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• Review | 'Legally Blonde': It's like, you know, too cute
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Review | 'Legally Blonde': It's like, you know, too cute

How much you enjoy Legally Blonde the Musical -- and loads of people do -- will probably depend on your tolerance for things kitschy and adorable.

Appreciate cute dogs and peppy cheerleaders and girls who bother to color-coordinate a feather-topped pen with a glittering pink tank top? Then you'll probably think Blonde is da bomb.

Think a musical that stereotypes gay guys, a black judge and its own main character (who has more in common with Malibu Barbie than a legal eagle) is at least retro, if not offensive? Then you may be reaching for something else pink, as in Pepto-Bismol.

Will Tampa's snazzy update of 'Alice in Wonderland' make it to Broadway?

The journey to that musical-theater pinnacle known as Broadway is full of obstacles, detours and delights, at least as many as Lewis Carroll's young heroine Alice encountered on her famous trip to Wonderland.

In Tampa this month, a team of inventive dreamers is hoping that a fresh take on a familiar story will get them to Broadway and beyond, giving the world a new musical with the sort of wide-ranging appeal that helped make Wicked such an enduring hit.

Wonderland: Alice's New Musical Adventure has just opened at the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts (formerly the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, newly rechristened to honor an arts philanthropist's major gift).

Actress-turned-rocker Juliette Lewis brings her music to South Florida

She mesmerized film buffs in her breakout role as a precocious teen in 1991's Cape Fear by notoriously -- and improvisationally -- sucking dangerous convict Robert De Niro's thumb. She let loose as the deranged Mallory Knox opposite Woody Harrelson in Oliver Stone's gleefully violent farce Natural Born Killers. And she plays roller-derby girl Iron Maven in Drew Barrymore's new directorial debut Whip It, which opens Oct. 2.

But actress Juliette Lewis leads a double life. For the past few years, she's moonlighted as a slinky banshee lead singer, channeling her inner Patti Smith, Janis Joplin and Grace Slick. Lewis, seemingly always the energetic wild child, hits Fort Lauderdale's Culture Room Sunday night in support of the new solo album Terra Incognita , her first after splitting with her band The Licks.

If it sounds sacrilegious to compare Lewis' voice to such greats, just listen to the new album. Although her melodies might not match up with the classics, she can belt it out with the best

'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.

A poor black girl who grows up in Georgia in the early 1900s, she's still a young teenager when she gives birth to two babies fathered by the man she thinks is her father, babies he takes away right after they're born. She is traded, along with a cow, to a cruel widower with kids, a farmer who abuses her verbally and physically, a man so determined to deny Celie any joy that he hides years' worth of loving letters from the sister who left to work as a missionary in Africa.

Yet Celie does endure, finds love, reclaims her life and her family. Walker's powerful tale of trial and triumph has sparked the imaginations of uncounted readers, the millions who saw Steven Spielberg's Oscar-nominated 1985 film of The Color Purple -- and, since 2005, the nearly two million theatergoers who have gone on Celie's journey in its newest form as a Broadway musical

Arsht Center going to the dogs with '101 Dalmatians Musical'

Onstage, children and dogs often turn out to be scene stealers. Just ask any adult actor who has appeared in a production of Annie .

So it's fair to say that Rachel York, a beautiful Broadway veteran with a killer voice, has some formidable competition in The 101 Dalmatians Musical , the new show that will bring the star, eight kids and 15 real Dalmatians (plus assorted other adult performers) to the stage of Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday.

York, however, doesn't leave a lot of scenery to steal once she strides onto the stage: Wearing a half-black, half-white wig and a slinky hot pink gown that conceals 15-inch stilts strapped to her shoes, she is the show's (literally) larger-than-life villain, Cruella de Vil.