By turns humorous and harrowing, Our Dear Dead Drug Lord is a relatively new play by Alexis Scheer currently making its South Florida premiere at Zoetic Stage—and it’s a play that its audiences are pretty damn unlikely to forget. It’s also a play that somewhat recalls Zoetic’s 2019 offering The Wolves in its sometimes overlapping mile-a-minute-dialogue and its focus on the sometimes messy reality of teenage girlhood.
Though it’s a question of aesthetics that sets off the action in the play Art by Yazmin Reza, Empire Stage’s current offering, the debate between friends that then ensues seems to have less to do with the meaning of art than with the absurdities of human ego. When dermatologist Serge buys what appears to be a completely white painting (though, as is repeatedly discussed to great comedic effect, it apparently also features some “fine white diagonal lines,”) his best friend Marc simply cannot make sense of how this action is in accord with the person he thought he knew.
Is there a difference between an officer and a gentleman? To some degree, at least, that’s a question posed by the musical An Officer And A Gentleman, which is based on a well-known 1982 film that I actually wasn’t familiar with before receiving an invite to the musical update currently on view at the Kravis Center.
The jukebox musical, Breaking Up is Hard to Do, now playing at the Wick Theatre in Boca Raton, offers the audience a double shot of nostalgia. Not only does it feature 18 terrific tunes written and/or sung by Juilliard-trained ‘50s and ‘60s rock star Neil Sedaka, but it also revisits the era of Catskills comedy with a couple of romantic love stories that blossom at Esther’s Paradise, a Borscht Belt hostelry about to wrap up its summer of fun with a tune-filled Labor Day spectacle.
In the years before the COVID pandemic, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for drama students at Florida Atlantic University to conclude their theatrical seasons with the production of a Shakespearean work.
First produced in 1956 and based on an even earlier 1913 play by George Bernard Shaw, My Fair Lady has certainly been around long enough to have become a recognizable part of the cultural canon. But if you make it to the Kravis Center’s current production of the musical, which is playing there until this April 24th, you should come prepared for a few major surprises.
It’s hard to know quite what to make of a play like This Is Our Youth, Area Stage’s current theatrical offering. First staged in 1996 and set in 1982, it’s a play that is at once very much of its time, with references to the Reagan White House and a conspicuous lack of cell service, yet very much universal in its portrayal of the aching aimlessness of uncertain youth, a limited scope that is perhaps both a strength and a limitation.
A captivating play written by a lawyer with 50-plus years of experience – a drama encapsulating the essentials of a deadly environmental lawsuit — recently concluded a brief series of tautly-told productions at the Mizner Park Cultural Center in Boca Raton.
Works that are considered classics are usually works that became classics for a reason. And this is definitely true of Guys And Dolls, a 1950’s musical currently onstage via MNM Theatre Company that has passed the test of time and gone on to become one of the most beloved staples of the canon in the seventy years since.
