Drama Queen

Teatro Avante returns with 'El no'

Teatro Avante closed out the XXVII International Hispanic Theatre festival in July with its production of Cuban playwright Virgilio Piñera's El no.  Adapted by Gilda Santana and directed by Mario Ernesto Sánchez, the play is about the eternal conflict between generations, and it boasts a powerhouse case in Isabel Moreno, Gerardo Riverón, Maribel Barrios and Julio Rodríguez.  The play is performed in Spanish with English supertitles.

Avante is bringing the play back to South Florida Thursday through Sunday for a run at the On Stage Black Box at the Miami-Dade County Auditorium, 2901 W. Flagler St., Miami.  Performances are 8:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 5 p.m. Sunday, with tickets priced at $30, with discounts available for seniors, students and disabled theatergoers.  Call Ticketmaster at 1-800-745-3000 or the box office at 305-547-5414.

Zach Braff sees his play, Miami-style

The talented (and very busy) Zach Braff, part of the soon-to-open movie Oz: The Great and Powerful, took a break from project-juggling in Los Angeles for a quick trip to Miami over the weekend.  He had heard from his dad Harold (who lives in South Florida) and others that the current Zoetic Stage production of his first play, All New People, was really good and rather different from the play's 2011 New York production and the 2012 London production in which Braff played the suicidal yet appealing Charlie.

So he flew to Miami with his girlfriend and saw the Saturday night performance with her, his dad and other family members.  The verdict, according to Zoetic artistic director Stuart Meltzer?  He liked it.

To be there for Braff's hush-hush visit, Meltzer drove back to Miami from Key West, where he's directing a production of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks for the Waterfront Playhouse (it previews Jan. 29-30, opens Jan. 31 and runs through Feb. 16).  After the show, the former Scrubs star posed for photos with the cast, offered positive feedback, and then everyone went to the nearby City Hall restaurant for a happy late-night dinner.

All New People winds up its run in the Arsht's Carnival Studio Theater on Sunday.  Performances are 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday, with tickets priced at $40 and $45.  Meltzer says the shows have been packed, to a large degree with theater lovers 40 and younger.  If you want to see what Braff wrote -- and what he saw -- call the Arsht at 305-949-6722 or visit the web site. The Carnival is in the Ziff Ballet Opera House at 1300 Biscayne Blvd.

Oh, and Meltzer says Braff is warm, humble and very nice. That's not always the case with Hollywood types, but it's refreshing to hear that the director, writer and star of Garden State is one of the good guys.

(Photos of Braff solo and Braff with cast members Todd Allen Durkin, Betsy Graver, Nicholas Richberg and Amy McKenna by Nathan Valentine/World Red Eye.)

Theaters reap Knight Arts Challenge support

Last night, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation made South Florida artists and arts groups happy to the tune of $2.28 million.  The Knight Arts Challenge will fund 34 projects, bringing the total of arts projects funded since 2008 to 143 -- representing nearly $20 million in support for ideas to enhance the arts in the region the foundation calls home.  Those funds are part of a larger $86 million investment the Knight Foundation has made in South Florida arts, and the foundation just announced that it will invest $23 million more to extend the Knight Arts Challenge through 2015 and support projects at seven institutions.

The 34 newly revealed grants will fund projects in the visual arts, music, dance, arts education -- and seven that focus on or include theater.  The 2012 theater winners, who have to match the Knight Arts Challenge funding, are:

*Actors' Playhouse of Coral Gables, which receives $40,000 to bring 3,000 students from 8th to 12th grade to its production of the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights; the experience includes study guides, discussions with the director and actors, and a rap-writing contest, with finalists performing at the Miracle Theatre.

*Miami's Centro Cultural Español, which receives $100,000 to produce 15-minute short plays in Spanish and English three times a year in intimately sized shipping containers.

* The Deering Estate Foundation, which will receive $35,000 to help create a playwright development program, retreats and a resident theater company at its historic facility.

*FUNDarte, which gets $100,000 for its Miami on Stage Knight New Works project, selecting three projects to fully produce and tour to two additional locations.

*Miami Theater Center in Miami Shores, which will receive $100,000 to help individuals and small performing arts groups develop work in its discounted 70-seat Sandbox space; those selected get marketing help, a commissioning fee, and rehearsal and performance space.

*The Project [theatre], which gets $25,000 toward developing larger-scale, immersive, site-specific theater experiences in Miami.

*Arts Garage in Delray Beach, which includes the Theatre at Arts Garage, won the Knight Arts Challenge People's Choice Award, receiving $20,000 to enhance its artistically eclectic programming.

For more information on the Knight Arts Challenge program in Miami, visit the foundation's web page.

 

 

 

GableStage gets NEA grant for McCraney 'Hamlet'

GableStage, which will join with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and New York's Public Theater in premieringTarell Alvin McCraney's set-in-Haiti Antony and Cleopatra next season, has just been awarded a $10,000 National Endowment for the Arts Art Works grant to support its upcoming production of Hamlet.  The 90-minute adaptation by McCraney and Bijan Sheibani, commissioned by the RSC, will run at GableStage Jan. 12-Feb. 10, then be performed free for 15,000 Miami-Dade County Public Schools students at the Joseph Caleb Auditorium in Liberty City and the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center in Cutler Bay.

The NEA received 1,509 eligible applications for the Art Works grants from not-for-profit groups seeking more than $74 million in support.  GableStage's is one of 832 approved grants totalling $22.3 million.

McCraney will direct his adaptation, and he has now settled on his cast.  Edgar Sanchez will play Hamlet, with Dylan Kammerer as Horatio, James Randolph as Claudius and the Ghost, Alana Arenas as Gertrude, Peter Haig as Polonius, Ryan George as Laertes and Rosencrantz, Mimi Davila as Ophelia and Arielle Hoffman as Guildenstern and a player.

Performances will be at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday (no evening show the first weekend).  Tickets range from $37.50-$50.  GableStage performs in the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables.  For information, call 305-445-1119 or visit the theater's web site.

24-Hour Theatre delivers magic at warp speed

The one-night-only performance of the eight little plays created for Naked Stage's 24-Hour Theatre Project 2012 has come and gone.  Hopefully, the sleep-deprived playwrights are starting to feel human again today, thanks to much-needed zzzzs and the satisfaction of a job well done.  As for artistic director Katherine Amadeo and her multitasking hubby Antonio Amadeo (the author, director, designer and star of the current A Man Puts on a Play at Barry University's Pelican Theatre), after being up for 48 hours straight, they deserve a week at a spa. But the fact that they are parents to school-age daughter Lara and baby son Max makes that an unlikely fantasy.

Naked Stage's annual fundraising event has become a much-anticipated opportunity for South Florida's theater community to show just how impressive its work can be under the tightest of time constraints.  After the playwrights did their thing over the hours when Sunday evening morphed into Monday morning, actors, directors, stage managers and interns arrived at the Biltmore Hotel at the raw hour of 7 a.m. Monday to learn their newly created lines, get the plays up on their feet, and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse before the single 8 p.m. public performance at GableStage, the place where 24-Hour Theatre began six years ago.  The free hosting of the event was, once again, thanks to GableStage artistic director Joseph Adler; as Antonio Amadeo noted from the stage, Adler supports the theater community again and again by turning over his space for readings, performances and events like 24-Hour Theatre.

This year, the audience of theater folk and theater fans got a lot of bang for their ticket price bucks.  As always, there were hits, misses and messes, but overall, South Florida theater did itself proud.

For me, the loveliest and fullest play of the evening was Stuart Meltzer's Pieces of Lisa.  Staged by Amy London and driven by Nicholas Richberg's quietly magnetic performance as a grieving son, the play explored the different mourning styles of three disparate brothers and their stoic father.  Meltzer's writing was funny, clever and touching, and Pieces of Lisa is clearly a short play worthy of a future life.

Christopher Demos-Brown went for smart, funny dialogue mixed with a snippet of meta theater in The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, a comedy about four parents at a tony private school who have been called on the carpet for the sin of sending a kid to school with a banned peanut butter sandwich. Funniest moment: When Tracey Barrow-Schoenblatt as a sexy mom and Oscar Cheda as a gay dad looked at an exquisitely attired, ridiculously in shape Jim Ballard and voiced the same simultaneous thought: "He's hot."  With some tweaks, Peanut Butter could stick around too.

Also on the plus side: Juan C. Sanchez's Splintered, a play about a man (Clive Cholerton) certain that his departed wife (Barbara Sloan) isn't really gone; Michael McKeever's Goldfish Don't Bounce, a neat comedy about a newly-in-love young couple (Arielle Hoffman and Adam Simpson) and an unhappily married pair (Lela Elam and Wayne LeGette) "celebrating" their 14th anniversary; and Andie Arthur's Mermaids in the Attic, a haunting piece (featuring Troy Davidson, Julie Kleiner and Hunter McConnell) about the loss of two generations of women in a family.

Tony Finstrom's Myth America aspired to be a raucous Southern Gothic comedy about a family's secrets spilled onstage.  Christopher DePaola's dark Pontius Co-Pilot featured Anne Chamberlain as a deceptively wholesome-looking drug dealer.  Marjorie O'Neill-Butler's Satan's Cheerleaders was an idea that proved hellish, in the end.

A large cross-section of South Florida's far-flung theater artists gather and mix three times a year:  At the annual Carbonell Awards, which honor some of the best work done during the previous year; at the Theatre League's annual holiday party, where the Silver Palm Awards are bestowed; and at the 24-Hour Theatre Project.  Naked Stage's event isn't about competition.  It's about creativity and community-building.  And on that score, 24-Hour Theatre delivered as it always does -- impressively.

(Photos of 24-Hour Theatre Project 2012 by George Schiavone)

 

 

 

 

 

 

24-Hour Theatre 2012 is off and running

It's Sunday night -- do you know where your playwrights are? For eight South Florida writers, the answer is that they're somewhere in the regal elegance of the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, sweating bullets. 

By Monday at 8 p.m., those currently-in-process short plays will be in front of the audience at this year's 24-Hour Theatre Project, the Naked Stage's popular annual fundraiser and theater community bonding experience.  Right now, the plays are still swirling around in the playwrights' heads, making the transition into their laptops.  But thanks to the luck-of-the-draw ceremony that took place at GableStage earlier tonight, the playwrights now have their titles, directors and casts.

If you go to the one-and-only performance at GableStage Monday evening, here's what you'll see:

*  Mermaids in the Attic by Andie Arthur, directed by Dan Kelley, featuring Troy Davidson, Hunter McConnell, Julie Kleiner and Shane Tanner.

*  The Peanut Butter Conspiracy by Christopher Demos-Brown, directed by Michael Leeds, featuring Jim Ballard, Oscar Cheda, Tracey Barrow-Schoenblatt and Matthew William Chizever.

*  Pontius Co-Pilot by Christopher De Paola, directed by Skye Whitcomb, featuring Anne Chamberlain, George Schiavone, Mcley Lafrance and Karen Stephens.

*  Myth America by Tony Finstrom, directed by Avi Hoffman, feautring Sally Bondi, Patti Gardner, Amy Miller Brennan and Andy Quiroga.

*  Goldfish Don't Bounce by Michael McKeever, directed by Andy Rogow, featuring Lela Elam, Wayne LeGette, Arielle Hoffman and Adam Simpson.

*  Pieces of LIsa by Stuart Meltzer, directed by Amy London, featuring Clay Cartland, David Perez-Ribada, Dan Leonard and Nicholas Richberg.

*  Satan's Cheerleaders by Marjorie O'Neill-Butler, directed by Nicole Stodard, featuring Meredith Bartmon, Sabrina Lynn Gore, Dave Corey and Amy McKenna.

*  Splintered by Juan C. Sanchez, directed by Hugh Murphy, featuring Alex Alvarez, Noah Levine, Clive Cholerton and Barbara Sloan.

You can be a part of the first and only audience to see the world premieres of these eight new plays, which open and close Monday at GableStage in the Biltmore, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables.  Tickets are $35 ($50 for a reserved VIP seat and a souvenir poster).  Call 1-866-811-4111 or visit the Naked Stage web site for tickets.

Stage veterans, newcomers score Silver Palm Awards

The Silver Palm Awards are to South Florida's Carbonell Awards as Off-Broadway's Obie Awards are to Broadway's Tonys.  The five-year-old Silver Palms have "...no nominees, no winners or losers, and no limit to the number of citations given in any 'category,' though there really are no official categories," says playwright Tony Finstrom, the awards' chairman and founder.

In other words, the awards for excellence in local theater from Sept. 1, 2011, to Aug. 31, 2012, are more free-form than the Carbonells.  Finstrom, TV host Iris Acker and critic Ron Levitt form the Silver Palm committee, and recommendations are made by a panel of critics and theater freelancers (including me).

This year's awards will be presented during the annual holiday party held by the South Florida Theatre League.  The celebration happens Dec. 3 from 7:30 to 11 p.m. at a to-be-announced Fort Lauderdale venue. Non-Theatre League members will pay an admission fee, but members party for free.  For info and reservations, call Andie Arthur at 954-577-0778; for Silver Palm details, visit the organization's web site.

Now to the winners, which for the first time include six previous Silver Palm recipients.  The year's honored directors are GableStage's Joseph Adler (for Race, Red, The Motherf**ker With the Hat and Time Stands Still), Actors' Playhouse's David Arisco (for Next to Normal and Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol), Margaret M. Ledford (for After the Revolution at the Caldwell Theatre Company, The Unseen at Promethean Theatre and Turn of the Screw at the Naked Stage) and Stuart Meltzer (for his consistently outstanding work as Zoetic Stage's resident director). 

The honored playwrights are Mark Della Ventura (for writing and performing Small Membership, and for his performance in Lobby Hero, both at Alliance Theatre Lab), Christopher Demos-Brown (for Captiva at Zoetic), Kim Ehly (as outstanding new playwright for Baby GirL, a Kutumba Theatre Project production at Empire Stage) and Michael McKeever (for Moscow at Zoetic).

Actors being honored with Silver Palms are Katherine Amadeo (for Naked Stage's Turn of the Screw), Jim Ballard (for All My Sons and The Fantasticks at Palm Beach Dramaworks and Side Effects at Mosaic Theatre), Ken Clement (for Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol and Becky's New Car at Actors' Playhouse and The Last of the Red Hot Lovers at Stage Door Theatre), Todd Allen Durkin (for Captiva at Zoetic, A Steady Rain at GableStage and A Measure of Cruelty at Mosaic), Lindsey Forgey (as outstanding new talent for Baby GirL at Empire Stage and Into the Woods, Urinetown and Xanadu at Slow Burn Theatre), Jodie Langel for Next to Normal at Actors' Playhouse and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre), Laura Turnbull (for The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds at Dramaworks, Becky's New Car at Actors' Playhouse and Death and the Maiden at Mosaic) and Gregg Weiner (for Red, A Steady Rain, Race and Time Stands Still at GableStage).

Also being honored are set designer Michael Amico (for his Palm Beach Dramaworks designs for All My Sons, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and Master Harold...and the boys) and Fort Lauderdale's Island City Stage (as outstanding new theater company for its debut with The Twentieth Century Way at Empire Stage).

The Theatre League will also present its annual Remy Awards at the holiday celebration. Director Amy London, executive director of the Carbonell Awards, gets the Pioneer Award, and journalist Bill Hirschman gets the Service Award for his Florida Theater On Stage blog.

(Photo of Gregg Weiner and Todd Allen Durkin in GableStage's A Steady Rain; photo of Nori Tecosky and Lindsey Forgey in Kutumba Theatre's Baby GirL)

 

 

 

Great theater on screen

New Theatre is winding up its run of Willy Russell's Educating Rita at Miami's Roxy Performing Arts Center this weekend, with performances at 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 1 and 5:30 p.m. Sunday.  But venture into Coral Gables, and you can catch the great Julie Walters (the actress who originated the role of the knowledge-hungry Rita) on screen in the National Theatre of London's production of The Last of the Haussmans.

In Stephen Beresford's play, Walters plays Judy Haussman, a matriarch whose spirit is more '60s than high society; Helen McCrory and Roy Kinnear costar as her daughter and son.  The comedy, part of the "Live from the National Theatre of London" series, will be shown through the weekend at 1 p.m. Friday-Sunday at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables.  Tickets are $16 ($14 for seniors 65 and older and for fulltime students, $12 for Cinema members, $10 for children 12 and under).  For info, call 786-385-9689 or visit the movie theater's web site.

 

Party with 'Rocky,' learn from 'Heights' duo

As Halloween approaches, you can count on some theater or other doing The Rocky Horror Show, that dress-up audience participation horror flick spoof.  This year, Entr'Acte Theatrix will do the Time Warp and all the other tunes from the forever-popular Rocky.  And Andrews Living Arts Studio in Fort Lauderdale is having its own go at Rocky, with a special Halloween costume ball.

The Entr'Acte Rocky Horror runs from Thursday through Nov. 4 at the Crest Theatre at the Delray Center for the Arts in Old School Square, 51 N. Swinton Ave., Delray each.  Performances are 8 p.m. Oct. 25-27 and Oct. 31-Nov. 3, 2 and 7 p.m. Oct. 28, and 2 p.m. Nov. 3-4.  Tickets are $25 ($10 student rush).  For information, call 561-243-7922 or visit the Entr'Acte web site.

Andrews Living Arts' Rocky Horror is at 8 p.m. Thursday-Sunday, with extra 11 p.m. shows Friday-Saturday and that costume ball at 8 p.m. on Halloween.  Tickets are $24.95 in advance, $29.95 at the door (for Halloween, you get the lower rate if you come in costume), and studnets pay $16.95.  Andrews Living Arts is at 23 NW Fifth St. in Fort Lauderdale.  Call 1-800-838-3006 or visit the theater's web site.

Heights actors give back

Actor-dancers Noemi Del Rio and Shaun Taylor-Corbett met while doing the Broadway production of In the Heights, then got married. Both are headed for Miami Oct. 26-27 to teach master classes for the Miami Childrens Theater.  Del Rio, a New World School of the Arts grad, and Taylor-Corbett offer a workshop session From 4 to 7 p.m. Oct. 26 in which they'll teach an In the Heights dance combination followed by an interactive seminar covering auditions and vocal/acting techniques.  The cost is $35.

Their four-hour workshop from 2 to 6 p.m. Oct. 27 is a musical theater master class in which they'll work with individual students.  That one has a $150 fee and is limited to a dozen participants; three spaces remain.

The master classes take place in the Russell Theater at the Dave and Mary Alper Jewish Community Center, 11155 SW 112th Ave., Miami.  For information, call 305-274-3595 or visit the theater's web site.

Zoetic Stage joins National New Play Network

The National New Play Network (NNPN) has a new member company: Zoetic Stage, which will kick off its season Oct. 4-21 with Doug Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife. The play, a solo show starring Tom Wahl as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (a German man who lived as a woman and survived both the Nazis and East German communists), will be done in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.  Zoetic's work is part of the Arsht's Theater Up Close series, and this particular play is one of the offerings during the center's ongoing Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project.

The NNPN affiliation is a valuable one for Zoetic in two ways.  As artistic director Stuart Meltzer observes in announcing the relationship, "It is vital to the health of every community that new writers continue to strive, question society and bring humanity back to our social media-frenzied world.  Becoming a member means that we can now include our very own playwrights on a larger circuit and recruit the work of outside playwrights to Miami."

In NNPN's model, several theaters agree to stage a "rolling world premiere" of a script they all like, giving a playwright different productions of a new play, exposing the work to audiences in different cities and allowing the writer to do ongoing developmental work between premieres.  Zoetic, which has staged world premieres by founding playwrights Michael McKeever (South Beach Babylon and Moscow) and Christopher Demos-Brown (Captiva), will now have more opportunities to help the work it originates have an ongoing life.

Miami's New Theatre, which will stage Robert Caisley's Happy Nov. 30-Dec. 16 as part of a rolling world premiere, is part of NNPN, as are the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre and Sarasota's Florida Studio Theatre.