CRITIC'S PICK

`Some Kind of Wonderful!' at Florida Stage

Summertime, and the entertainment is musical at Manalapan's Florida Stage. Bill Castellino and Christopher McGovern -- the duo who created the theater's hit show Cagney! -- have put together a 'theatrical concert' of songs from 1960-65. Some Kind of Wonderful! features numbers made famous by Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, the Beatles and various Motown artists. In the Florida Stage cast are, from left, Barry Tarallo, Irene Adjan, Michelle Pereira, Dana Dawson and Eric Collins. Performances...

THEATER

Review | 'Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown' a riot of L.A. characters

As swan songs go, Guillermo Reyes' Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown is both a simple and affecting farewell from Fort Lauderdale's Sol Theatre Project. The company's founding partners, Robert Hooker and Tony Priddy, are moving, so it's likely that Reyes' solo show will be the last from Sol with its funky space and eclectic artistic history.

THEATER

Staging their lives: A theater family returns with a new company

John Rodaz and Maria Banda-Rodaz ''met cute'' (as they say in the movie biz) two decades ago. He was tidying the lobby of the former Lincoln Road shoe store he had turned into a 49-seat theater called Area Stage. She was on a business trip from her native Ecuador and thought the little theater -- and the guy sweeping it -- looked interesting. She went in to chat. They fell in love, married and became partners in life and theater.

THEATER

Hot Broadway star tackling Shakespeare

Raúl Esparza is one of the hottest leading men on Broadway, slipping effortlessly between musicals and plays, and picking up tons of acclaim along the way.

THEATER

Review | Third wheel undermines 'I Just Stopped By to See the Man'

Watching M Ensemble's new production of Stephen Jeffreys' I Just Stopped By to See the Man is both stirring and frustrating. Whenever Paul Bodie as a presumed-dead music legend and Christina Alexander as his on-the-run daughter are onstage, the play sings with the depth of feeling Bodie's character brings to the blues. That's the stirring part, and happily, it dominates the production of a play that was done by Chicago's edgy Steppenwolf Theatre in 2002.

CRITIC'S PICK

'I Just Stopped By to See the Man' at M Ensemble

Stephen Jeffreys' I Just Stopped By to See the Man is a tale of opportunity and devilish temptation. Herman Carabali, Paul Bodie and Christina Alexander star in the play about an English rock star trying to convince a blues great long thought to be dead to appear with his band. The play runs at the M Ensemble Actors Studio, 12320 W. Dixie Hwy., North Miami, through July 19. Performances are 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $25 ($20 for students and seniors...

CRITIC'S PICK

'Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown' at Sol Theatre Project

Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown features five characters, most of them Latino and gay, and offers a grand opportunity for the right actor to display his versatility. Angel Perez takes on the challenge of Guillermo Reyes' solo show, playing a naive young immigrant, a kept man, a lonely kid, a Cuban restaurateur and a stuffy English instructor. The show goes on at 8 p.m. every Friday and Saturday through July 18 at Fort Lauderdale's Sol Theatre Project, 1140 N. Flagler Dr. Tickets...

THEATER

'Toners in Time' not just a play -- it's an adventure

Three young Miami playwrights script an event to launch their 305-centric theater company.

THEATER

Review | 'New Century': Laughs plentiful almost to the end

With few exceptions (Noises Off, for example), comedies aren't quite as funny the second time around. You know the story, the setups, the punch lines. That element of hilarious surprise is missing.

THEATER

Review | 'On an Average Day' has mystery, power

The past shapes the present, giving us tools and regrets, coloring our lives. Or sometimes, forever poisoning them. Playwrights know that bringing siblings together to deal with their shared past can make for explosive drama. Sam Shepard did it in his violently comedic True West, Suzan-Lori Parks in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog, Neil LaBute in his unsettling In a Dark Dark House. And John Kolvenbach does his own exploration of that volatile territory in On an Average Day.

THEATER

Review | 'Rachel Corrie': Political controversy obscures artistic flaws

My Name Is Rachel Corrie is a play that has caused the blood to boil of too many people who have neither seen it nor read it. If you actually see the new production by the Alliance Theatre Lab in Miami Lakes, you'll soon realize that although Corrie's pro-Palestinian point of view is clearly and unapologetically presented, the protests and censorship efforts aimed at the play have made it far more famous than its artistic quality would merit.

CRITIC'S PICK

'The New Century' at GableStage has a crackerjack cast

If two of the three pieces that make up Paul Rudnick's The New Century at GableStage seem familiar, it's because City Theatre did them as stand-alone short plays during past Summer Shorts festivals. No matter. Artistic director Joseph Adler has a crackerjack cast -- from left, Daniel Landon, John Felix, Jehane Serralles, Patti Gardner and Sally Bondi -- and this bunch knows how to wring the laughs from Rudnick's tales of a gay cable TV host, a Jewish mother and a crafty midwesterner...

THEATER

Controversial play 'Rachel Corrie' opens in South Florida at last

Rachel Corrie was a passionate American activist, a young woman who had cared about the larger world since she was a child. As a fifth-grader in Olympia, Wash., she said this in a speech about world hunger: ``We have got to understand that people in Third World countries think and care and smile and cry just like us. We have got to understand that they dream our dreams, and we dream theirs. We have to understand that they are us. We are them.''

THEATER

Playwright's elusive dream: Conquering his hometown of Miami

Already a rising star in the theater world, Alvin McCraney hasn't given up on one of his few unfulfilled dreams: opening a theater company in his hometown of Miami.

CRITIC'S PICK

'My Name Is Rachel Corrie' at Main Street Playhouse

My Name Is Rachel Corrie, the Katherine Viner-Alan Rickman play woven from the diaries and e-mails of an American activist who lost her life in the Gaza Strip, is a play that stirs protest. Plantation's Mosaic Theatre planned a production of Rachel Corrie two years ago but scrapped it after a barrage of complaints about what some claim is the script's pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli bias.

THEATER

Review | Missteps aside, 'Bent' a riveting story

The quality of the work at Fort Lauderdale's Rising Action Theatre has been a sometime thing -- sometimes good and engaging, sometimes woefully inadequate -- so hearing that the company would be staging Martin Sherman's challenging Bent is bound to stir a mixture of hope and fear.

THEATER

Review | Revelations from the past jeopardize couple's future in 'Molotov Kisses'

''This is a story with a message,'' repeat the actors in the new production of Tu ternura Molotov (Molotov Kisses) that opened last weekend at Area Stage at their new home in Coral Gables.

THEATER

Review | New company takes on Russian classic 'The Seagull' -- in Spanish

While playwrights often adapt classics in order to take creative liberties, Fabián De Cárdenas, artistic director of the new company Dream Theatre Productions, offers audiences a Spanish-language adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull that is deliberately faithful.

'Billy Elliot' dominates Tonys, wins best musical

An movie-inspired British musical and a withering French comedy triumphed over Broadway's American fare on Sunday when the 63rd annual Tony Awards were presented at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall.

Money-maker musicals will rule Tony awards

Though a late surge in plays helped Broadway weather the recession and take in more than $943 million during the 2008-2009 season, musicals are what keeps box offices fat. So musicals, with their easy-to-showcase and time-polished numbers, will again dominate Broadway's annual amalgam of awards show and infomercial, better known as the 63rd annual Tony Awards.

THEATER

Review | 'Strange Snow' will warm your heart

Alliance Theatre Lab returns with a haunting production of a play about damaged souls finding hope. Stephen Metcalfe's Strange Snow has a history in South Florida theater.

CRITIC'S PICK

'Celia' returns to Miami's Arsht Center

Celia: The Life & Music of Celia Cruz was a long-running hit last summer in nostalgic, Celia Cruz-mad Miami. That success has led to a return engagement, through June 21, in the Knight Concert Hall at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. Once again, Anissa Gathers portrays the queen of salsa in the music-heavy biographical show, which includes such hits as Guantanamera, Químbara, Toro Mata, La Vida es un Carnaval, La Negra Tiene Tumbao and La Bomba...

CRITIC'S PICK

'Bent' at Rising Action Theatre

Martin Sherman's Bent opened on Broadway almost 30 years ago, but the power of its storytelling, which helped win it the 1980 Tony Award as best play, hasn't aged. Fort Lauderdale's Rising Action Theatre is taking on its biggest dramatic challenge to date in producing Sherman's play about gay men who were shipped off to Nazi concentration camps. Michael Perry, Larry Brooks and Larry Buzzeo, who is also staging the play, are featured in the cast. Bent, which contains sexual situations...

THEATER

Review | Undershorts is a mix of raunchy fun and I-don't-get-it...

From the unprintable lyrics of the pre-show music to the opening image of a preacher tied to a bed underneath a leather-clad prostitute, the collection of short satires Undershorts gleefully announces its mission as raunchy, irreverent fun.

THEATER

Review | 'Dark Dark House' intriguing

The emotionally crippled brothers in Mosaic Theatre's In a Dark Dark House don't like each other very much; a closetful of secrets clogs any attempt to make a perfunctory connection. But they spend the play illustrating their offbeat brand of brotherly love as defined by legendarily jaundiced playwright Neil LaBute.

THEATER

Broadway is booming with escapist fare

You'd scarcely know times are hard from the crowds thronging around Times Square and into Broadway theaters for the Great White Way's version of a stimulus package.

Play series aims to pack a punch in a few minutes

City Theatre's version of hot fun in the summertime, aka the Summer Shorts Festival, is all about the quality of the art, as any enduring theater festival must be. But the story of the company's annual celebration of short-but-mighty plays, dramas and mini-musicals also involves numbers and nimbleness.

THEATER

Theater review | Comedy, drama that's very short and sweet

It isn't often that you find a Harold Pinter play about torture and a Christopher Durang comedy about a saucy, slinkily feline waitress on the same bill.

CRITIC'S PICK

Alliance Theatre Lab returns with 'Strange Snow'

Alliance Theatre Lab returns after a long hiatus with Stephen Metcalfe's Strange Snow, a haunting play about a damaged veteran, his sister and a fellow soldier. Andy Jean-Gilles and Jennifer Toohey are featured with Cliff Burgess in the production directed by Adalberto J. Acevedo. The play runs at the Main Street Playhouse, 6766 Main St. in Miami Lakes, through June 14. Performances are 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $20 ($15 seniors and students). Call...