Written By: Christine Dolen

Originally published on artburstmiami.com

Artistic inspiration flows from many sources, including ideas and images created long before younger artists build upon them to fashion something new.

Take “Create Dangerously,” which began as a 1957 speech by Nobel Prize laureate Albert Camus.

When the celebrated Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat was asked to give the second annual Toni Morrison lecture at Princeton University in 2008, inspired by Camus, she delivered a speech titled “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work.” In 2010, Danticat published a book with the same title, a work blending memoir, essays and stories about the courage of Haitians at home and in exile.

Hey, all you rock ‘n’ roll buffs, devotees of music styles that flourished in the 1950s; aficionados of local theater and all you folks who are known to frequent the Wick Theatre in Boca Raton on a regular basis. Get ready to have your socks blown through the back doors by a powerhouse musical that will revive your memory nodules and push your melodic reminiscences to their limits. 

A jukebox musical simultaneously bears a unique burden and boasts a special advantage: Unlike other musicals, wherein your first time seeing it often means your first time hearing the songs in it, a jukebox musical presents songs you’ve likely heard many times before. The result — especially if you’re going in as a fan of those songs — can be a disappointing journey down a distorted memory lane, or it can be a triumph of balancing tribute with storytelling. 

If the fact that Lynn Nottage’s play Sweat is an intensely relevant and well-crafted one wasn’t already relevant from its status as the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner, the fact that I was able to stumble upon two different productions of it playing only a few counties apart in a single weekend is also probably rather telling. Since, regrettably, I can only be in so many places at once, only one of these productions still happens to be running—the Main Street Players’ version, which will be playing until this May 14—but I actually found stopping by Florida Atlantic University’s Department of Theatre and Dance production to be tremendously clarifying as to the piece’s potential and power. 

My recent adventure to the Pembroke Pines Performing Arts Theatre’s current production wasn’t my first time seeing Pippin, an endearing, inscrutable little mess of a show that first premiered in 1972. But it was my first time seeing Pippin quite like this, “this” meaning “set” during the “summer of love” as opposed to during the period in which the show actually takes place, which happens to be medieval times. 

As the play starts, lead by Krystal Millie Valdes, you can already tell something is different. Not only is this performer giving some sort of house speech, but she’s doing so while accompanying herself on guitar and switching back and forth between English and Spanish – letting us know right out the gate that this play  is not like most we have seen in South Florida. 

If you didn’t happen to pick up on the pun I tried to pull off in the title of this review, then I suppose you may not be familiar with the plot of Newsies, a 2011 musical based on a 1992 film that was itself inspired by the true story of the newsboys strike of 1899. 

Written By: Mindy Leaf

Ronnie Larsen has been busy making a name for himself as an actor, director, playwright and producer for three decades now – to growing acclaim locally, nationally and abroad. He was often seen staging plays and acting in his home turf of The Foundry in Wilton Manors, whose kitschy flexible space was known for its avant-garde horror shows, hard-core LGBT fare, and immersive Off-Off Broadway-type experiences rarely found elsewhere in South Florida.