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Contact SFTN to find out how to get your production pictures posted here on our blog.
Contact SFTN to find out how to get your production pictures posted here on our blog.
Contact SFTN to find out how to get your production pictures posted here on our blog.
Contact SFTN to find out how to get your production pictures posted here on our blog.
Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet is a sprawling, provocative, messy, observant, overlong yet undeniably insightful play about the shattered relationship of a wife and husband, both black, after he leaves her for a white colleague.
It’s an old, sad, oft-repeated story. But because the Toronto-based Sears wants to explore so many facets of it – its historical, sociological, political and psychological ramifications, to name just four – Harlem Duet is a richer (if sometimes maddening) contemplation of that story.
A new production of the 1997 play, which is laced with references to and influences from Othello, is the latest offering from M Ensemble at the Light Box at Goldman Warehouse. Miami’s oldest black theater company has taken on a huge challenge in Harlem Duet. And the fact that much of the script’s comedy, emotional turmoil and contextual connections work as they should is due to director Lowell Williams (a University of Miami theater department faculty member) and one of the stronger casts M Ensemble has ever brought together.
The poison that the abandoned wife Billie is concocting on her kitchen table for her husband Othello is just a metaphor for the toxicity of African American history on male-female relations in M Ensemble’s wildly uneven production of Harlem Duet.
Playwright Djanet Sears has crafted an intriguing contemplation of the intersection of the macro issue of race on the micro-dynamics of an individual marriage.
But Sears’ insightful script gets a hodgepodge treatment in M Ensemble’s production. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Lowell Williams, this edition is by turns subtle and overly-melodramatic, illuminating and opaque, clear and confusing. Some performances are deeply affecting and touching, some are just plain affected and stilted – sometimes from the same actor.
Framed with audio clips from resonant figures in black history such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, and even Oprah Winfrey, Djanet Sear's Harlem Duet weaves back and forth through time, from the plantation fields of the 1800s to the streets of Harlem in the late 1990s. Inspired by Shakespeare's Othello, the production tediously tows the line of racial identity, sexual politics, and mental illness in the black community. It's a lengthy, weighty play, and one that leaves us with no easy answers.
But thanks to a solid, impressive cast from the M Ensemble — Miami's premier African-American troupe — and the fluid direction of Lowell Williams at the Light Box at Goldman Warehouse, the story's complexity is made easy to grasp
Frequent theatergoers approach productions of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with fatigue. So it’s heartening to report that the latest edition by Actors Playhouse is a playful and imaginative riff that will entertain audiences who haven’t seen the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical in a while.
Frankly, a lot of people are Joseph-ed out by now, but Arisco and Company have heavily peppered the oratorio with scores upon scores of unique touches of silliness that make you laugh against your better judgment. When Pharaoh sings that something is a piece of cake, the Narrator drops off a plate of layer cake in his outstretched hand.
When Actors’ Playhouse first staged Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat a dozen years ago, the show cleaned up at the region’s annual Carbonell Awards, winning eight honors including the coveted one for best production of a musical.
Just guessing (because I’m no Joseph when it comes to predicting the future), but I don’t think the company’s Joseph revival is going to come anywhere close to that level of recognition. Nor should it.
Though Actors’ earlier and new productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s college-era musical have some key elements in common, the just-opened Joseph is overstuffed with singer-actors and underperforming as inspired musical theater.
Singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka isn’t exactly a giant in the history of pop music.
You might need a few prompts before you can connect his name with tunes such as Where the Boys Are, Next Door to an Angel, Love Will Keep Us Together and Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, the title tune of the musical comedy now at The Plaza Theatre in Manalapan.
This production, which was imported from the Golden Apple Dinner Theatre in Sarasota, doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is — a cheeky, fun tale spun out Sedaka songs. Dowdy Marge and her curvy, blonde, but not-too-bright friend Lois arrive at Esther’s Paradise resort in the Catskills in the 1960s on a vacation that was intended to be Marge’s honeymoon — until the groom left her at the altar.
Twyla Tharp’s surrogates in Come Fly Away effortlessly swirl and slide across the stage like you think you do in your dreams – and to sound of Sinatra yet, crooning “The Way You Look Tonight.”
This 75-minute dance recital – it arguably doesn’t qualify as musical theater because there is not a shred of overarching plot – is an undeniably enchanting evening playing at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach this week and moving to Arsht Center in Miami next week.
Obviously, Sinatra and Tharp are among the nonpareil practitioners in their fields and nothing connected to them is ever going to be second rate. Tharp is a master at fusing modern dance, ballet and the sensuality of contemporary movement. And Sinatra is, well, Sinatra.
The cruel irony is that The Unseen, the last show before The Promethean Theatre closes its doors forever, is one of the finest productions that the company has mounted in its eight-year history.
Be warned: The Unseen is definitely not for everyone. It is designed for audience members who prize theater as a crucible of challenging ideas and unsettling emotions. This often bleak, deeply intellectual, highly metaphorical work will horrify some people, even bore audiences unwilling to invest their own analytical skills in decoding an evening of drama. It occasionally dances on the precipice of losing the audience in the lengthy Byzantine tunnels of its characters’ insane musings. But the faithful can be assured: You’re in good hands.
Wright’s play, first seen at the 2007 Humana Festival of New American plays, takes place in a prison where the inmates are isolated and regularly tortured. The specifics of time and place aren’t spelled out, so this particular hell on earth could be anywhere. Or today, everywhere.
But what really sells The Unseen is the haunting performances by Wind as a man on the verge of finally breaking, the sweet presence of Amadeo as an optimistic soul who can pluck a world of hope from a tiny sound, and the explosive fury of Alvarez as a psychopath with one of the most horrifying descriptions of violence ever devised by a playwright.
Kane left behind a small body of work—only five plays, a short film and a couple of newspaper articles—all intense and brutal. Two years ago, Joseph Adler’s GableStage mounted a Carbonell-winning production of Kane’s inaugural play, Blasted, a frightening, metaphoric view of sexual assault and the war in Bosnia that left the South Florida theater community buzzing.
Now, Thinking Cap Theatre, under the direction of founding artistic director Nicole Stodard, has taken on Cleansed, Kane’s third play, at Fort Lauderdale’s Empire Stage in a spare, yet thought-provoking production that will leave audiences shocked, perhaps mortified, and forced to challenge every conventional assumption of love.
George Kun’s minimalist set effectively transforms Empire Stage’s tiny space into the cold, hopeless institution with just a metal examination table, bench and school desk, but it’s the creative lighting from Jeffrey D. Holmes and Nate Sykes and extensive sound effects from David Hart and the Thinking Cap team that complete the nightmarish scene.
Torture, vengeance and morality take center stage in Death and the Maiden, a suspenseful thriller now receiving a riveting production at Mosaic Theatre in Plantation.
Death and the Maiden, by Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman, is set in an unnamed country, probably Chile, after a dictator-run government has been overthrown and democracy is taking flight. But Dorfman’s underlying message, by not specifically naming the country, is that such a story can take place, under certain circumstances, anywhere.
Death and the Maiden, which takes its title from a string quartet piece by Schubert that Paulina’s rapist played during her torture, is a taut psychological thriller, and Mosaic Theatre’s production is impressive.
The sense of danger in the world, of evil walking among us, has only increased since Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden made its debut in 1990. The intensity and uncertainty built into the script feel very much of the moment. Despite the passage of more than 20 years, Dorfman’s examination of torture and retribution hasn’t aged a bit.
Newly revived at Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre, Death and the Maiden offers its three actors the chance to deliver psychologically rich performances designed to keep the audience off balance. Under Avi Hoffman’s direction, Mosaic’s cast – Laura Turnbull as a forever-traumatized torture victim, Stephen G. Anthony as her lawyer husband and Oscar Cheda as the doctor who may or may not have been the woman’s tormentor – make good on the script’s potential.
