Tag Archives: Avi Hoffman

Upcoming Brighton Beach Memoirs Is Different Neil Simon

With the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s upcoming Brighton Beach Memoirs, director J. Barry Lewis says people need to “come forward with a new perspective on what a Neil Simon play is, not just what you think.”

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GableStage Mounts Its Unique Passionate Take On Indecent

GableStage’s rendering of Paula Vogel’s Indecent is freshly distinctive from Rebecca Taichman’s New York staging and from the rapturously received version that Palm Beach Dramaworks delivered last season. It’s not better or worse; it is its own. And its quality takes a back seat to no one.

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Indecent Exemplifies What Theater Can Be & Why We Go

Palm Beach Dramaworks’ Indecent is precisely the kind of thrilling evening that glories in what theater can be – a unique art form that cannot be matched by anything on film, anything hanging on a wall, anything reproducible on an mp3 or an mp4.

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Vogel Encourages Dramaworks To Use Indecent Script As Blueprint Not Straitjacket

Paula Vogel welcomes, even celebrates how imaginative directors and committed casts use her work as a starting blueprint for their own explorations. She is pleased that this week the team at Palm Beach Dramaworks will unveil their particular vision of Indecent, just one of 20 productions that have been or are being mounted around the country last season and this season.

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Spoiler Alert: Mystery Abounds In Premiere Of Broken Snow

Revelation after revelation – none of which the playwright wants us to spoil – are exposed like the proverbial peeling of an onion until the underlying secret lays naked in the world premiere of Ben Andron’s Broken Snow at the J’s Cultural Arts Theatre in North Miami Beach.

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World Premiere Unlikely Heroes’ Family Drama Segues From Light Humor To Emotional Savagery

If Arthur Miller were also a doctor on the side, he might have written a play like Unlikely Heroes. A family drama full of long-harbored resentments and new ones stemming from intimate secrets revealed, this world premiere on view at Boca Raton’s Mizner Park Cultural Arts Center also hinges on a potentially fatal condition that will require an organ donation

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Looking Back At South Florida Theater’s 2015: Taking Chances Financially And Artistically

2015 produced a wild variety of snapshots to paste in the theatrical scrapbooks: a male Dolly Levi, a homicidal dimwit slicing carrots, a kidnapper forcing her captives to learn nonsense, a tsunami engulfing a Japanese village, a green-gunked survivor of toxic sludge singing love songs to his blind librarian girlfriend. You know, just another year for regional theater in South Florida.

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Not Your Grandma’s Theater: The 2015-2016 Season In SoFla

South Florida theaters still mount familiar warhorses, but the 2015-2016 season is proof that companies realize the future of theater is to attract pre-retirement audiences with shows steaming fresh out of Manhattan, edgy intellectually challenging works, imaginative takes on familiar titles, regional premieres of shows you only read about in The New York Times over the past few years and some shows you have never heard of, period.

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Stars Of David Is Touching, Funny Revue About Identity

Seeking “Who am I?” is the defining journey of most lives, and our religious heritage is part of the solution, even if we don’t embrace that religion or its culture. Such is the soul of Stars of David: Story To Song, a musical revue, which, despite its cripplingly kitschy title, is a surprisingly entertaining, witty and poignant look at how Jewish-Americans struggle on that journey.

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Loopy Durang Comedy Vanya And Masha And Sonia And Spike Is Insightful And Flat Out Funny

Under the vanities and inanities, the witty literary allusions and the silly sight gags, “Vanya and Sonia and Marsha and Spike” gently pokes fun at people who have wasted their lives. But don’t fret, mostly director Joseph Adler and his cast deliver a good old-fashioned, absurdist character comedy at GableStage.

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