A mother and daughter with separate lives and vastly different temperaments decide to hit the road in the middle of the night.
It isn't that the Cuban-American mom and her brainy, lonely teen daughter have always dreamed of reconnecting that way. It's that a woman and a girl, linked by blood and little else, have both arrived at crisis points in their lives. And a road trip into the unknown feels like the best medicine imaginable.For three decades, Christopher Durang has been one of American theater's preeminent social satirists. From his breakthrough play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (a scathing yet hilarious contemplation of Catholicism), to his latest, Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, Durang has skewered dysfunctional families, psychotherapy, homophobia and more.
Like a shiny toboggan wedged on wet snow, the Radio City Christmas Spectacular needs a little push. The traditional holiday revue, which runs in New York through Dec. 30, essentially repeats last year's program, which varied little from the show in 2007. It isn't just a return visitor who might feel that some of the old routines are indeed showing age.
Christopher Durang is at the height of his satirical powers in his newest play, Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. If you think the title is weird, consider the family at the play's center: Dad (Dave Corey) collects butterflies and may be working for a shadow government; daughter Felicity (Sharon Kremen) discovers she has married a possible terrorist (Nick Duckart) while she was drunk; and Mom (Barbara Bradshaw) frequents the theater in a vain search for normalcy. Durang's riff on America's love affair with violence opens at 8 p.m. Friday at Mosaic Theatre in the American Heritage Center for the Arts, 12200 W. Broward Blvd., Bldg. 3000, Plantation. Performances are 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday through Dec. 13. Tickets are $37 ($31 for seniors 65 and older, $15 for students). Call 954-577-8243 or visit www.mosaictheatre.com.
26 Miles by Pulitzer Prize finalist Quiara Alegría Hudes. Artistic director Ricky J. Martinez is staging the play, about a Cuban-American mom, her long-estranged Jewish daughter, and the bonds they forge as they head west together. Performances are 8 p.m. Thursday- Saturday, 1 p.m. Sunday (additional shows at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 29, Dec. 6 and Dec. 13). The play runs through Dec. 20 at New Theatre, 4120 Laguna St. in Coral Gables. Tickets are $40 Friday-Saturday and Sunday matinee, $35 other shows (student rush tickets $15). Call 305-443-5909 or visit www.new-theatre.org.
In his glowing review of Broadway's Finian's Rainbow, a New York Times critic last month wrote of the musical revival's ''satisfying pairing of a him and a her.''
Beneath the elegant façade, obscured by the opulent trappings of wealth, a scandal is brewing. A respected, successful man known for his charitable works and his familial generosity has been using other people's money to buy a rich man's lifestyle. He has been found out by someone who trusted him, worked with him. And now the younger man, possessed of this ruinous knowledge, must decide whether to bring a carefully constructed house of cards tumbling down.
Marco Ramirez is a wildly imaginative playwright whose writing acknowledges a fundamental reality: If you want to entice the under-30 crowd into experiencing theater, you'd better give 'em something exciting in a form that really speaks to them.
Macon City: A Comic Book Play, a new work getting its first production by The Naked Stage. Jasmine Fluker and Hugh Murphy are in the play, along with Naja Corbett, Jason DeWitt and Giordan Diaz. David Hemphill, Scott Genn and Alyn Darnay round out the cast. They portray citizens of an American metropolis, folks just trying to survive after their decaying city is abandoned by its crime-fighting superheroes. The play opens Friday in the Pelican Theatre on the Barry University campus, 11300 NE Second Ave., Miami Shores. Performances are 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday (no Thanksgiving performance), and the play runs 'til Nov. 29. Tickets are $25 (seniors 60 and older pay $18, students $12). Call 866-811-4111 or visit www.nakedstage.org.
How much you enjoy Legally Blonde the Musical -- and loads of people do -- will probably depend on your tolerance for things kitschy and adorable.
Becky Gulsvig has been awash in pink, onstage anyway, since she began playing various roles in the cast of the musical Legally Blonde during its Broadway run from mid-2007 until the fall of 2008.
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.
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