Unexpected scenarios when an adult daughter visits her father for his 70th birthday lead to both a humorous and dramatic story in playwright Joshua Harmon’s two act comedy “Skintight”, running now through June 29 at Island City Stage in Wilton Manors.
The 27th anniversary of City Theatre’s “Summer Shorts”, running now through June 23 at the intimate Carnival Studio Theater of the Adrienne Arsht Center in downtown Miami features the annual salute to the ten minute short play, but with a significant difference this year.
Even though South Florida has experienced a record amount of rainfall this week, enough to cause substantial flooding, the show must go on. To end the 2023-24 Broadway season, the Broward Center and Broadway Across America presents Clue, a new comedy play based on the beloved Hasbro game and Paramount Pictures movie. The classic whodunnit game comes to life in the best way possible, full of thrills and laughs and murder.
If you choose to venture to under the radar West Palm Beach theatre Actor’s Rep this weekend, you’ll find an unexpected gem in their moving production of A Song For Coretta by playwright Pearl Cleage. The title of the play refers to Coretta Scott King, who first came into the public eye as the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. and became a powerful activist in her own right and a leader of the civil rights movement after his passing. When Scott King herself passed away in 2006, thousands of mourners gathered outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church to pay their final respects.
When I first heard of Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants” animated TV series, I didn’t get the appeal. “Really?” I thought? “A talking sea sponge in shirt-and-tie, shorts or underpants?” But haven’t we all embraced talking mice and daffy ducks et al for generations? Who am I to cast doubt?
Playwright Alexis Scheer, born and raised in Miami from a Columbian household, captured the humor and spirit of Latina culture in her one act play “Laughs in Spanish”, running now through June 23 at Gabletage in Coral Gables.
I was initially intrigued by Palm Beach Dramaworks’ (PBD) first-ever revival play TRYING by Joanna McClelland Glass because of its premise. It shows how people of extremely disparate backgrounds and generational experience can spar yet keep working together to where they eventually respect and even deeply care for one another. If an ailing, patrician 81-year-old former US attorney general and judge from a prestigious American family and a vigorous, determined non-Ivy-League educated young woman of 25 from a small Canadian prairie town (who’s hired as his secretary) can learn to get along, perhaps there’s still hope for the rest of us. Particularly in our contentious times.
When ACT’s (Actors Community Theatre of Davie) popular director Jerry Jensen decided to keep their latest production, CLOSE TIES by Elizabeth Diggs, in the playwright’s setting of 1981, it was a no-brainer. Audiences would surely love revisiting a family’s summer home set in the quieter and more rural Berkshires of decades past. Where, as Jensen states in his Director’s Notes, “There are no cellphones or even area codes, no PCs, an office where the father uses a Dictaphone. The kitchen table is the center of family activity. But the family relationships are as timely today as they were then.”
Playwright Elena Maria Garcia and Stuart Meltzer’s “Cuban Chicken Soup”, a one woman comedy starring Garcia, now running through May 19 by Zoetic Stage at the Carnival Studio Theater of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, is a humorous look at Latina and Jewish culture in Miami.
How did we get here? As we rapidly approach the intermission season, the limbo space between one performing arts season to the next, institutions in South Florida are wrapping up their efforts, while some are showcasing their penultimate selection of talent. One venue with a firecracker of a musical play is Miami’s Arsht Center and “Peter Pan.” Only on stage for one week, this new adaptation of the classic 1941 play offers contemporary outlooks to dated and harmful portrayals of women and Indigenous cultures.
