I applaud The Wick Theatre for continuing to tap into many of our happiest memories at a time when we need them more than ever. Just entering their classy, luxurious venue and perhaps, like I did, indulging in rich chocolate gelato and coffee under crystal chandeliers in the lobby before the show, hearkens back to more relaxed and hopeful times.

When Slow Burn Theatre Company’s artistic director/choreographer Patrick Fitzwater welcomed the audience to his inaugural show of their 2023/2024 season, he asked how many of us had seen INTO THE WOODS before. Most hands went up. Obviously, Stephen Sondheim’s (music and lyrics) and James Lapine’s (book) two-time, Tony-award winner (for both new production and best musical revival) had a large South Florida fan base. Could Broward Center’s local regional professional theater live up to the memories of traveling shows or even Broadway? Fitzwater seemed to think so, going so far as to call this production their “most beautiful show ever”… though you might recall their last season boasted one groundbreaking blockbuster after another. 

This past weekend marked three things for Lake Worth Playhouse (LWP): the opening weekend of Rent; the second performance of its 2023-2024 season, its 71st; and the first show premiering after the recent passing of its Executive Director, Stephanie Smith. Her usual chair in the theater was left reserved, adorned with a bouquet of flowers. 

Famed Pulitzer Prize playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) shared his experiences growing up as a young Black poet in his native Pittsburgh in the one man play “How I Learned What I Learned”, running now through October 22 in the South Florida premiere of the play at GableStage in Coral Gables.

I’m writing this just as word came in of a tentative deal that would end the Hollywood writers strike. Which is welcome news, of course, for our country’s creatives and, by extension for all of us, their audience. But I can’t help feeling sorry for everyone involved in the glittery, glamorous, immensely lucrative (for the rare few) … but also incredibly caustic and phony movie business.

Prolific playwright Stephen Brown may be heading toward his late thirties, but he looks at least a decade younger and has managed to retain incredible knowledge of and insights into all the angst and anger of teen and preteen life. Whether his plays revolve around the actions and passions of a troubled young boy or girl, they always ring true, inciting gasps of recognition from his audience. 

Despite its thunderbolt of a title, the focus of this memory play is on the relationship between a self-involved author and his long-suffering agent.

Amid an ongoing strike by Hollywood screenwriters and actors, a play with the nifty title “Pay the Writer” courts applause before anyone has uttered a word. Never mind that its turf is mainly the literary world, not the cinematic one; the author at the center of Tawni O’Dell’s play, Cyrus Holt (Ron Canada), seems to speak for all underpaid writers when he inscribes that feisty injunction in a copy of his book that is being adapted as a movie.