Performances

The Interview Is Even Better The Second Time Around

Four years ago, The Women’s Theatre Project mounted Faye Sholiton’s The Interview about the persisting damage that the Holocaust wreaked across generations. As solid as the first production was, this edition is a significantly deeper, more moving rendition elevated by acting that has only become richer with time. This likely stands among the company’s finest offerings.

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This Cat Lady Purrs At Mad Cat

Kristina Wong’s Cat Lady at Mad Cat Theatre Company is downright hilarious while shot through with pathos and insights into the search for human connection. It seems to be exactly the offbeat but accessible exploration of loneliness that Wong and director Paul Tei hoped to create.

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Sister Act Rocks the House: Nun Musical is a Hard Habit to Break

We’re entering another period of as many as six productions opening in one week. As a result, reviews may not remain in the center featured position more than one day. Please check out recent reviews by clicking on entries listed …

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Sidle Up To Side By Side By Sondheim At Stage Door

This critic worships the gospel according to Stephen Sondheim and knows nearly every beat of the original cast recording of 1976’s Side By Side By Sondheim. So there was cause for concern. Thankfully, no such trepidation is called for in Miami Beach Stage Door’s production of the revue playing at the Byron Carlyle Theatre.

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This Show Boat Has Lovely Music But Uninspiring Acting

Warm, full-singing voices swiftly carry a happy audience down the Mississippi through a glorious score in Broward Stage Door’s Show Boat, but the acting and directing are so pedestrian that they rob the masterpiece of the magic it is capable of delivering. The magic is missing because Show Boat is more than its music. Still, audiences just wanting to hear Kern’s rich melody and sweeping underscoring tied to Hammerstein’s deceptively simple but deeply evocative lyrics will relish what Stage Door has wrought.

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McKeever And Santaland Diaries Deliver Off-Beat Holiday Spirit

Indulge your inner contrarian with the new subversive Christmas tradition, the annual staging somewhere of the delightfully contrarian The Santaland Diaries. The satire about an unemployed actor forced to pay the bills by enlisting in the army of elf drones at Macy’s Santaland is being mounted this time by Parade Productions in its second season in Mizner Park in Boca Raton.

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Backwoods Farce About Abuse Exit Pursued By A Bear Is A Hoot

Yards and yards of duct tape, a dead deer, a timely taser, emperor penguins, Shakespeare, a shotgun, Anderson Cooper, President Jimmy Carter and the titular ursine creature all are ingredients in this unalloyed hoot of an anti-spousal abuse comedy, Exit, Pursued By A Bear at the Theatre At Arts Garage.

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Plaza Theatre’s Oddball “Luv” Allows Avi Hoffman Full Rein

Back during the Cold War, a theatrical genre flourished called the American absurdist comedy. Perfected by Herb Gardner and Bruce Jay Friedman, it took hip unconventionality to an extreme degree of kookiness, one crucial millimeter short of being a living cartoon. Perhaps the most popular entry was Murray Schisgal’s hilarious Luv, hauled out of mothballs this holiday season by the fledgling Plaza Theatre in Manalapan for an older audience that remembers the original production in 1964.

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Bravura Turn By Janet Dacal Is Reason To See Last Five Years

A yin and yang vibe imbues Jason Robert Brown’s intriguing and imaginative two-character musical tracking the life cycle of a romance and marriage, The Last Five Years, receiving a warm, entertaining production at Actor Playhouse. But the reason to see it is the vibrant, bravura performance by former Miamian and current Broadway actress Janet Dacal.

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Dramaworks’ A Delicate Balance Delivers Uncompromising Thought-Provoking Drama

A nameless terror has upended the fragile homeostasis in Agnes and Tobias’ carefully-ordered uppercrust existence, all the more frightening because its anonymity makes it uncomfortably universal for the audience at Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance. What starts in this laudable production as a play about a troubled family of privilege, which keeps our attention simply because they are engagingly hyper-articulate, then ends as a shattering indictment of self-deception and hypocrisy in human interaction.

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