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.

You can probably guess from the title more or less what you’re going to get from a show called To Life: Stories & Music Celebrating the Contributions of Jewish Composers to the Great Hollywood Musicals, which you’ll find playing at Boca Raton’s Willow Theatre until this coming February 5th. 

Of course, if you know the slightest bit about Broadway or Hollywood history, you probably won’t be too surprised by the way that host Shari Upbin jokingly suggests that the number of famous composers who were Jewish is actually “all of them.”

An incredible ride awaits anyone who chooses to attend Rotterdam at Island City Stage. This instantly engaging play by Jon Brittain has plenty of comedic moments, yet also tells an insightful, dramatic story likely to stick with you long after the final scene. 

But the basic premise of the play is laid out cleanly in the first. For the past seven years, Alice and Fiona have been living as a lesbian couple in a Dutch city called Rotterdam, abroad from their native England. Until now, this distance has allowed Alice to stay in the closet to her parents, which is the main reason she’s resisted coming home. But just as Alice is finally getting ready to admit that she is not attracted to men, Fiona suddenly announces that “she” feels as if she has always been one. 

Whether you’re an avid theatergoer or just a patron of occasional stage productions, you’ve probably seen Anything Goes, the tune-filled musical crafted by composer Cole Porter in the mid-1930s. Over the years, the show has survived a cornucopia of revisions and still manages to entertain audiences after nearly nine decades.

So, what am I going to say about Guys And Dolls this time? 

I’ll admit that it did cross my mind at one point during my viewing of the Lake Worth Playhouse’s version of this long-lived classic that I may have already exhausted my supply of potentially insightful remarks, since I reviewed a different production of the show only a few months back!

Listen: if you don’t know who Tina Turner is, let me bring you up to speed. The “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll” was born into poverty in rural Tennessee, famously sung about in her hit record “Nutbush City Limits.” Gifted with a powerful, irreplaceable voice, Tina (born Anna Mae Bullock in 1939) was noticed by one Ike Turner; they formed the band known as the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. The band is great because Tina is great, which makes Tina grow bigger than the band, and she goes on to have the most successful solo career for a woman rock ‘n’ roll singer. Insert the best musical I’ve ever seen.

20 years later Anna in the Tropics is as impactful and important as it was when it first premiered.  Nilo Cruz now takes the play that earned him the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a Latino  playwright and gives it a new life with his directorial vision in focus.  

Miami New Drama’s anniversary production breathes new life into this poetic work with  aesthetics to match the language itself. Originally premiering at New Theatre in Coral Gables,  Miami New Drama brings the play back to a familiar home of South Florida with Cruz at the  helm, filling each moment on stage with the lyrical nature of his words. 

“I see America as an epic poem… volumes long.”

With this singular line, Michael McKeever, the playwright of American Rhapsody opens and summarizes the entirety of the play. In Zoetic Stages current world premiere production, directed by Stuart Meltzer, America is observed through the lens of one family spanning 63 years. This family is a representation of the country as a whole as you go from decade to decade, historical event after historical event…

In other words, it is a story of epic proportions. The task of touching on so many things can be daunting to most artists and yet McKeever tackles it head on. With Meltzer at the wheel the play is given a poetic life that compliments the epic poem it is so modeled after, taking us on an ambitious journey.