As a teenager, Washington state native Heidi Schreck set her sights on learning all she could about the U.S. Constitution. In fact, around age 15, the inquisitive youngster launched a journey to earn her college tuition by winning Constitutional debate competitions across the U.S. 

Now 51, the woman from Wenatchee who went to the University of Oregon using debate-raised cash and grew up to become a teacher, actress and playwright turned her enthusiastic political learning experience into a humorous, thought-provoking play called What the Constitution Means to Me that has played on and off Broadway. It was nominated for Best Play, and she for Best Actress, in the 73rd Tony Awards, and the show earned a finalist spot for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. 

Actor’s Playhouse is offering a seasonal twist on the winning formula responsible for the theatre’s two past successful runs of the play Million Dollar Quartet with a production of its spinoff, Million Dollar Quartet Christmas. To those unfamiliar, both the original musical and this holiday variant are fictionalizations of a real-life incident in which four rock and roll music legends—Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and the one and only Elvis Presley— end up, mostly by happenstance, holding an impromptu jam session that was then recorded by their entrepreneurial manager Sam Phillips.  

Books have always been an escape to people of all ages. A way to get away from the daily monotony that sometimes pushes us to a breaking point, all because they transport us. If you find the right book, the right story, the right time, a book can take you somewhere you never imagined you could go – and that’s what happens for the characters in the play, Dorothy’s Dictionary, by E.M. Lewis.

Small Mouth Sounds, which recently began its two week run in the Lake Worth Playhouse’s black-box Stonzek theatre, is a critically acclaimed play by Beth Wohl that premiered off-Broadway in 2015. And it has perhaps been most remembered and most remarked upon for the fact that a significant portion of the show’s action takes place in total silence. 

If you decide to walk into the theater at Lake Worth Playhouse, make yourself comfortable in the seats as you sip on a drink, and wait as the lights go up, you immediately get transported to the era of love, peace, and hairspray. From Aretha Franklin, to Leslie Gore, Beehive The ’60’s Musical, directed by Carl Barber-Steele will have you dancing, clapping and singing along with the cast. To songs many of you have grown up listening to.

Any fans of the performers alluded to in the full title of On Your Feet! The Story Of Gloria And Emilio Estefan will find much to appreciate in this fun-filled celebration of their musical stylings and inspiring lives. So will those who had a good time at similarly spirited bio-jukebox musicals that have graced the stage at the Kravis Center, like last May’s Donna Summer extravaganza, or those who are simply in the mood for a catchy tune and a compelling story. 

For its southeast premiere, “Ocean Filibuster” is now showing at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, and the performance posits the human condition from the view of the awesome ocean. Awesome in the 19th century definition, that is, being beautiful and terrible and unrelenting. South Florida Theater Magazine was there to witness it during opening weekend on Sunday, November 13.

I’m quite glad that I got the chance to catch Florida Atlantic University’s Department of Theatre and Dance’s production of Violet this weekend, one of only two that it will be playing and a relatively rare staging of this 1997 musical. As director Bruce Lindser describes in the opening note of the show’s playbill, though the piece is something of a “cult favorite” among theatre people, it also isn’t one that seems to have gained much traction as far as mainstream popularity. Speculating as to why, he suggests:

“Maybe the show’s themes of forgiveness, redemption, and personal growth cut a little too close to the bone and challenge our comfort zones just a little too much.”

One normally doesn’t find nuptials, an apparent murder plot and elegant ballroom dancing all in the same stage production. 

However, the Willow Theater at Boca Raton’s Sugar Sand Park has located just such a performance. The show, Marry. Murder. What? opened Friday for a brief, two-weekend South Florida premiere, arriving a month or so after being staged in a workshop at the Flea Theater in Tribeca, New York, under its original name, Marry. Murder. F$&@k!?

More than one meaning of the phrase A Class Act is alluded to in the play of the same name by Norman Shabel, which opened last weekend at Miami’s Sandrell Rivers Theatre. Though it is an informal term that can be used to describe “a person or thing displaying impressive and stylish excellence,” it can also be used to describe an action taken by a class of people, as in the class action lawsuit that the play’s plot centers on.