Though it’s been a while since I attempted to address two shows in the space of one review, the fact that both Actor’s Playhouse’s Escape To Margaritaville and Slow Burn Theatre Company’s Honeymoon In Vegas revolve around the exotic destinations referred to in their titles seemed to suggest an almost too-obvious angle for comparing these distinct theatrical staycations. 

Based on the 1982 movie, the musical Tootsie, which is currently playing at the Kravis Center, actually might be one of the more interesting musicals I’ve seen recently, or at least a more nuanced one than I might’ve at first expected given the rather ridiculous central premise. After having alienated every director in town with his difficult behavior, flailing actor Michael Dorsey takes a fairly desperate tactic—he creates a female alter ego, Dorothy Michaels, who gives him a chance to start over and is an improbable, immediate success. 

Written By Michelle F. Solomon

Originally published on artburstmiami.com

While it may have been fitting for Actors’ Playhouse to celebrate its 35th anniversary by presenting the musical the company started with, it certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun.

It was Feb. 3, 1988, when its first production, “Man of La Mancha,” opened in a converted Kendall movie theater – a space where the company would perform for its first seven years until its move to the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables in 1995.

Though there are more moments of levity in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ world premiere production of The Science Of Leaving Omaha than you might expect for a play set in a funeral parlor, the story told is ultimately less a ghost story than a story about the ghosts the living can become. 

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!