Middletown by Dan Clancy, which was first staged shortly before the pandemic, has arrived at Miami’s Actor’s Playhouse, as part of a rotating-cast tour co-produced by GFour Productions. This unapologetically sentimental show takes you on “the ride of your life,” at least as its roller coaster tagline would have it. That ride, though, is less a thrill-packed shocker than a mostly-comforting coast through two couples’ relatively average middle class lives, which they happen to be living in Middletown, New Jersey.
What does it really mean to fall in love? If you’re anything like the main and only two characters of Jennifer Lane’s To Fall In Love, Theatre Lab’s long-delayed post-pandemic offering, it means, or at least meant, being able to fill the “black hole” of your heart’s neediness with affection, being passionate enough to write hundreds of poems for someone, or feeling so strongly about someone that you can’t imagine being able to so much as survive without them.
The West Boca Theatre Company, sidelined for the better part of two seasons by a coronavirus shutdown, is back in business. The kickoff for its 2021-22 schedule is a frantically paced, one-man show called Fully Committed, a day-in-the-life, depiction of a person clearly overwhelmed by his demanding job.
Wherever you’ve come from to attend the touring production of Come From Away at West Palm Beach’s Raymond F. Kravis Center, you’re likely to come away from this production satisfied. The successful musical, which is still running on Broadway after a 2017 opening, takes place in 2001, during the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
The Lake Worth Playhouse is at it again with a production of the 126-year-old Oscar Wilde classic The Importance Of Being Earnest. Director Daimien Matherson has put a modern spin on the famous farce by setting the production in today’s South Florida rather than 1890s London and by casting a non-binary female-presenting performer as protagonist Jack “Ernest” Worthing.
At the beginning of Gablestage’sThe Price, you can’t quite tell if the protagonist Victor (Gregg Weiner) is laughing or crying. He’s arrived in his father’s attic and put on a novelty “laugh record,” and hides his face as he shakes and vocalizes along.
Before I say anything about Old Tricks, the new play by Michael Bush now premiering at Empire Stage, the first thing I should probably note is that I was not quite a member of the target demographic. The play, which is marketed as a “gay comedy,” appeared to be succesfully attracting a plethora of older gay men, but I think I might’ve been the only woman in the whole theatre!
Politics is a nasty business. Its sinister entanglements are not confined to smoke-filled back rooms in hideaways scattered here and there within the Capital Beltway. They slink into the fancy steakhouses of Baltimore and the elaborate suburban New York abodes of upwardly mobile, would-be office seekers.
Playing at the Pembroke Pines Performing Arts Theater through November 7th, this production of Cabaret doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but rather aptly presents the wheel as it was once famously reinvented. Following the original highly controversial production in 1966, a memorable acclaimed 1980s revival of Cabaret added a few shocking staging conventions that have become the standard for most productions that followed.
What makes the difference between a monster and a man? This seems to be the primary question posed by Zoetic Stage’s production of Nick Dear’s Frankenstein, a thought-provoking adaptation of the classic novel that first premiered in 2011.
