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.Her face has, hmmm, changed over the years, but the way she talks is vintage Joan Rivers.
``Someone told me -- and I hate the term -- stars have very distinct voices. You know Cher, immediately. You know Liza, immediately,'' says Rivers, who performs Wednesday night in Miami. ``When I was a little girl, I picked up the phone and someone said, `Little boy, put your mother on.' I almost died. Now, Chastity Bono would have loved that!''
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Celie, the central character in Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, lives a life most folks would consider unendurable.
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).
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.
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.
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.
There are no divas among the cast of The 101 Dalmatians Musical, but plenty of stars. Take Rascal, the puppy with a broken leg who was rescued from the side of a road.
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.
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.
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.
In 2000, New York's Tectonic Theater Project presented writer/director Moises Kaufman's The Laramie Project, compiled from interviews with residents of Laramie, Wyo., where gay student Matthew Shepard was murdered in what is believed to be a homophobia-inspired hate crime.
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.
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