By Mindy Leaf

It’s been a few years since I last attended a show by Florida Atlantic University’s Department of Theatre and Dance. I do recall their students being quite good and I especially enjoyed how they’d often produce rarely staged gems. So I was nostalgically delighted to discover that after the long pandemic absence nothing has changed – if anything they are better than ever! The plays are still staged at their main Boca campus in the lovely Marleen Forkas Studio One Theatre with free garage parking and an impressive art gallery that’s open to the public (at least it was during Saturday’s matinee) and entices you to enter as you make your way down the long, white art-laden hall to the theater’s entrance. 

by Mindy Leaf

Breaking news! Slow Burn Theatre Company ends their famously popular 2022/2023 season with one more exhilarating, high-energy extravaganza!

Laughs and familiar scenes of Miami were memorable in the 2023 “Summer Shorts Homegrown Edition” of eight 10 minute plays, running now through June 25 at the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center in downtown Miami.

Broadway in Ft. Lauderdale has found its closing show for the 2022-2023 in Beetlejuice, the musical retelling of the cult classic movie. At the Broward Center, this show promises to make you laugh, maybe feel a little comfort in however you define your sexuality, and the cast and crew deliver the experience of being dead. South Florida Theater Magazine was there on opening night to report back that this is a show that aspires, and achieves, to be better than its source material. Yes, this musical improves on the movie in several ways, and that’s why it’s worthy of a closing slot.

The rich thematic landscape of Topdog/Underdog is evident from the first moment that would-be dealer Booth, as he practices, and seems to engage the audience in, a rousing game of Three Card Monte. At least to me, combined with what vague knowledge I had of the play’s themes going in, it was impossible not to notice the dark implications of a line like “if you pick the black card you pick a loser.” 

While the idea of a character being on the search for themselves is a pretty classic one, few characters have taken the concept as literally as does Tracy Jones, the protagonist of a play of the same name currently on view at Island City Stage until this June 18th. Described as “a comedy about friendship, connection and chicken wings,” the show comes to ICS as part of a rolling world premiere, after previous stops in Rochester, NY and Williamston, MI. It takes place at a party thrown by said protagonist, to which she has had the bright idea of inviting every other woman named Tracy Jones in an attempt to alleviate her crushing sense of loneliness. 

To end its 2022/2023 season, Miami City Ballet closed out with Entradas, a performance dedicated to the pioneers of American ballet, with choreography from renowned choreographers like George Balanchine. Not only did this concert show what the company is made of, but where it came from, and that’s my biggest takeaway. First premiering at the Kravitz Center in West Palm Beach on Friday, May 12, South Florida Theater Magazine caught its final show at the Arsht Center in Miami on Sunday, May 21.

Whether you’re a dedicated Disney fanatic or a dedicated Disney detractor, you’ll probably find plenty to enjoy in Disenchanted, a raunchy send-up of princesses new and old that will be playing for only one more weekend at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse thanks to MNM Theatre Company. Brought to you by your “hosts,” Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty, the concept of the show is that it is a revue a gaggle of Disney princesses are putting on to express their dissatisfaction with the way they are portrayed in the famous films. And they’ve also got a few objections to the oppressively narrow standards of behavior they are expected to adhere to, from keeping their “cherry intact til marriage” and waiting until they find their prince to come to being left behind to do keep up with housework while the men go off on all the real adventures.

If you’re someone who’s always taken your own sanity for granted, you may be blessedly unfamiliar with some of the emotions explored in Proof, which poses, for its main character, the compelling and unsettling question of whether she is losing her grasp. Now playing at Miami’s Actors’ Playhouse, this 2001 Pulitzer Prize winning play by David Auburn is, if not a terribly iconoclastic choice of work, still one that gives audiences a good deal to consider.

Written By: Mindy Leaf

When playwright Stephen Kaplan was fresh out of college, he wrote the first draft of a comedy about loneliness and the universal longing for connection called TRACY JONES. He cites the famous Beatles’ song “Eleanor Rigby” as inspiration, and if you listen carefully, you can find a few insider references in his show. Fourteen years would pass till Kaplan took up the play again, in 2018. And, like another famous Beatles’ song, it would all fortuitously “Come Together,” culminating in a third Rolling World Premiere Production in 2022/23.