Written By Christine Dolen

Originally published on artburstmiami.com

Miami’s venerable M Ensemble Company was founded in 1971, the year before Joseph A. Walker’s “The River Niger” had its off-Broadway premiere. That first production by the Negro Ensemble Company won a best play Obie Award, transferred to Broadway in 1973, then captured the best play Tony Award in 1974.

Playwright Bess Wohl made it to Broadway in 2019 with a play festooned with systematic observations and offbeat family reactions to an elderly couple’s desire to divorce after a half-century of marriage.

Called Grand Horizons – named after the independent living community that  senior citizens Nancy (Lourelene Snedeker) and her husband, Bill (Michael Gioia) call home — the show is a cauldron of complexities that mixes laughable situations with sharp one-liners, family interactions that often go awry and plenty of self-examination by all parties concerned with their parents’ proposed demutualization.

Though it’s been a while since I attempted to address two shows in the space of one review, the fact that both Actor’s Playhouse’s Escape To Margaritaville and Slow Burn Theatre Company’s Honeymoon In Vegas revolve around the exotic destinations referred to in their titles seemed to suggest an almost too-obvious angle for comparing these distinct theatrical staycations. 

Based on the 1982 movie, the musical Tootsie, which is currently playing at the Kravis Center, actually might be one of the more interesting musicals I’ve seen recently, or at least a more nuanced one than I might’ve at first expected given the rather ridiculous central premise. After having alienated every director in town with his difficult behavior, flailing actor Michael Dorsey takes a fairly desperate tactic—he creates a female alter ego, Dorothy Michaels, who gives him a chance to start over and is an improbable, immediate success. 

Written By Michelle F. Solomon

Originally published on artburstmiami.com

While it may have been fitting for Actors’ Playhouse to celebrate its 35th anniversary by presenting the musical the company started with, it certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun.

It was Feb. 3, 1988, when its first production, “Man of La Mancha,” opened in a converted Kendall movie theater – a space where the company would perform for its first seven years until its move to the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables in 1995.

Though there are more moments of levity in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ world premiere production of The Science Of Leaving Omaha than you might expect for a play set in a funeral parlor, the story told is ultimately less a ghost story than a story about the ghosts the living can become. 

You know, you don’t often come across many Edward Albee plays being produced around these parts, perhaps due in part to how far the seminal playwright often veers into absurdism. Actually, you don’t come across much absurdism, period, for pretty understandable reasons. Theatre is hard enough to sell to audiences these days when it doesn’t threaten to be inscrutable—and yet when the genre is done well, as it is in Albee’s The Play About the Baby, there’s a sense in which it can get at ideas stored on a deeper level of the psyche than a traditional play, or imply something entirely unique in its obliqueness.

You’re unlikely to have much more fun observing preparations for an apocalypse than you’ll have while watching Last Night in Inwood, a new play by Alix Sobler that takes place after a cascade of natural disasters—and the government’s inability to deal with them—collides with pre-existing political tensions to turn America into total turmoil. Director Matt Stabile, who is also Theatre Lab’s producing artistic director, brings another compelling new play to fruition in this wonderfully crafted world premiere.