Performances

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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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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Soul of Motor City Delivers The Detroit Sound At Stage Door

Greying Boomers may instinctively resist that the music of their lives is being repackaged into stage revues with little or no story the way Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer’s songbooks have been for the past two decades. But when it’s done with as much skill and verve as Broward Stage Door’s The Soul of Motor City, it’s hard not to get swept up.

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Beauty And The Beast Redux Redux Redux Still Effective

There’s a virtue, I suppose, in reliability. When you go to see something with Disney’s name in the title whether it’s the Pirates of Caribbean Ride in Orlando, Anaheim, Toyko or Paris, you know what you’re getting. So it is with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast making what is likely its seventh visit to South Florida,.

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Slow Burn’s Heathers Sings To The Teenage Misfit In Us All

You know you wanted to murder some abusive soul-crushing bullies and snobs when you were in high school. Heathers knows it and wants to liberate your daydream. So do the cool kids and not-so-cool kids at Slow Burn Theatre Company giving a hilarious don’t-miss production of the 2014 off-Broadway musical version of the 1988 cult classic film.

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