THEATER REVIEW

Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago a pleasure for audience

David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago is a play of a certain era: early Mamet, post-sexual revolution, pre-AIDS.

Written in 1974, the play flits from one short scene to the next, providing a snapshot of twentysomething big city ``romance'' and serving as a window into the younger Mamet's mind. This is a work that is funny, foul-mouthed and more than a little misogynistic; still enjoyable, but a harbinger of better things to come from a talented playwright.

STAGE PICK

'The Voysey Inheritance' at the Caldwell

The Voysey Inheritance has its first preview performance at 2 p.m. Sunday. Mamet's version of Harley Granville-Barker's 1905 drama about a wealthy clan undone by the patriarch's Ponzi scheme (Bernie Madoff, anyone?) stars Peter Haig as the owner of the family-run investment firm. Also in the large cast are Terry Hardcastle, Lourlene Snedeker, Stephen G. Anthony, Kathryn Lee Johnston, Jim Ballard, Katherine Amadeo, Cliff Burgess, Dennis Creaghan, Marta Reiman, John Felix and Dan Leonard.

THEATER REVIEW

Review | Amusing turns terrifying in 'The Walworth Farce'

For all that most American theater fans know, playwright Martin McDonagh is in a league of his own when it comes to spinning Irish tales wrapped in humor and terror. Think again.

THEATER

Get your Irish up in 'Walworth Farce'

At first, The Walworth Farce looks like a routine the Three Stooges might have dreamed up -- if Larry, Curly and Moe had been Irish, that is.

STAGE PICK

'The Walworth Farce' at Carnival Studio Theater

If Quentin Tarantino wrote a play for the Three Stooges, the result might look a lot like Enda Walsh's The Walworth Farce, a darkly comic play running Wednesday through Nov. 7 in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. Raymond Scannell and Tadhg Murphy, part of the cast from Ireland's Druid Theater Company, play sons who ritualistically act out a version of their family's story for their demanding, housebound father.

THEATER

Review | 'The Color Purple' worth the wait -- and you may have to

The Color Purple took its time -- 27 years, to be exact -- making the journey from the pages of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the stage of Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. Its fleeting run ends Sunday, but as the cheering crowd affirmed at Tuesday's opening, the musical is abundantly worth the wait.

THEATER

Review | A few gems, but 'Naked Women Fully Clothed' comes up short

You know those joke-filled chain e-mails everyone gets? Maybe the one that uses bits of Jesus' biography to explain why the son of God was Mexican or Jewish or Irish, or the one that tries to make you laugh as it explores how older women's body parts start to resemble Jell-O.

THEATER REVIEW

Review | `Reasons To Be Pretty' a wild ride

The battle between Neil LaBute's boy-men and the women who put up with them rages on in Reasons To Be Pretty, the playwright's first script to hit Broadway -- and, for GableStage, the first resounding success of the new South Florida theater season.

THEATER

'Color Purple,' the musical, comes to Arsht

Celie, the central character in Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, lives a life most folks would consider unendurable.

THEATER REVIEW

`Two Jews Walk Into a War' misses the mark

Seth Rozin's Two Jews Walk Into a War, a new comedy now launching a premiere-filled season at Florida Stage, has been likened by folks at the Manalapan theater to earlier plays by Neil Simon (The Odd Couple or The Sunshine Boys, take your pick) and Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot).

STAGE PICK

`Reasons To Be Pretty' at GableStage

Neil LaBute returns to familiar themes -- the premium society puts on appearance, the ways in which men and women drive each other crazy -- in Reasons To Be Pretty, his Tony Award-nominated Broadway play opening Saturday at GableStage. Erin Joy Schmidt and Ricky Waugh portray at-odds lovers in the show, which runs through Nov. 22.

THEATER

LaBute play goes from Broadway to GableStage

Neil LaBute didn't set out to create a trilogy of plays about our obsession with appearance when he wrote his twist-filled Pygmalion tale, The Shape of Things, in 2001. But then he came up with another play on the subject, 2004's Fat Pig. And in 2008, a third one, Reasons To Be Pretty.

THEATER REVIEW

Fort Lauderdale troupe gives good effort in rarely seen `Flora the Red Menace'

It was the show that introduced Liza Minnelli to the Broadway stage, winning her a Tony Award at 19. It marked the first musical comedy pairing of John Kander and Fred Ebb, the composer-lyricist team that would soon join Broadway's titans. Its initial run was short, just a couple of months in 1965, maybe because a musical poking fun at American Communists didn't seem too amusing barely more than a decade after the infamous McCarthy hearings.

STAGE PICK

`Two Jews Walk Into a War' at Florida Stage

In Seth Rozin's new play Two Jews Walk Into a War, Gordon McConnell, and Avi Hoffman play characters based on two men who were really characters. Isaac Levin and Zebulon Simentov were discovered by NATO forces living inside a synagogue in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2001; though they were preparing to celebrate Hanukkah together, the men also clearly loathed each other.

THEATER

Review | 24-Hour Project an unpolished wonder

For three decades, the most notable coming together of South Florida's far-flung theater community happened at the annual Carbonell Awards, where polished productions and performances are honored.

THEATER REVIEW

Review | Playwright takes the easy way out when 'In Development' stops making sense

One of the great dramaturgical cheats is explaining away a piece's illogic -- or incoherence -- by revealing that everything an audience has just seen was actually a dream or some other flight of fancy.

THEATER

Playwrights planning 24 hours of magic at Actors' Playhouse

Andie Arthur, Christopher Demos-Brown, Elena Maria Garcia, Lucas Leyva, Michael McKeever, Andrew Rosendorf, Juan C. Sanchez and Mark Swaner are getting ready to pull an all-nighter.

'In Development' premieres at New Theatre

In Development, a new work by former Miamian David Caudle, kicks off a world premiere-filled season at New Theatre this weekend.

THEATER

Topol's a role model

Chaim Topol does, as you see, have a first name. But professionally, the Tel Aviv-born actor is best known simply as Topol. And though his eclectic resumé includes everything from Othello to the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, his signature role is a character dreamed up by Sholom Aleichem decades before Topol was born: Tevye, the Russian-Jewish dairyman who became the central character in the 1964 Broadway musical smash Fiddler on the Roof.

Fall's extra hot this year -- on Broadway and off

Generally when we go to Broadway, it's to savor the work of stage stars, escape into the world of lavish musicals, maybe take in the odd pithy British play. But sometimes, when the celestial stars align just right, we get a bonus, as a Hollywood hunk or two decides it's time to try theater again.

THEATER

Powerful drama explores the underside of Havana

When Cuban playwright Abel González Melo's Chamaco (Boy at Vanishing Point) opens Saturday at Coral Gables' Teatro Trail (in Spanish with English supertitles), it will be the first time in seven years that director and scholar Alberto Sarraín has presented a play in Miami.

STAGE PICK

'The Marvelous Wonderettes' at Actors' Playhouse

Nostalgia as big as the cast's petticoat-plumped skirts is on the bill as Actors' Playhouse kicks off its season with the current Off-Broadway show The Marvelous Wonderettes. Julie Kleiner, Tiana Checchia, Lisa Manuli and Amy Miller Brennan play members of a girl group who sing at their 1958 high school prom, then gather for the 10-year reunion, older and arguably a bit wiser. Dream Lover, Rescue Me, Respect and a host of golden oldies are on the show's playlist.

Sarasota's Ringling festival boosts town's arts scene

Sarasota is an arts-crazy place, a Florida Gulf Coast city justifiably proud of its cultural riches.

STAGE PICK

'Rock 'n' Roll' at Mosaic Theatre

The personal and the political intersect in Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, the smartly engaging season opener at Mosaic Theatre. Laura Turnbull plays both the wife and the daughter of Gordon McConnell as Max, a Cambridge University professor who refuses to acknowledge that the Communist philosophy he so ardently supports is playing out badly in the real world. The play runs through Oct. 4 at the American Heritage Center for the Arts, 12200 W. Broward Blvd., Bldg. 3000, Plantation. Performances are 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $37 ($31 for those 65 and older, $15 students). Call 954-577-8243 or visit www.mosaictheatre.com.

THEATER REVIEW

Review | `Rock 'n' Roll' delivers tension, tenderness

Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, an intellectually challenging yet undeniably engrossing play, opens at Mosaic Theatre in Plantation.

THEATER

Tri-county lineups include almost every genre

From Broadway blockbusters to intimate plays meant to rock an audience's world, the many professional theaters in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties will present almost every genre of theater throughout this challenging season.

THEATER

Ambitious Mosaic Theatre recreates challenging Tom Stoppard play

Tom Stoppard's smart, provocative plays are magnets for audiences who crave theater that sparks both thought and emotion -- and for artists who relish the bottomless challenge of bringing the playwright's rich worlds to life.

STAGE PICK

Caldwell Theatre Company extends 'The Whipping Man'

Matthew Lopez's The Whipping Man was supposed to end its run at the Caldwell Theatre Company last weekend, but great reviews and strong demand won the intense, involving play a well-deserved extension. So this holiday weekend brings a final chance to catch the play about a gravely wounded Jewish Confederate soldier and two of his family's former slaves.

THEATER REVIEW

Review | Baseball star comes out in 'Take Me Out'

Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out, winner of the best play Tony Award and a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, is an entertaining, artfully written play. Its premise -- a superstar baseball player casually comes out, and all hell breaks loose -- is, unfortunately, still all too believable.