If you’re someone who’s always taken your own sanity for granted, you may be blessedly unfamiliar with some of the emotions explored in Proof, which poses, for its main character, the compelling and unsettling question of whether she is losing her grasp. Now playing at Miami’s Actors’ Playhouse, this 2001 Pulitzer Prize winning play by David Auburn is, if not a terribly iconoclastic choice of work, still one that gives audiences a good deal to consider.

Written By: Mindy Leaf

When playwright Stephen Kaplan was fresh out of college, he wrote the first draft of a comedy about loneliness and the universal longing for connection called TRACY JONES. He cites the famous Beatles’ song “Eleanor Rigby” as inspiration, and if you listen carefully, you can find a few insider references in his show. Fourteen years would pass till Kaplan took up the play again, in 2018. And, like another famous Beatles’ song, it would all fortuitously “Come Together,” culminating in a third Rolling World Premiere Production in 2022/23. 

If anyone is in search of a fun-filled musical theatre indulgence to put on their schedule for this weekend—or needs a reminder that actually, blondes have feelings too—then it’s a good thing that Legally Blonde is parked for the weekend at West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center.

“Disenchanted”, a musical comedy created by Dennis T. Giacino and Fiely Matias that gives a mature view of the fairy tale princess over a decade ago, has had a popular run internationally and audiences at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach learned why within the first minute of the show. The show opened on May 12 and runs until Memorial Day weekend on May 27.  

As a movie, Legally Blonde has had a profound cultural impact. No, really! Few sources of entertainment can easily unite both those who loved sorority life and those who snarkily avoided it, those who unironically consider themselves girlbosses and those with a more nuanced understanding of feminism. The musical based on the 2001 film adeptly carries on that universally appealing campy-yet-inspirational, farcical-yet-aspirational balance, garnering countless fans (many of whom wear pink to the show in solidarity with the main character) for reasons that are on full display by the Legally Blonde national tour currently finishing its run at the Kravis Center.

Aren’t we all searching for grace? Perhaps so, but in Zoetic Stage’s second world premiere this season (and their second by a South Florida playwright!), Vanessa Garcia’s #Graced, its protagonist Catherine is doing so a bit more directly than most in a Lewis-and-Clark inspired odyssey across the United States, undertaken in part in her effort to cope with a recent divorce.

Written By: Mindy Leaf

The great American playwright (also acclaimed actor and screenwriter) of “Torch Song Trilogy” and “Hairspray” fame, and early “out” gay celebrity Harvey Fierstein, 68, still questions his gender identity. But he’s okay with that. In a 2022 interview, Fierstein confided: “I’m still confused as to whether I’m a man or a woman…. As a boy attracted to men, finding out about gay was enough.” The term non-binary bothers him, though, as he’s simply “comfortable being me and if I ask myself, ‘Would you want to transition? The answer’s no.”