Though the International Hispanic Theatre Festival has been beset by economic and logistical troubles, you wouldn't know it from the art onstage. The award-winning, three-week celebration of Spanish-language and Hispanic theater kicked off its 24th year last week with top-notch productions from Colombia, Mexico and Miami.
La pipa de la paz (The Peace Pipe) by Alicia Muńoz is a hilarious character study. This portrait of an aging woman incapable of being happy, a woman who makes everyone around her miserable, is a funny take on someone most of us have known -- or even had in our family.
Theaters love to tout world premieres, those gambles that can confer prestige, create buzz and lead to continuing benefits if a show takes off. Yet more often than not, a ''world premiere'' is nothing more than a new work that needs work.
The pleasures and perils of marriage are the focus of Married Alive! -- the Sean Grennan-Leah Okimoto summer musical opening this weekend at Actors' Playhouse. The show stars Julie Kleiner and Jason Parrish as newlyweds, Gary Marachek and Marcia McClain as a long-married couple. The wedded bliss and battles unfold in the Balcony Theatre in the company's home at 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables, through Aug. 16. Performances are 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday (Thursday-Saturday beginning July...
For his first show since succeeding Caldwell Theatre Company founder Michael Hall as artistic director, Clive Cholerton is tackling nothing less than a world premiere. Vices: A Love Story is a dance- and music-driven piece about people in their 20s and 30s, spun from a story by Ilene Reid and Michael Heitzman, with choreography by Emmy winner A.C. Ciulla.
Playwright Eduardo Pardo may have given his protagonists the intentionally anonymous monikers Ella and El (she and he), but Jśrame (Promise Me), starring Elluz Peraza and Eduardo Ibarrola, is anything but generic. Nor is it symbolic.
If you were a teen in the early 1960s, what do you remember about summer? Cruising to the burger joint, going to the drive-in but not watching much of the movie? Maybe it's the music, the oldies that transport you right back to those days when your biggest worry was whether your parents would ground you for getting home after curfew.
The plays, the companies and the experience change from year to year. But Mario Ernesto Sįnchez knows that pulling together Miami's International Hispanic Theatre Festival -- the 24th edition begins Wednesday -- involves certain constant challenges.
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...
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.
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.
Raśl 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.
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.
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...
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...
Three young Miami playwrights script an event to launch their 305-centric theater company.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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