The young Russian house maid climbed onto the stool in the lobby. She rang a small hand bell. “Ladies and gentlemen, please follow me,” and she led the forty-nine theatre goers into the auditorium of the Miami Theatre Center, formerly the PlayGround Theatre.

It was opening night of Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov and the old Miami Shores theatre had been converted into a fading Russian mansion. The audience was seated on the stage on a steeply raked grandstand. They faced the immense drawing and dining rooms, and beyond, the long passageway to the front door. To their left was the large wooden garden balcony, extending out over the orchestra seats and to the right, the...

Kevin Reilley, Vera Varlamov, Kim Cozort, Kenneth Kay - photo Roger Martin            On the surface, Irish playwright Conor McPherson did not do the theatrical world any favors when he wrote sixteen scene changes into his eighty-five minute play, The Birds. My handy dandy calculator tells me that means every 5.3125 minutes there's a dimout/blackout on stage during which time the set/props may be changed, costumes changed and a time line established. Can you think of a better way to slow down a performance? No, neither can I. But Richard Simon of Mosaic Theatre and his director John Manzelli, with the help of...

Scott Douglas Wilson, Mark Krozynski            Thinking Cap Theatre's Artistic Director Nicole Stodard admits that the company's current work, The Drawer Boy, is not what audiences might expect from the fledgling group. In the program's Director's Note she reveals that this is "inarguably the most traditional piece TCT has ever programmed." While it is only the second show of the group's third season, she has a point. The linear and quite standard fare, The Drawer Boy, follows on the heels of TCT's show The All-American Genderf*ck...

Right off the top, Betsy Graver and Matthew William Chizever can mesmerize an audience pretty much by just standing center stage. Don't believe me? Then go to see Joe Adler's production of Venus in Fur at GableStage.

She's auditioning, in her sex shop lingerie, for a play that he adapted and is about to direct. She's late, storming with a torrent of ‘fucks’ into Lyle Baskin's real as can be replica of a New York rehearsal hall. He's Thomas, (Chizever) exhausted from not finding the perfect Vanda for his work. She's Vanda (Graver) a demented, long legged, blonde butterfly, fluttering around the stage in a diamond studded dog collar and little else. He's wearing playwright clothes and demeanor, with a fianc

Gabe Hammad, Mark Della Ventura, Ashley Price, David Sirois, Anne Chamberlain

I can guarantee you one thing when you see a play written by Mark Della Ventura: you'll get the truth, feelings be damned.   He's a disarming man, but he writes with a knife. No pussy footing here.  No genteel euphemisms; just foul hilarity, surprising tenderness and ultimate cynicism. 

If the first line of roomies and the following give and take on ladies' naughty...

Karen Stephens, Lela Elam, Jessica Peterson, Sally Bondi         The Women's Theatre Project is breaking in its new home in Boca Raton at the Willow Theatre in Sugar Sand Park with a well-acted, smartly directed comedy about white-collar female jailbirds that put the capital D in the word divas.

"Delval Divas," by Barbara Pease Weber, is the story of a small group of bourgeois convicts at the Delaware Valley Federal Correctional Facility whose comfortable living arrangements...

Antonio Amadeo, Kathleen Robiou, Andy Quiroga        And I do mean all.  Antonio Amadeo wrote a play. Then he designed it. Then he produced it. Then he directed it. And, of course he acted in it.   And then he presented it on stage at the Pelican Theatre.   All this with great wit, imagination and energy. 

But it's not a one man show. Far from it, for Andy Quiroga, Kathleen Robiou, Shawn Burgess,  Stephanie Meskauskas, Ricardo Redd, Victor Rodriquez, Kaitlin Sarnacki and...

If Miracle Mile ever had a power outage, all Coral Gables would have to do is call out the cast of Godspell to light up the entire city. Too bad there was only a smattering of a crowd at the Thursday night performance that I attended. Still, the electricity was fully intact. Kudos to these professionals for giving it their all when they could have slacked a bit since they were only playing to half a house. 

C’mon, good people, go and see this show. Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of this half-baked 1970s clone of Hair, but I must admit that after seeing this creatively rendered...

"If everything goes well for me tonight, this should be a waltz," Matt Friedman tells the audience in the four-minute opening monologue of Lanford Wilson's Talley's Folly.

In this delightful production, everything does go well as Palm Beach Dramaworks presents a thoroughly enjoyable and dramatically rich interpretation of Wilson's tender, romantic story about two lonely people and the boathouse that brings them together.

Wilson has his drama unspool in real time — 97 minutes without an intermission, and purposefully so since interrupting this slice-of-life...

Rock of Ages is another in a line of modern Broadway musicals that take inspiration in what could be coined the Mamma Mia effect. Mamma Mia built a show around the songs of Swedish Europop group ABBA. There have been more than a few that have followed in its footsteps. Now, there's Rock of Ages, a virtual 1980s jukebox of songs from classic rock bands and performers like Journey, Guns 'N Roses, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, Foreigner, Styx, Whitesnake and the list goes on and on.

Happily for this particular touring production that opened a six-day run at the Adrienne Arsht Center, the music is what sells this show. The non-equity cast expends a lot of energy, but...