Even if you don’t know the love story that Noah reads Allie from his trusty, timeworn notebook by heart, you’ve surely heard of it before. After all, The Notebook has reached audiences for decades in many different forms: a bestselling novel by Nicholas Sparks, a hit romance film starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling, a Tony-nominated Broadway musical. Most recently, it’s taken on new life on a national tour, with the latest stop being here in South Florida, at the Kravis Center. I have no shortage of memories tied to this classic story—from when the movie made my friends and me cry at countless sleepovers in middle school, to a decade later, when I found myself tearing up all the same, this time watching it on Broadway. Now it’s your turn to reach for the tissue box and engage yourself in this stunning story that asks its viewers, can love really transcend anything? Differences, distance, memory…and even time?

What happens when one decides to make a parody of a long-established and beloved mockumentary by turning it even further on its head into a full-blown musical comedy? If you’re the famously industrious writing team of Bob and Tobly McSmith (co-creators of 10 musical parodies of popular TV series in 15 years) and now featuring Assaf Gleizner music and orchestrations, what happens is you’ve got another major hit on your hands!

When a Jewish family of parents and grown up children gather for a vacation together in the Caribbean resort in Turks and Caicos, the beautiful sunny skies soon change into a dark, wet and windy storm that is escalating into a hurricane.

The setting is the principle scene of playwright S. Asher Gelman’s two act drama “The Zionists: A Family Storm”, a Miami New Drama world premiere production that is running now through May 10 at Colony Theatre in Miami Beach.

As a new play making its East Coast premiere in Island City Stage’s current can’t-miss production, Everything Beautiful Happens At Night isn’t a piece that I went into with any real knowledge or notions about. And it’s an unusual compliment to the show that the first thing that I have to say about it is that this Sunday’s matinee confidently disproved its own otherwise striking title. 

I was blown away by Conversa (part 1 of Joanna Castle Miller’s autobiographical trilogy) and couldn’t wait to see part 2, INFERNA, another Theatre Lab world premiere that’s now also the featured opener of Forida Atlantic University’s (FAU) Owl New Play Festival. Once again, I was struck by the playwright’s originality, performance talent (she also acts in both plays), and breakaway message for the masses who are complacent about our bible brainwashed, sexist, and brand-manipulated society. Also, don’t worry if you missed Part 1 (which Castle Miller occasionally references, in jest, as “my other play”). My theater partner only saw this one and can confirm its standalone power to entertain, enlighten … and end with an emotional kick in the gut!

Does a bull belong in a China shop?  Well, when that “China shop” is actually “the patriarchy” and that “bull” is actually a woman ahead of her time, the takeaway from the standard cliche is actually far less obvious. For playwright Bryna Turner, the proverbial bull is early feminist Mary Woolley, whose bull-headed ways butt against glass ceilings in a way that makes for a compelling script’s worth of drama. 

Miami City Ballet’s Your Perfect Golden Hour, presented at The Parker in Fort Lauderdale on April 11 and 12, brought together four works from the company’s existing repertoire. The program paired Amy Hall Garner’s “Resplendent Fantasy,” José Limón’s “Chaconne” and “The Moor’s Pavane,” and Alonzo King’s “Following the Subtle Current Upstream,” a lineup that asked the company to shift rapidly between contemporaries. It was also my first time at The Parker, and it felt like an ideal room for ballet. So much dance in South Florida is experienced in spaces that emphasize scale and grandeur, at the cost of distance. The Parker offers something else. The stage never feels small, but the theater does feel intimate and personal. That closeness served this particular program well because Your Perfect Golden Hour was all about texture and tension.