fast-track in the same category.

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