Main Street Players is coming back from the pandemic with a bang with Wolf And Badger, the first of two world-premiere new plays that will make up the company’s abbreviated 2021 season.
Ironically enough for a play as funny and fun-filled as Off Balance, its world premiere is now taking place at Empire Stage under some uniquely tragic circumstances. The show is among the last works completed by the late local playwright Michael Aman, who died of brain cancer last May.
Towards the end of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus asks, “What revels are in hand? Is there no play, to ease the anguish of a torturing hour?”
The comic sitcom “Laverne and Shirley” brought a lot of laughs to a lot of viewers during its eight-year run on ABC television.
One of its stars, Cindy Williams, who portrayed Shirley Feeney opposite Penny Marshall’s Laverne DeFazio, in the long-running show, has brought a spate of memories — along with lots of clips from L&S and other films in her prolific career – to create a delightful, nostalgic and very funny one-woman performance of “Me, Myself & Shirley,” playing through June 27 at Boca Raton’s Wick Theater.
Fantasy Theater Factory celebrated Father’s Day this year with a collection of twelve monologues, entitled Dear Dad, which premiered online on June 20th and will remain available for free streaming on their Facebook page throughout the next month.
For the second time in just one year, a musical by Lin Manuel Miranda has provided me with the sole motivation to sign up for an entire streaming service. Last July, it was Hamilton and Disney Plus; this time, it was In The Heights and HBOMax.
Few scripts have had more cultural influence than Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. First performed in 1879, the play incited much controversy when protagonist Nora challenged the period’s social norms by walking out on her husband and children after coming to the realization that her stifling marriage would never allow her to be her true self. And when she did, according to critic James Huneker, the door that she slammed behind her “reverberated across the roof of the world.”
If you’d told me a few weeks ago that one of the most exciting and innovative productions to hit South Florida so far this year would be a staging of Annie, I may have been a bit skeptical. While the classic 1977 musical has been widely beloved for its spunky main character and touching storyline, it isn’t exactly known for its iconoclasm.
Maybe you’d be hard-pressed to believe that a botched sex-change operation could be a winning premise for a feel-good night of musical theatre, but Hedwig and the Angry Inch proved a lot more fun and a lot more poignant than its vulgar title and peculiar subject matter might at first suggest. Playing until June 20th at the Lake Worth Playhouse, this unconventional musical by Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell first premiered off-Broadway in 1998, and later spawned a 2001 film version and a Tony-winning Broadway revival.
Though most area theaters are still firmly closed for indoor productions, some smaller venues around South Florida have already opened their doors, with a few notable precautions in place. Each pod of audience members at the Lake Worth Playhouse’s current production of Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar And Grill by Laine Robin, playing there until this May 16th, were seated at a healthy social distance from all others and instructed to wear their masks throughout the performance.
