Written By Christine Dolen
Artburstmiami.com

The characters in Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky” are caught somewhere between the creative, hopeful heaven of the Harlem Renaissance and the hellish economic collapse of the Great Depression.

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. 

Most folks who know Boca Stage Artistic Director Keith Garsson are aware of his penchant for producing complex, slightly skewed theatrical pieces.