Though it’s been a while since I attempted to address two shows in the space of one review, the fact that both Actor’s Playhouse’s Escape To Margaritaville and Slow Burn Theatre Company’s Honeymoon In Vegas revolve around the exotic destinations referred to in their titles seemed to suggest an almost too-obvious angle for comparing these distinct theatrical staycations. 

Based on the 1982 movie, the musical Tootsie, which is currently playing at the Kravis Center, actually might be one of the more interesting musicals I’ve seen recently, or at least a more nuanced one than I might’ve at first expected given the rather ridiculous central premise. After having alienated every director in town with his difficult behavior, flailing actor Michael Dorsey takes a fairly desperate tactic—he creates a female alter ego, Dorothy Michaels, who gives him a chance to start over and is an improbable, immediate success. 

Written By Michelle F. Solomon

Originally published on artburstmiami.com

While it may have been fitting for Actors’ Playhouse to celebrate its 35th anniversary by presenting the musical the company started with, it certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun.

It was Feb. 3, 1988, when its first production, “Man of La Mancha,” opened in a converted Kendall movie theater – a space where the company would perform for its first seven years until its move to the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables in 1995.

Though there are more moments of levity in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ world premiere production of The Science Of Leaving Omaha than you might expect for a play set in a funeral parlor, the story told is ultimately less a ghost story than a story about the ghosts the living can become. 

You know, you don’t often come across many Edward Albee plays being produced around these parts, perhaps due in part to how far the seminal playwright often veers into absurdism. Actually, you don’t come across much absurdism, period, for pretty understandable reasons. Theatre is hard enough to sell to audiences these days when it doesn’t threaten to be inscrutable—and yet when the genre is done well, as it is in Albee’s The Play About the Baby, there’s a sense in which it can get at ideas stored on a deeper level of the psyche than a traditional play, or imply something entirely unique in its obliqueness.