Tag Archives: Lela Elam

Like the Country It Unravels, ‘American Rhapsody is Complicated, Ambitious & Flawed

American Rhapsody, Michael McKeever’s sprawling premiere at Zoetic Stage, is a history play, a bildungsroman, a tribute to fluid families, a cautionary tale about where the zeitgeist might be headed. It spans more than 60 years and feels, perhaps like the American experiment itself.

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Affecting ‘The Tin Woman’ Plumbs Depths of The Heart

A double sense of “life after death” pervades the touching and beautifully rendered The Tin Woman drama suffused with wit now playing at Actors Playhouse as spring slides into summer.

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Fine Cast Still Can’t Make Book Club Much Of A Page Turner

Professionalism is the only explanation why this much talent—the cream of South Florida theater from the director to the cast to the creative team — invested itself so deeply into the flawed frippery of The Book Club Play at Actors’ Playhouse.

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The Best Of Times Is Now: Memorable Moments Of 2014

Here’s a look back at 2014 including a very subjective subjunctive reductive list of outstanding shows, performances and developments guaranteed to make someone unhappy they were not on the list. Take comfort in that there was so much good work that this is the crème de la crème de menthe.

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Nilo Cruz’s Hurricane Swirls With Unbridled Passion, Superb Craft

The tempest dies down, but the emotional tumult rages on in Nilo Cruz’s superbly staged world premiere of Hurricane, getting a criminally brief run at Arca Images in Miami. Rarely do South Floridians see such a highly polished and boundlessly inventive alloy of words, sounds, movement and stage pictures as Cruz does here directing his work.

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Nilo Cruz Unleashes a World Premiere With His Rewritten ‘Hurricane’ At Arca Images

The devastation from a hurricane outside is only a reflection of the greater emotional destruction already crippling the protagonists in Nilo Cruz’s play Hurricane set for only five performances this week from Arca Stages in Miami.

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Zoetic And McKeever Skewer Hollywood As A Cesspool In Clark Gable Slept Here

Death, drug overdose, murder, lies, hypocrisy, soulless creatures willing to do absolutely anything for greed and glamour – you really shouldn’t be laughing this much or this hard. But after all, it’s Hollywood in Michael McKeever’s hilarious new play Clark Gable Slept Here getting its world premiere at Zoetic Stage.

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M Ensemble’s Knock Me A Kiss Is Uneven But Has Electric Acting

Some vibrant performances – one of them pure electricity – rescue M Ensemble’s uneven production of Charles Smith’s intriguing but flawed script about boldface names from the Harlem Renaissance, Knock Me A Kiss.

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Thinking Cap’s The Rover Is Ambitious, Smart & Delightful

There’s more to Thinking Cap Theatre’s inventive The Rover than staging a 300-year-old play with oomph enough to keep a 21st century audience interested. What director Nicole Stodard (who is also the artistic director of Thinking Cap Theatre) has done is to craft an inventive, ambitious and quite delicious offering of England’s first professional female playwright’s navel gazing study of the dating games people play. And watching Stodard’s adaptation of Aphra Behn’s The Rover proves that the battle of the sexes hasn’t changed much since 1677.

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GableStage’s Ruined Is Powerful Tale of Atrocities and Suvival

GableStage’s powerful Ruined examines our species’ simultaneous capacity for a bottomless cruelty absent in animals and an inextinguishable humanity that borders on divinity. This engrossing rendition of Lynn Nottage’s play about people struggling to survive the hellish civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo also has a duality. It is one of the finest pieces of local theater seen this season, featuring superb acting, notably from Lela Elam as an indomitable owner of a bar/brothel.

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