Though Patrick Marber’s Closer first premiered in 1997—which is actually hard to believe was a full 26 years ago—there is still much that is compelling and even shocking about this dark, sadistic twist on a classic rom-com set up that you can catch for one more weekend at the Lake Worth Playhouse. A meet-cute car accident connects an obituary writer aspiring to become a novelist (Dan) and a sensual waif with a mysterious past (Alice) and the two soon strike up a romance. Her past becomes the inspiration for the book he goes on to write, but when sparks fly between him and the photographer tasked with taking his picture for the jacket, Anna, he can’t resist the temptation. Despite the fact that Dan then accidentally orchestrates a relationship between Anna and Larry, the doctor who tended to Alice after her car accident, the two sneakily continue an affair until all four participants in this mad game of relational do-si-do are inextricably intertwined. 

Who among us hasn’t, at one time or another, found themselves longing for yesterday? But for aging Tony winner Lydia Taylor, the protagonist of the Foundry’s new musical One More Yesterday who has now spent nearly 50 years out of the spotlight, longings for her happier yesterdays are just about all that she has left. 

In what might be one of the most hilariously chaotic plays I’ve ever seen in my life, a zany rendition of Noises Off is currently on at Delray Beach Playhouse until May 14. The slapstick kind of comedy is exactly what I didn’t know I needed when I caught the opening night’s performance, and you might need it, too. Just laugh.

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.