Performances

Actors’ Playhouse Outwits Dimwitted Fox on the Fairway

The Fox on the Fairway, plays more like a 1970s sitcom. When any one of the comedy’s exaggerated characters comes bursting through the door (and this happens more than a few times), you expect a canned laugh track to surface.The Fox on the Fairway won’t take the World Cup when it comes to comedy, but it’s a fun romp and summer fare that only requires the audience to be swept away in its lunacy.

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Memphis The Musical Keeps Rocking The House At The Arsht

Say what you will about the joys and shortcomings of Memphis the Musical — starting with exuberant performances and unimpressive lyrics –it has one of the most infallibly infectious finales.

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War Horse Remains Thrilling Theater On Tour But Has Lost A Bit Of The Original Magic

War Horse is cherished by many of us who saw it at Lincoln Center as one
of the most brilliantly executed pieces of theater we have seen. Certainly, audiences continue to be thrilled by the geniuses who designed, built and now endow breath nightly into the larger-than-life puppets that nearly transmute into flesh-and-bone horses. And the creatures are only one element among superbly conceived stagecraft.. But it’s hard to shake the heretical truth that the extra sense of transcendence we felt in New York wasn’t there on the opening night of this two-week run.

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Report From New York: Durang’s Satire Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike Is Funny and Cutting and Silly and Superb

So among the fine, entertaining evenings and afternoons in theater this trip, the highlight hands down was watching a brilliant cast under Nicholas Martin’s direction make Christopher Durang’s wacky Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike into such a hilarious yet incisive satire on the 21st Century.

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Theater Shelf: Philharmonic’s Staged Concert of Carousel On Line For Very Limited Time

Act quickly – you only have a few days to view one of the greatest concert presentations of a musical that I’ve ever seen … the New York Philharmonic’s staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.

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Report From New York: I’ve Never Been To Spain, But I’ve Been to Madrid With Edie Falco

I expended so much effort at Liz Flahive’s The Madrid at the Manhattan Theatre Club desperately trying to get my metaphorical arms around the shape and meaning of this play about a runaway wife that I failed to take many notes. I also failed to see why this passable script was mounted other than Flahive is a producer on TV’s Nurse Jackie, which stars The Madrid’s headliner, Edie Falco.

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Report From New York: Tyson Rewarding In Trip To Bountiful

It’s rare that color blind casting is truly color blind. What happens so smoothly and appropriately in the Broadway revival of Horton Foote’s The Trip To Bountiful, is that a play about a white Texas farmer who seeks to reclaim the soul she lost moving to Houston in the early 1950s is, in fact, a perfect and effortless fit with a primarily African American cast. This edition is helped immeasurably that the part of Carrie Watts, the 88-year-old heroine who runs away from a stifling life relying on her son and daughter-law – is played by the dead solid 79-year-old Cicely Tyson.

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AAPACT’s Anne & Emmett Finds Footing In Common Ground

Janet Langhart Cohen’s play, Anne & Emmett, this notion of imagination and introduction paves the way for a stirring play about intolerance and two people from decidedly different backgrounds who discover that they share a lot more in common than they or the audience could ever imagine, presented by the African American Performing Arts Community Theatre, Inc.

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Priscilla Is Certified Silly Hoot, Dressed To The Nines, Tens, Elevens And Way, Way Beyond

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, is just an extravagant, downright silly and infectiously entertaining hoot, a gay fantasia – as in Disney’s Fantasia – playing for only one week at the Arsht Center in Miami before moving at the end of the month to the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach.

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FGO’s La Traviata Surprisingly Well-Acted As Well As Sung

The surprising virtue of Florida Grand Opera’s 11th retelling of Verdi’s La Traviata is that for all the performers singing high E’s at the top of their lungs, all the falling to their knees in sorrow or illness, for all the oversized passions, it’s believable.

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