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. 

Written By: Mindy Leaf

Ronnie Larsen has been busy making a name for himself as an actor, director, playwright and producer for three decades now – to growing acclaim locally, nationally and abroad. He was often seen staging plays and acting in his home turf of The Foundry in Wilton Manors, whose kitschy flexible space was known for its avant-garde horror shows, hard-core LGBT fare, and immersive Off-Off Broadway-type experiences rarely found elsewhere in South Florida. 

Written By: Mindy Leaf

Numbers are dry, unemotional. Sometimes the higher the numbers of victims of war, hunger, atrocities, the harder it is to relate. Humans appear to require one-on-one connections to enter another person’s world and actually care about their fate. To facilitate such empathy through the generations, we’ve developed art, music, and perhaps – most of all – live theater. 

When one more or less spends their life wandering from theatre to theatre, one gets used to experiencing quite a range of emotional intensity; yet I believe there are few plays this season that I found quite as moving as I found Refuge, a new play by Satya Jnani Chávez and Andrew Rosendorf that is currently finishing up its rolling world premiere at FAU’s Theatre Lab. Even at a glance, there are also quite a few qualities of this production that mark it as something out of the ordinary; for one, a significant portion of the dialogue is delivered only in Spanish, with no subtitles or translation to be found. 

Wrapped up this previous weekend at the Broward Center, Broadway found its way back to south Florida with To Kill A Mockingbird and a star-studded cast. Based on the movie, which was based on the novel, this play is a newer adaptation by playwright Aaron Sorkin, famed writer for his contributions to popular TV shows like “The West Wing,” and more. Emmy award-winning actor Richard Thomas commanded the audience like he did in the courtroom as Atticus Finch. South Florida Theater Magazine got a chance to see the poignant play, and let me tell you: it’s just as important today as it was when it was published in 1960.

Especially considering this is my first exposure to their work, I definitely wasn’t expecting to be quite as entertained as I was by Loxen Production’s version of Little Shop of Horrors, a classic musical that seems to have become one on its own decidedly quirky merits and not by mere happenstance. Written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, the same winning team that would later go on to Disney fame, this brilliant show centers around a dorky-beyond-belief every-guy named Seymour, who is just going about his business as a clerk at a flower shop on the downtrodden skid row until he stumbles upon a particularly peculiar little plant.