As ‘Hamilton’ tour rolls into Miami, three South Florida natives are part of its history

Raised in Miami, Cuban-American and New World School of the Arts graduate, Alex Lacamoire, has been with the production of “Hamilton” from its inception as arranger, orchestrator, coach, and conductor. (Photo courtesy of the production).

From the spark of its concept to red-hot stagings, “Hamilton,” a musical about American history, has been making theater history of its own since 2015. And South Florida talents have helped propel that success from the start, with Alex Lacamoire—a Miami-raised Cuban-American and New World School of the Arts graduate—prominent on the team.

The national touring company of “Hamilton” comes to the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami opening Wedneday, March 13 and running through Sunday, March 24.

The biographical, political, and social strata of the mountain that is “Hamilton” are cemented by mold-breaking dramatic elements. Most striking has been the casting of African-Americans as War of Independence leaders and—rap in prominence—today’s musical idioms taking possession of a revolutionary spirit. The championing of racial and cultural inclusivity trumpets the message that all folks—to echo a standout song in the musical—should see themselves in the rooms where history happened.

As the brainchild of Lin-Manuel Miranda—a New Yorker of Puerto Rican background who already had a breakout hit about el barrio with 2005’s “In the Heights”—“Hamilton” has let Latinos lay claim to the very American musical from the get-go.  In 2016, Lacamoire—arranger, orchestrator, coach, and conductor, and all-around master at turning notes into the molecules of sonorous stage life—won a Tony Award for best orchestration and a Grammy Award for best musical-theater album for “Hamilton,” the teamwork enthroning him alongside author Miranda and other collaborators as a 2018 Kennedy Center Honoree.

“My introduction to ‘Hamilton’ was when we were working on ‘In the Heights’ and Lin-Manuel came into my dressing room to tell me about the opening number,” says Lacamoire. He praises Miranda’s bull’s-eye aim in a 2009 performance—with Lacamoire at the piano—of selections from the musical-in-formation at the White House during Obama’s presidency. Nerve-racking? You bet. But the arranger holds that memory among his dearest.

But that was just the beginning of Lacamoire’s thrill ride. “My favorite part in mounting a production is the beginning,” he confesses.  “At rehearsals for a Broadway show, you’re in there for eight hours a day, six days a week. I like that immediacy of working with singers. An hour ago they didn’t know how a song would go, and then I’ve helped them learn it. I love it when I create a vocal arrangement and get the chance to hear it back from them. Bringing something from your computer into the real world is very special. I thrive on it.”

Such agency is not lost on Buenos Aires-born, Miami-raised Emmanuel Schvartzman, since 2019 music director of “Hamilton” in the current tour. He says, “Though my favorite song from the show depends on what I’m going through in my life, I always tell my friends that ‘Yorktown,’ with the line that immigrants get the job done, always resonates with me.”

“Yorktown” refers to getting ready for the decisive 1781 battle in Virginia which handed final victory to the revolutionaries. It features commander Hamilton, born in the English Caribbean island of Nevis, and the Marquis de Lafayette, among French allies of the American cause. But their going into the unknown, stresses Schvartzman, and achieving through drive and skills success against all odds characterizes not just personages of record but also the legions of workaday warriors who, coming from elsewhere, realize the promise of their adopted land.

“My family has the typical immigrant story,” says Schvartzman, who arrived in Miami when he was 7 years old.  “We had little of what others enjoy. So I had to prove my worth. But that fire in my belly helped a lot. When musicals were introduced to me, they were like an all-American game. I wondered if I was really going to do this, knowing we have to be twice as good just to be accepted.”

But Schvartzman also thinks the vibrantly resurrected protagonists and tumultuous period in “Hamilton” can connect with us all—a universal humanity of foibles and virtues, triumphs and loss, reflected in the song list.

Honoring the baton Lacamoire passed to him, Schvartzman keeps the road show in impeccable pitch. “We wear a lot of different hats,” he says. “Our job is 33 percent being a really good musician, 33 percent being a good manager, and 33 percent being a good person.”

Like Lacamoire, Schvartzman cultivated his artistic side early on in the local community. “I did theater all over South Florida, where I learned what a musical is,” he says, lauding magnet-school Coral Reef Senior High School and Florida International University, where he earned a master’s degree in classical piano. “And my family’s quite artistic—my mother being an actress. I was always begging her to take piano lessons. My most memorable childhood moments included playing keyboard in my aunt’s studio—plain little melodies I’d teach myself.”

When a friend asked him to pitch in as pianist for a high school musical, Bach, Beethoven and their brethren stood aside for Broadway tunesmiths.  From then on, Schvartzman says, “There was no turning back.”

Throughout his career—starting as assistant music director for “On Your Feet,” the Gloria Estefan jukebox musical—Schvartzman has recognized the importance of harmonious relations on the job.  “That’s a big deal when we manage people on tours since we can’t be home everyday, going together from airports to hotels, city after city. My tasks include making sure everybody is in a good place. But that’s easier with this level of professionals who know the game.”

According to drummer Quinton Robinson (a.k.a Q), born in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami and now Atlanta-based, Schvartzman “provides the show’s connective tissue.”  In a musical that’s particularly percussion-driven, Robinson sees himself as the quarterback and the music director as head coach. The Miami Northwestern Senior High graduate, educated at the University of Miami has spread his own spicy South Florida jam throughout the nation as a pit player on the tour.

Nearing 500 curtain calls, Robinson asserts, “Every night is a new show,” his love of theater binding him to Schvartzman and Lacamoire with South Florida roots.

Gold-starred on his resumé, work on the Motown musical “Ain’t Too Proud” landed him the “Hamilton” gig. No wonder his favorite song on the show is “My Shot,” with the lead intoning, “Hey yo, I’m just like my country/… , scrappy and hungry / And I’m not throwin’ away my shot.” Be assured, beat by beat, Robinson hits every musical target.

WHAT: “Hamilton”

WHEN: 1 p.m. Thursday, March 14, Sunday, March 17 and 24; 2 p.m. Saturday, March 16 and 23; 7 p.m. Sunday, March 17 and 24; 8 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday, March 13 through 16, and Tuesday through Saturday, March 19 through 23.

WHERE:  Ziff Ballet Opera House at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

COST:  $39, 49, $59, $69, $89, $99, $109, $129, $139, $159, $169, $179, $199, $209, $229

INFORMATION:  (305) 949-6722 and arshtcenter.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.

GableStage mounts a monumental production with a trio of transformative actors

James Zannelli, Mark H. Dold and Brandon Morris play the Lehman Brothers in “The Lehman Trilogy” at GableStage with a preview, Friday, March 15, and opening Saturday, March 16 through Sunday, April 21, at the theater inside the Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables. (Photo courtesy of Magnus Stark)

The play starts with a brief prelude, a reminder of why so many people know the name Lehman Brothers: the spectacular, $3.9 billion failure of an investment bank that helped cause a recessionary avalanche in 2008.

But then, as oldest brother Henry Lehman arrives in New York from Bavaria in 1844, the epic commences.

Surrounded by the hustle-bustle activity of the famous metropolis, he speaks of himself in the third person, painting a picture with his words, including these:

“Children yelling / the creak of metal and squeak of pulleys / and in the midst of it all, / there he is. /Silent, still, / just off the boat. / Wearing his best shoes, / the ones he’d never worn, / the ones he kept in storage for that moment when / I will be in America. / And here it is. / That moment.”

Thus begins “The Lehman Trilogy,” a theatrical feat that unspools 164 years in the history of an entrepreneurial Jewish family alongside the interwoven political and economic evolution of the brothers’ new homeland.

Written in Italian by playwright-novelist Stefano Massini and translated into 24 languages after its 2013 debut in France, “The Lehman Trilogy” took off in the English-speaking world in 2018 thanks to the way adaptor Ben Power and director Sam Mendes decided to create their version at London’s National Theatre.  After a three-year developmental process, the form was set: Just three actors would play  the founding brothers and every other character in a three-part, three-hour production (Massini’s original ran five hours).

Now it’s GableStage’s turn to deliver its own version of an epic.  Previewing Friday, March 15, and opening Saturday, March 16, “The Lehman Trilogy” will run at the company’s space in Coral Gables’ Biltmore Hotel through Sunday, April 21.

Producing artistic director Bari Newport is staging the complex production with associate director Jeni Hacker by her side; Newport celebrates Hacker, who is also a Carbonell Award-winning actor and a choreographer-movement coordinator, as “a fabulous problem solver and collaborator.”

Although Newport notes that “The Lehman Trilogy” requires “a ton of simple, clever staging,” the play itself is anything but simple.

Performed in three, hour-long sections with a pair of 15-minute intermissions, the production introduces each of the three Lehman brothers as he arrives from their hometown of Rimpar, Bavaria: Henry (his name changed from “Heyum Lehmann” by an immigration officer who didn’t understand what he was saying) in 1844, Emanuel in 1847, Mayer in 1850.

The New York-based GableStage cast – James Zannelli as Henry, former Miamian Brandon Morris as Emanuel and Mark H. Dold as Mayer – must necessarily become a mighty, in-synch trio. Not only do they portray the founding brothers, but they also play Lehman descendants, wives, customers, executives and every other role in the multi-character piece.  Sometimes, a change in character is accomplished by little more than a hat, a cigar, a shift in posture or voice. But clarity – who is playing whom in any given moment – is paramount.

“I love big plays like this,” says Dold, who was an understudy in Matthew Lopez’s two-part, six-hour, Tony Award-winning “The Inheritance” on Broadway.  “This is what I was born for…The arc of it is so innately compelling.”

Because of the length of the 183-page script (most contemporary plays are under 100 pages), the stylistic complexity of mixing direct address and dialogue, and the particular challenges of producing an epic in GableStage’s cozy space, Newport gave herself, her collaborators and the cast the luxury of time.

Rehearsals stretched to six weeks, with the actors paid for an additional two weeks up front as they memorized their lines.  A significant challenge happened when the actor originally cast as Henry decided to withdraw.  Luckily, GableStage found Zannelli, who had just finished a run as understudy for the character of Henry at Arizona’s Phoenix Theatre on Feb. 11.

“I had a flight booked back to New York on Feb. 19 to audition for another production of ‘The Lehman Trilogy,’” says Zannelli, who is also a musical theater performer and opera singer.  “I was in a Home Depot parking lot with my parents in Phoenix when I got the call from Bari. The timing was incredible.”

Morris, who grew up in Miami, graduated from the New World School of the Arts college program in 2000 and appeared in a trio of GableStage productions when Joseph Adler was producing artistic director.  Although he performed in theaters throughout the country, after moving to New York he focused on film and television (his credits include “The Flight Attendant,” “FBI: Most Wanted” and “Law and Order: SVU”).

But in a bit of serendipity, when Morris decided to come back to South Florida at the start of 2022 to do a production of “Almost, Maine” at Palm Beach Dramaworks, Newport saw his performance and asked him to read for the part of Emanuel Lehman.

“This is one of the most challenging things I’ve ever had to do,” says Morris.  “It’s close to Shakespearean in its heightened language.  But if you say the words exactly as it’s written, it makes sense – it’s a big puzzle of words you’re putting together.”

Dold, a Yale School of Drama grad and associate artist at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, got to know GableStage supporters Rhoda Levitt, board chair Rosalind Stuzin and others over his 20 summers at Barrington Stage. They and Newport, who saw Dold in a production of Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer,” hoped the actor could be part of a GableStage production, and “The Lehman Trilogy” proved to be another case of just-right timing.

“The rhythm, the dovetailing dialogue is very much like a game of ping-pong,” Dold says. “It’s written like a poem in blank verse….All of that room has been left for the actor to be the storyteller.”

And what a story the three actors tell.

From the brothers’ beginnings selling cotton goods from their store in Montgomery, Alabama, to growth that feels like the American Dream on steroids, “The Lehman Trilogy” covers the finer points of finance, the diminishing connection to their Jewish roots over generations, the trading of cotton grown on plantations worked by slaves, the impact of the Civil War and the crash of 1929, the stunning collapse of 2008 – the 164-year saga is a riveting piece of theater and history.

Newport, who saw the Mendes-directed version of the play in London, is crafting something complex and markedly different for GableStage.

“It’s based on etching something out of nothing. The set and concept involve coming out of the darkness of the universe and creating light on one thing at a time,” says the director.  “In the stage directions, often the word ‘magic’ is used.  The notion of miracles is something that happens often.”

Describing “The Lehman Trilogy” as “a big ol’ fable,” Newport appreciates how deeply theatrical the piece is.

“This uses almost every aspect of what theater does best.  It uses metaphor to evoke images…in colorful and majestic ways,” she says.  “It’s such a theatrically rich and epic feat…This iteration celebrates the act of creation – coming with nothing and building something that lasts generations.”

Newport is also pleased with the way the actors are illuminating the text as they navigate multiple roles.

“They’re all just exceptional transformers. They do that thing we look to actors to do – be magical, miraculously turn into something or someone else.  It requires a level of trust among the three of them,” she says.

All three actors say that forming a bond, as brothers might, is key.  Dold and Morris met for coffee when they were still in New York, then did an abbreviated walking tour of Manhattan’s Financial District and places mentioned in the script.  Dold went to Salem Fields Cemetery in Brooklyn to pay his respects at the resting place of Mayer Lehman and his family.

“Our chemistry is terrific,” Dold says. “Once James joined us, by his second week it felt like he had always been part of it.”

Says Zannelli: “Bari is great, very smart. She is always getting back to what is happening, what are we trying to say, who’s got the power, what’s the conflict. She reminds us to always be telling the story. She strips it all down to make sure you see the sign, see the fire, know what you’re talking about.  She wants us to take the time to see everything and really paint the picture for the audience.”

Morris feels Newport is trying to get the cast to “conjure the story through our narration.”

He adds, “Bari came in with a vision and passion, and so did we. I think she has great ideas. I trust her. And I’m having fun.”

For a time, very long-form drama in the form of epic theatrical events such as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” (with a running time of nearly nine hours on Broadway in 1981) or Robert Schenkkan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Kentucky Cycle” (a seven-hour Broadway experience in 1993) were what theatergoers wanted.  And of course, William Shakespeare’s plays aren’t exactly short.

But in the 21st century, perhaps with our diminished attention spans in mind, the 90-minute play with no intermission has become ubiquitous.

Regarding “The Lehman Trilogy,” Newport observes, “Some plays are appetizers. Some are dessert. This is a full-on meal.”

WHAT: “The Lehman Trilogy” by Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power

WHERE: GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables

WHEN:  Previews 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 15, opens 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 16;  2 p.m. Wednesday, 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday (additional 7:30 p.m. performances Tuesdays beginning in April), through April 21

COST:  $45, $50, $55, $60, $65, all with additional $10 service fee (discounts for students, teachers, artists, military and groups)

INFORMATION:  305-445-1119 or gablestage.org.

RELATED EVENT:  Dr. Josh Parshall, director of history at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life will speak about “The Jewish Diaspora in the American South: Southern Jews and the Cotton Economy” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 26 at The Hub at Temple Beth Am, 5950 N. Kendall Dr., Pinecrest. Admission is free, but reservation required. Click here for RSVP.

 ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

From Miami Beach to NYC: Miami New Drama’s ‘A Wonderful World’ Heading to Broadway

Miami New Drama’s original world premiere, “A Wonderful World,” a musical about Louis Armstrong, will open on Broadway in previews in October of 2024 with James Monroe Iglehart in the leading role. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Ask playwright Aurin Squire how the Louis Armstrong musical “A Wonderful World” went from a dream to a reality and he’ll tell you it began with a quick lunch meeting on Lincoln Road and then a “very long lunch” at a steakhouse with an ocean view on Miami Beach.

Now, the production, which had its world premiere at Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach in 2021, will open on Broadway this fall with previews starting on Oct. 16 and an official opening date of Nov. 11.

Michel Hausmann, artistic director of Miami New Drama, who was the instrumental force behind the production as he put all the people and pieces together, sounds like a proud papa when asked about the Broadway announcement that was trumpeted in the New York Times on Feb. 28.

“This is a Miami play, written by a Miami playwright, produced in Miami by a Miami theater company,” says Hausmann.

The birth of the musical on the Miami New Drama stage wasn’t without its own drama, through no one’s fault. It was March 5, 2020, when the company launched its production at the Colony Theatre. On Friday the 13th, Miami New Drama’s world premiere musical, “A Wonderful World,” had its final preview performance with the gala public opening set for the following night. It was canceled. All of the work (and a considerable amount of money) that had gone into the production was abruptly halted when COVID-19 shut down theaters everywhere.

“The set for ‘Wonderful World’ sat for almost two years at the Colony until we were able to produce it again,” says Hausmann. It opened in previews on Dec. 4, 2021. “Just when Omicron hit. So, we did two full productions (and) both of them had the recurring cast of COVID,” says Hausmann.

Squire, born and raised in Opa-locka, is an award-winning graduate of The Juilliard School’s playwrighting program and received his MFA from Northwestern University. He has already amassed a long list of impressive playwrighting and television writing credits, including co-executive producer of CBS’s “Evil” and “The Good Fight,” and as a staff writer on NBC’s “This Is Us” and “Braindead.”

His path to “A Wonderful World” started while he was back in his hometown working on a commission from Miami New Drama, “Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy,” which was co-written by Squire and Miamian Billy Corben and directed by Hausmann in the spring of 2019.

“We were in rehearsals for ‘Cowboy’, and we walked about 50 yards from the theater to a lunch spot on Lincoln Road,” says Squire. Hausmann and Squire were meeting Christopher Renshaw, a British director who has helmed “The King and I” on Broadway and in London’s West End, and who was the director for Boy George’s “Taboo” on Broadway and in the West End.

Renshaw has been living in Miami Beach for more than a decade, almost around the corner from Miami New Drama’s resident home at the Colony Theatre.

Squire says the topic of a musical about Louis Armstrong came up: “At the time, it seemed rather farfetched considering all the hoops that had to be jumped through for a musical that big.”

A few days later, there was another meeting with Renshaw and writer and “Wire Magazine” founder Andrew Delaplaine. (Delaplaine has since passed away, in May of 2023).

Then Squire says he went back to New York and returned to Miami for a few more lunches.

“Smith & Wollensky is where the thing started to take shape,” he says.

After that, it was a continuous back and forth, according to Squire, between him, Hausmann at Miami New Drama, Renshaw (who would go on to direct “A Wonderful World”), and Delaplaine, who is credited with conceiving the musical with Renshaw. Thomas and Renee Rodgers, who were investors, were also involved from the very start.

In fact, it was Thomas Rodgers who years before had planted the seed of a Louis Armstrong musical. He had mentioned to Delaplaine, his brother-in-law, and Renshaw that he had read a biography about the musician and thought maybe there was something theatrical that could be done.

But rather than write a biographical show about Armstrong or create a typical jukebox musical, Squire took a different approach.

Squire, who wrote the musical’s book, explains: “The issue with Louis Armstrong’s life is, unlike most jazz musicians, he lived a long life. (He died at the age of 69 in 1971). Trying to find a way to encapsulate that with a person who lived in multiple cities and traveled the world so much was the main struggle . . . You can make 10 musicals out of Louis Armstrong’s life.”

Then the idea came together to have four different seasons of Armstrong’s life.

“And then Chris or Andrew said, ‘Well, you know he had four wives,’ ” recalls Squire.

The wheels in the playwright’s head began turning: “Ah, so maybe they are like the facets of Louis Armstrong, and it fit with the trajectory of jazz and American history in the 20th century.”

The story of the musician’s career is told from the perspective of his four wives. The musical score is made up of songs recorded and made popular by Armstrong, including the famous title song. The show’s music was orchestrated and arranged by Annastasia Victory, a Russian-born pianist, composer, arranger and conductor, and her husband, Michael O. Mitchell, both of whom have worked on a number of Broadway shows.

There wasn’t a doubt from the get-go when Miami New Drama committed to producing “A Wonderful World” that the ambitious and costly production was aimed at a Broadway stage.

“We would not have been able to produce a show of this (size) without the support we received from Tom and Renee,” says Hausmann, who says the investors never gave up on the musical. For the Broadway production, the Rodgers’ remain as producers with the addition of Martian Entertainment (Carl D. White and Gregory Rae), Vanessa Williams (yes, that Vanessa Williams, who makes her theatrical producing debut with “A Wonderful World”) and her producing partner Liz Curtis.

As the company that originated “A Wonderful World,” Miami New Drama receives a financial percentage of the Broadway production, says Hausmann. Squire adds that “A Wonderful World” on Broadway means even more to Miami in the bigger picture. “A rising tide lifts all boats . . . A Miami product that’s successful will help Miami theater, Miami New Drama . . .”

Starring as Armstrong in the New York production is James Monroe Iglehart, who won a Tony Award as the original Genie in Disney’s “Aladdin”  on Broadway. Iglehart starred in the pre-Broadway tryout runs of  “A Wonderful World” in New Orleans and Chicago in 2023.

Miami actress Lindsey Corey, who was in the Miami New Drama production as Rachel the Reporter and in the ensemble, also played those roles in New Orleans and Chicago. She’s being considered for the Broadway production, says Hausmann. Currently, Corey is getting ready to play Sally Bowles in Zoetic Stage’s production of “Cabaret,” which opens at the Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater on Thursday, March 14.

Neither Hausmann nor Squire knew of any other actors from the Miami original production being considered for the Broadway production at this time, with Squire saying, “besides James Iglehart, they haven’t finalized anything.” However, there is a possibility that some of the ensemble members from the Miami production will be in the cast, according to Hausmann.

That the two pre-Broadway tryouts did so well made it “easier to get an agreement with a Broadway theater,” according to the artistic director. The theater where “A Wonderful World” will play is Studio 54 on West 54th Street, owned and operated by the Roundabout Theatre Company since 1998.

Hausmann brings up another Miami connection to “A Wonderful World” and its home on Broadway. Miami New Drama is producing “The Museum Plays,” an interactive theater piece featuring 10-minute short plays (one written by Squire) inside Don and Mera Rubell’s museum in the Allapattah neighborhood of Miami through March 31.

“So, the announcement was made about the Broadway run as we’re currently in production at the Rubell Museum. And Don’s brother, Steve, was the co-founder of Studio 54 (the famous New York City disco founded in the ‘70s) . . . Just a beautiful Miami happenstance.”

Information and tickets, when they become available, will be through roundabouttheatre.org.

Nilo Cruz’s newest play, ‘Thirst on the Street of Water,’ inspired by author’s struggles

Daniel Romero and Claudia Tomás in Nilo Cruz’s “Sed en la Calle del Agua” (“Thirst on the Street of Water”), which has its world premiere on Thursday, March 14 at the Miami Dade County Auditorium’s Black Box Theater in Spanish with simultaneous translation in English. (Photo by Roberto Santamarina, courtesy of Arca Images)

The award-winning Cuban American playwright Nilo Cruz confesses that it was a great challenge for him to have a daughter early in his life when he was just discovering his voice as a writer. “Sed en la Calle del Agua” (“Thirst on the Street of Water”), the play that he finished writing less than a month ago — and that he is now directing in its world premiere in Miami — explores those struggles.

“It was difficult, it was very difficult to do both, and that became a great conflict: being the father of my daughter and being the father of my plays — the conflict of not being able to be fully present,” he says.

“Thirst on the Street of Water” will play four performances in Spanish with simultaneous translation into English at the Miami Dade County Auditorium’s Black Box Theater, 8 .m. Thursday, March 14, Friday, March 15, and Saturday, March 16, and 3 p.m. Sunday, March 17.

According to the synopsis of the play, “Thirst on the Street of Water” is set in an asylum for the mentally ill and tells the story of an artist who falls into a depression after losing her daughter to an illness. The psychiatrist in charge of the case realizes that art is vital for the woman’s well-being and that it may be the only path to her salvation.

“I wrote it in English and Alexa Kuve translated it into Spanish,” says the author, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama just over two decades ago with his work “Anna in the Tropics.” The original of “Thirst on the Street of Water” had been shelved for four years when Kuve, the actress and producer who heads Arca Images and who had already translated texts by Cruz such as “A Park in Our House” into Spanish, invited him to work again with the theater company.

“Thirst on the Street of Water” occurs in two time periods, Cruz explains: the past that the characters live at the end of the 1920s of the last century in Mexico, at the height of muralism, and the present at the beginning of the 1930s in New York.

“It jumps from a present to the past: Emma, who is American, falls in love here in the United States with this Mexican artist; they travel to Mexico, where both of them find their voices as artists,” says Cruz. “When the relationship begins to break down, they try to cling to that past in which, in addition to finding their voice as artists, they found each other.”

The work begins with a moment of crisis when a psychoanalyst tries to find out what happened in the painter’s life, what is the reason for her disorder, and why she has stopped painting.

“They find their voices just when a daughter comes into their lives. The conflict is: how to deal with creativity and domestic life, early love and a daughter who comes too soon into the lives of two bohemian artists who have not established themselves financially to assume that responsibility?”

The fundamental difference between the text that Cruz had shelved, and the definitive version, is the role of the psychologist, the playwright reveals. He was there only as a vehicle to get the protagonist out of her depressive state, but the playwright decided, he now says, to “give him a brush” in search of his individual struggle within the conflict of the play.

“Although the character says that his profession as a doctor prevents him from getting involved in the patient’s conflict, the case is very similar to something that happened to him, and there is a mirage that also occurs between the present and the past,” reveals Cruz. “In fact, there are several mirages in the work, and it was unintentional: everything came to me while writing the story and I just wanted to accentuate them.”

Cruz admits that he has always been more interested in his characters than the plot. “And here the doctor realizes that he has to treat this patient in a different way, using her painting to try to get her out of the state she is in.”

 A writer’s voice does not emerge overnight, according to Cruz. “You may think your first work is fabulous, but it’s not,” he says. “Training is very important, at least for me, as I am always training; I do it each time I write a work — I get to know another part of my being”.

In this case, he reiterates, the echoes of his own experience come to light: being a father or being an artist.

“That put a lot of pressure on my relationship and the relationship became very diluted,” he recalls. “It was difficult. Now it’s like going back to that stage of my life but through these characters. When you write, there is a very intimate interest. A certain urgency to tell a story about problems in your life for which you did not find a solution. Even though you have those things hidden deep within yourself, they somehow come out in writing. You react to certain situations because you have lived them, and if you have lived them, you have a way to enter that world. It is a kind of a thoughtful catharsis.”

The theme of a lost daughter had already appeared in another of his works, “Beauty of the Father,” which he wrote before “Anna in the Tropics,” when he was living in New York.

“If you study the work of Marguerite Duras, you will see that there are themes that are repeated, and the same thing happens with (Antón) Chekhov: the sale of a house, a changing world and how certain human beings are left behind,” says Cruz. “I think that happens with all authors, themes that emerge again and again, and the process of investigating them from another point of view ends up being a redemption. It is the obsessive themes that create the character, the style of the artist.”

“Thirst on the Street of Water,” he says, also has to do with what some consider the shortest story ever written, attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

“Incredible that such a short text encapsulates so much,” says the author and director. “It has a certain ambiguity, because it is not known if they are selling the shoes because the child died, or because they bought two pairs, one was too small, and he could not use them. My play can be reduced to this brief story,” he adds.

It has been disputed that it was Hemingway who wrote it. In 1910, under the title “Tragedy of baby’s death is revealed in sale of clothes,” an article in The Spokane Press ran the classified “Baby’s handmade trousseau and baby’s bed for sale. Never been used,”  which could be the true source of the very short story attributed to Hemingway.

Cruz not only wrote the play but is directing it.

“I am working with Claudia Tomás and Daniel Romero, two actors that I recently discovered and who were in my last play, ‘A Park in Our House,’ ”  he says. “In real life they are a couple, very young, recently arrived from Cuba. They are artists, passionate about theater. There is a certain intimacy in the protagonists of ‘Thirst on the Street of Water’ that comes very easily to them because they are a couple, and they are also obsessed with theater, with art, just like these characters. So, half of my work was already done when I chose them”.

He had never worked with Orlando Urdaneta, he says. He had seen him in several productions, they had met before, and the Venezuelan actor had expressed his desire to act in one of his plays.

“I saw him recently at a performance, I told him that I was preparing this play and that maybe he would be interested in playing a character; I offered it to him, he read it and he liked it,” says Cruz. “And Carlos Acosta Milián is an actor with whom I have worked a lot: he played a doctor in ‘Exquisite Agony’ and was also in ‘Lorca in a Green Dress’ and ‘Baño de Luna’; a veteran of my theater in this city.”

For Cruz, the process of bringing the characters to life with the actors becomes a final phase of writing.

“You’re exploring the text, seeing how it works in that third space that is the theater, and wondering how to deal with human behavior on a set, which in this case is basically a circle on the floor,” he says, adding: “I asked the set designer for something that looked like a moon, regarding the concept of the lunatic and the circle at the same time. It helps to recreate the three times: past, present and future.”

WHAT: World premiere of “Sed en la Calle del Agua” (“Thirst on the Street of Water”), by Nilo Cruz. In Spanish with simultaneous translation into English.

WHERE: Miami Dade County Auditorium’s Black Box Theater, 2901 W. Flagler St., Miami, FL 33135

WHEN: Thursday, March 14, Friday, March 15, and Saturday, March 16, 8:00 pm, and Sunday, March 17, 3:00 pm.

COST: General admission: $30. Seniors over 65 and students: $25. Tickets are available at arcaimages.org and on the day of the show only at the theater.

INFORMATION: arcaimages.org

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Review: Juggerknot’s ‘Conjuring the King’ Goes Inside Mind Of Extreme Elvis Fan

June Raven Romero, above, plays Avery, an obsessed Elvis fan, in Juggerknot Theatre Company’s “Conjuring the King” playing in Little River. Susie K. Taylor shares the role in the immersive production through Sunday, April 28. (Photo courtesy of Scott McIntyre)

Elvis Presley sang in a voice full of thrilling joy and seductive longing.  His movie-star looks, rags-to-riches story and boundary-shattering style earned him a vast, enduring fan base.  Inevitably, some of those who idolized the man known as The King took their devotion to extremes.

Avery, who runs an Elvis fan club and museum, is one of those extremists.

She is also the invention of playwright Dipti Bramhandkar and Ana Margineanu, the conceptualizer and director of Juggerknot Theatre Company’s newest immersive production, “Conjuring the King.”

Running through the end of April at a “secret” location in Miami’s Little River neighborhood – you get the exact address once you buy a ticket, but it’s in a shared office building with free parking – the play is a classic example of how Juggerknot built its immersive theater brand and fandom.

[RELATED: Elvis Fandom in a Secret Location]

The company’s successful large-scale productions of “Miami Motel Stories” (there were editions in Little Havana, MiMo and North Beach) and “Wynwood Stories,” plus the solo show “The Blues Opera,” established Juggerknot as the OG of South Florida’s growing immersive theater trend.

“Conjuring the King” is, like “The Blues Opera,” a more intimate show. Just 15 people per performance share in Avery’s fan club experience, and over the course of an hour and 20 minutes, they have ample opportunity to share in the fun, surprises and thought-provoking turn of this communal journey.

Going in, future audiences need to keep in mind that “Conjuring the King” is a piece of theater, not the Elvis fan club meeting it initially seems to be.  It has depth, twists, turns and, as it moves from one room to the next, unsettling surprises.

Sure, you’ll “ooh” and “aah” as you walk into Avery’s museum space, with its jam-packed wall of Elvis memorabilia, photographs, music boxes, Graceland furniture replicas, a big ol’ ceramic bust and more.  Off to one side is a mirrored karaoke room with flashing lights and a disco ball, ready for a brief interlude when anyone can croon an Elvis tune.  A small open kitchen holds supplies for a “cooking” contest and free shots of a special Elvis whiskey.

But pay attention to Avery from the moment she hurtles into the room, and you’ll realize “Conjuring the King” is about the psychological price of one woman’s obsession with the unattainable object of her fantasies.

Because Juggerknot’s team decided to present two shows per night every Wednesday through Sunday, two actors are cast as Avery to alternate performances of the intense solo show.

Susie K. Taylor and June Raven Romero perform each night, with Taylor doing the early shows except on Saturdays. The actors say the same words, follow the same blocking, handle the same elements as they conduct Elvis trivia contests or take the audience on a “visit” to Graceland for a heart-to-heart with Elvis’s late mother Gladys.

But if you were to watch back-to-back performances (as I did), you would register how different the essence of “Conjuring the King” can be, depending on the actor.

Romero sparkles and shines in a gold jumpsuit, red scarf, glittering red boots, a red and gold rhinestone belt, and Elvis-symbolic lightning bolt earrings (the costume, identical for Taylor, is by Brooke Vacca).

Her Avery leans into the early roots of Avery’s obsession, the jealousy she feels toward other women and Elvis’s own success, and the way she relies on her imaginary beloved to occupy an unfillable void. The trans actor’s Avery comes across as vulnerable, wounded, fragile at this moment in her life.

Regarding a not-to-be-revealed moment, let’s just say that if you see Romero’s performance, you will never again hear Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell” without thinking of the actor.

Taylor, on the other hand, bursts into the performance space ready to (karate) kick butt and take names.  Her vocal projection is excellent, her movement (designed by Octavio Campos) riveting.  Although her Avery is a bit older, she also seems a little more innocent and self-deprecating, less inclined to use her modest talents to achieve an infinitesimal amount of the success Elvis had.

As always (particularly in the case of Juggerknot), it takes a village to make what appears to be a one-woman show.

Vanya Allen’s scenic design, with the inextricable contributions of executive director and producer Tanya Bravo and producer Natasha Bravo as props masters, creates three different worlds for Avery and her visitors – one bright and orderly, the next darker and messier, the last darker still but with seeds of hope.  Anamaria Morales gets the lighting just right for as she reflects Avery’s changing moods. Sound designer Luciano Stazzone keeps the Elvis music coming, sometimes prominently, sometimes as a memory-triggering undercurrent.

Stage managers Zoe Garnett and Adele Robinson, along with assistant stage managers Miguel Bonilla, Manuel Bonilla, Emily Valdez and Roshambia Clark, and actor Maya Ibars (adopting an accent as thick as Tennessee barbecue sauce) as the welcoming Peggy, keep the action and activities flowing like clockwork.

To reiterate:  “Conjuring the King” immerses its audiences in joyful fun and as much Elvis trivia as a writer can gracefully pack into a script that isn’t actually about the object of its protagonist’s obsession.  And that’s what makes the play memorable.

Working with Margineanu to develop the piece, Bramhandkar has given Avery moments of clarity, including this one that stands out: “I can’t keep pushing away my life because of you. You’re just my imaginary friend I’ve had forever. A refuge. A muse. But also my crutch and excuse. I wonder what would have happened if we really met fifty years ago. I’ve imagined it many times. But if I’m really honest, a person like you would have never noticed someone like me.”

Avery, it’s clear, is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  Or maybe it’s another nervous breakdown, given a “Psycho”-reminiscent surprise in her bedroom and her private “scent library,” which prompts a “Happy Birthday” singalong for Elvis’s stillborn twin.  Like Avery herself, “Conjuring the King” has layer after layer — as do the all shook up responses to it.

WHAT: World premiere of Juggerknot Theatre Company’s “Conjuring the King” by Dipti Bramhandkar

WHERE: Exact location in Little River area of Miami disclosed after ticket purchased.

WHEN:  7 p.m. and 9:20 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday and Sunday; 7:30 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. Friday-Saturday, through April 28

COST:  $81 (includes fee), $112.50 VIP (includes fee, one drink and Elvis swag)

INFORMATION: 786-757-1986 or www.juggerknottheatrecompany.com

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Animated film about promising Brazilian pianist who vanished is a music lover’s dream

“They Shot The Piano Player,” a film by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, opens at the Coral Gables Art Cinema on Friday, March 1 and in Key West on Friday, March 15.  (Photo by Javier Mariscal, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Brazilian pianist Francisco Cerqueira Tenorio Jr., better known as Tenorio Jr., was at the beginning of a promising career when he disappeared after playing the final concert of poet Vinicius de Moraes’s tour in Buenos Aires in March 1976. He was 34 years old.

“They Shot the Piano Player,” the new animated film by Oscar-winning writer-director Fernando Trueba (“Belle Epoque,”1992) and visual artist and graphic designer Javier Mariscal premiering in Miami at the Coral Gables Art Cinema on Friday, March 1, is a music lover’s search for a response to the obvious question and more.

Trueba, a dedicated music fan whose previous animated feature film collaboration with Mariscal, “Chico y Rita” was about music and musicians, chose animation to tell the story because he says he “wanted Tenorio Jr. to feel alive.”

“That Rio where Tenorio came of age musically, those clubs, don’t exist anymore. I wanted that vitality and people to understand the context in which he moved,” says Trueba, speaking in Spanish in a telephone interview from his home in Madrid. “And for me, that I love Brazilian music, it was an opportunity to explore the Brazil of the late 50s, early 60s, perhaps the country’s highest point.”

“They Shot the Piano Player” follows music journalist Jeff Harris, voiced by American actor and pianist Jeff Goldblum. While researching to write a book about bossa nova, Harris, Trueba’s alter ego, hears an album featuring Tenorio Jr. He is deeply impressed but can’t find any recording by him after 1975, and becomes obsessed with his fate.

It gives Trueba, a fan of Brazilian music, a chance to offer a delightful, if often melancholy, music history lesson as it revisits a Rio de Janeiro full of life, a creative moment bubbling with bossa nova and samba jazz, offering context and setting the stage for Tenorio Jr.’s rise. In Mariscal’s imagery and animation, it is a Rio of dense, luxuriant colors and non-stop movement.

As a pianist, Tenorio Jr. had a light, clean touch that often evoked Bill Evans, one of his idols, a gift for melody and an easy, elegant swing.

He accompanied top artists such as Milton Nascimento, Egberto Gismonti, and Gal Costa, and his playing appears in several Brazilian music collections. He recorded only one album as a leader, “Embalo,” released in 1964. Captured with elegance and a musical ear by Mariscal’s animation, the sequence rendering the studio recording of the title track, which featured an all-star cast, brings back the look and feel of “Calle 54″ (2000), Trueba’s documentary on Latin jazz.

An artist whose work and interests reaches across media and disciplines —from furniture design and graphic design, to painting, sculpture, illustration, and animation, Mariscal’s eye for detail makes you forget that while you are hearing the real voices of the people being interviewed, what you are seeing is artwork.

Case in point: Trueba had a clarinetist perform the melody of “Embalo” as he filmed his hands playing the instrument. In a segment of “They Shot the Piano Player” as the great, late Paulo Moura reminisces about Tenorio Jr. and plays a fragment of the melody, Mariscal’s animated depiction of his performance shows the true fingering of the passage on the clarinet.

The film’s music includes several tracks by Tenorio Jr. but also a rich list of indispensable titles in Brazilian popular music, including “Chega de Saudade,” (“No More Blues”), the alpha of the bossa nova movement, “So Danço Samba, “”Ela e Carioca,” and even a few bars of “Travessia,” Nascimento’s breakthrough song. Uncanny, animated versions of the late pianists Bebo Valdés and Joao Donato, towering figures in Cuban and Brazilian music, respectively, make cameos to play music by Tenorio Jr.

As he pulls on the slender threads available to find some answers, the character of Harris, Trueba’s alter ego, calls on a who’s who in Brazilian music, artists such as Caetano Veloso (who expected to record with the pianist at his return from Buenos Aires and says he “always felt very reverent before Tenorio because of his musical ability”), Edu Lobo, Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento, Joao Donato, and Moura. He also seeks out American saxophonist Bud Shank, whose Brazilian-tinged jazz with Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida in the mid-’50s, foreshadowed the Brazilian music wave headed to the United States. He heard Tenorio Jr. on a visit to Rio and speaks animatedly of him and the Brazilian scene — only to be stunned into silence at finding out the pianist’s fate.

The film also offers a sobering look at dictatorships and state terrorism in Latin America in the 1970s, which ended up costing Tenorio Jr. his life.

It’s a few years and a short flight between the Beco das Garrafas (Alley of the Bottles), where small clubs became the hub for music in Rio in the ’50s and ’60s, and the dungeons and torture chambers at the “Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada” or ESMA, (Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy), the secret concentration camp in Buenos Aires that under the military dictatorship (1976-1983) became the Auschwitz of Argentina.

Tenorio Jr. was not involved in any political activity. After the last concert — Vinicius, Tenorio Jr., and the rest of the group were returning to Brazil the following day — he went back to his hotel. Hungry around 2 a.m., he went looking for a place to buy a sandwich. His youth, long hair, how he was dressed, and, the fact that he had a musician union’s card in his pocket when a gang of plainclothes policeman on the prowl stopped him, targeted him as suspicious.

In those days, everyday life in Buenos Aires was poisoned by fear. Trapped in a logic of violence and murder carried on by police death squads, right-wing paramilitary gangs, and leftist guerrillas, Argentina had become a nation of suspects and enemies. After a couple of days of interrogation and torture, the Argentine police reached out to representatives of the Brazilian military government to ask about Tenorio Jr. They confirmed that he was not involved in politics and was not a suspect in anything. But by then, it was too late. Tenorio Jr. was never seen again.

Desaparecido, disappeared, is Argentina’s contribution to the lexicon of terror.

In the film, Harris says that he became “a victim of two dictatorships.”

To learn about the man, Trueba also reached for testimony from Tenorio Jr.’s wife Carmen (because his body was never found, she is not officially a widow), his children and grandchildren, and Malena, the woman the pianist was involved with at the time of his disappearance.

“If you get to know a person by the people who love him, meeting Carmen and Malena tells you everything you need to know about Tenorio,” says Trueba. “And he was a serious person. He and Carmen had four kids, and they were expecting another child. Tenorio was not one to fool around. He was deeply conflicted by the affair.”

As we hear from the people who remember him, “They Shot the Piano Player” adds up the devastating costs of state terrorism in Latin America. Some are obvious and deeply personal — first, to Tenorio Jr., then to his family, and loved ones. And then there is the profound loss that such a death of a talent represents to a society.

(Trueba talks about his movie for Coral Gables Art Cinema)

The military coup in Brazil in March 1964 (the dictatorship then lasted until 1985) “stopped a Golden Age of Brazilian music in its tracks,” laments the character of Harris in the film.

“I am not a musician, so I can’t explain it in technical terms,” says Trueba in the telephone interview when asked what affected him so strongly about Tenorio’s playing. “But you could hear his touch, his ideas, and how he was bringing together jazz, Brazilian music, and classical music. He was on to something. He was special.”

WHAT: “They Shot The Piano Player” from Sony Pictures Classics

WHERE: Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables, and Tropic Cinema Key West, 416 Eaton St., Key West

WHEN: Opens Friday, March 1 in Coral Gables and Friday, March 15 in Key West

COST:  Varies by theater

INFORMATION: 786-472-2249, 305-397-4944, gablescinema.com, tropiccinema.com or sonyclassics.com/film

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Review: Miami New Drama’s ‘Museum Plays’ merges art forms at the Rubell

In one of six of Miami New Drama’s “The Museum Plays,” Jovon Jacobs sits in front of Kehinde Wiley’s masterpiece “Sleep” in Aurin Squire’s play “Maybe Love” at the Rubell Museum. (Photo courtesy of James Jackman)

For those who are passionate about the visual arts, a museum is a repository of treasures, a place to ponder the end result of an artist’s vision.  Miami’s Rubell Museum is, as always, full of works that nourish the eye, the intellect and sometimes the soul as they invite personal interpretation.

For the month of March, the Rubell is also home to a different kind of art, thanks to Miami New Drama’s cofounder and artistic director Michel Hausmann.  As commissioner and curator, Hausmann worked with six playwrights to derive short pieces inspired by works in the vast collection of Don and Mera Rubell, key players in the transformation of Miami into an international art hub.

“The Museum Plays” are as different as the writers who created them.

Although this project is somewhat in the spirit of “Seven Deadly Sins” —  Miami New Drama’s pandemic-era production that saw actors performing in Lincoln Road storefronts as small groups of masked-up audiences watched from seats outside each space — that leap into a different kind of creativity came from necessity.

“The Museum Plays” is an exploration of collaborative possibilities for institutions specializing in different art forms.  Though it has some structural similarities – guides lead five groups of 30 from one play to the next, with each guide told via an earpiece when to move from one space to another – seeing art-inspired plays in a museum setting is a singular experience.

For one thing, you react to a work of art and the playwright’s creative reaction to it. For another, although the plays are carefully placed throughout the museum, its spacious galleries weren’t created with sound, sets and lighting effects in mind, so sometimes acoustics are less than ideal, and the sets are mainly the inspirational pieces of art.

Still, Hausmann, who directed all six plays, chose his writers wisely. These playwrights know precisely how to fashion impactful short theater with a clear beginning, middle and end.  The entire 150-person audience gathers only for the final play; otherwise, the order in which you see the others is determined by a color-coded wristband given to each ticket buyer. So if your wristband is orange, you’ll see the short plays in a different order than the blue group, and so on.

Rogelio Martinez has crafted a clever, moving piece of meta theater in “Bedfellows.”  Inspired by the late Kaari Upson’s 2014 work “Rubells” – which looks very much like a worn-out mattress hanging on the wall of the museum’s library – the play features Caleb Scott as Martinez. He initially butts heads with  Hausmann (played by Hannah Benitez, who wrote “Mousa” for “The Museum Plays”) as the artistic director sends back early drafts of a script and pushes Martinez to do more, see more.

Martinez teaches playwriting, and he intersperses information and examples about various aspects of the craft – a call to action, stasis, obstacles, intrusions, withholding information – expertly into the script. A recording of Upson’s voice is heartbreaking, as is the play, performed with expert rhythm and intensity by Scott.

One opening-night group got a unique insight into the artwork when a moved Mera Rubell stood after the play to share that she and her husband had commissioned the piece for their 50^th anniversary. Although what hangs on the wall is made of silicone, spandex and fiberglass, the work is based on the couple’s own mattress – described by Martinez in “Bedfellows” this way: “Where I once saw a mattress now I see folds, small gaps, depressions, grooves…all things to indicate that a person once inhabited that space and for a long time they rose.”

Carmen Pelaez wrote “Waiting for America,” in which she plays a Rubell Museum guard named Celeste.  In a gallery showcasing Glenn Ligon’s buzzing, blinking neon sign “America,” she is showing the ropes to Darwin (Carlos Fabian Medina), young Venezuelan who is trying to figure out his new job – and the country itself.

Celeste, who seasons her English with Spanish words here and there, sets Darwin straight about his illusions, from her perspective.  She’s a straight shooter, intense yet expert in the art of dealing with museum visitors and asserting her authority in a low-key way.  The performance space, however, is dimly lit to keep focus on the “America” sign, and the acoustics are sometimes problematic. A good, thought-provoking play should be seen and heard better.

“Mousa” by Benitez, inspired by a Jenna Gribbon painting, is styled as a lecture by a highly educated Docent (Timothy Mark Davis) on what he and other experts believe is the most important element in all art: the female body.  His accompanying slides slip through the centuries, as he makes awkward jokes and comments – until he notices that a well-dressed Woman (Kelly Pekar) has positioned herself near the Gribbon, staring at it as she inches closer.

Flustered, he tells her to move back, even using a tall red stool like the ones holding some of the theatergoers to create a line of demarcation. Her response is to strip down to her bra and let her wavy hair down. Horrified, the Docent runs off in search of a guard.

But the Woman restarts the slide show and explains each image from her perspective – as the muse behind the artwork.  Davis’s haughty, jittery Docent is quite funny, and Pekar exudes the kind of mystery and strength that could inspire many an artist. Benitez’s flip into a feminist view of the art we have just heard described quite differently is clever indeed.

Aurin Squire, who wrote the book for Miami New Drama’s world premiere Louis Armstrong Musical “A Wonderful World,” has crafted a wonderful (albeit much shorter) play in “Maybe Love.” Surrounded by three magnificent Kehinde Wiley paintings – the massive “Sleep,” “Triple Portrait of Charles I” and “Equestrian Portrait of the Count-Duke Olivares” – Regina (Renata Eastlick) and Terrence (Jovon Jacobs) have a first date in that very room in the Rubell.

She’s interested in how Terrence reacts to Wiley’s paintings of Black subjects against intricately patterned, colorful backgrounds. He’s interested in what she wants for dinner at which Miami hotspot – and the sooner the better.  Though the two seem to have zero chance at a future, Squire expertly takes them through arguments and conflicts to a point where each is cautiously taking in the other’s perspective.  Eastlick and Jacobs are so good, so vibrant that you feel you need to root for them.

In Harley Elias’s “Pump and Dump,” inspired by the work of Los Angeles artist Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., an art and bitcoin Dealer (Carlos Orizondo) is pitted against a Buyer (Margery Lowe) who seems to be an eager-to-please mom.  As we learn before she arrives, he’s ruthless and foul-mouthed.  He changes his tune – or maybe partially mutes his true nature – once the red-haired dynamo arrives.  They haggle and try to make a deal, then do so, only to have the Dealer’s world explode.

Getting every nuance of the play requires at least a passing knowledge of the world of bitcoin, and if you don’t have that, good luck.  But Elias has created two fierce competitors, each played ravenously by Orizondo and Lowe. Would you have sympathy for either one? Nah. But they leave an impression.

The final play, Marco Ramirez’s “Body of Work,” is the show everyone watches together, performed by all 10 actors.  A gallery is set up ostensibly for a funeral service – right there, front and center, is a shiny lipstick-red casket.  A Eulogizer (Pelaez) speaks of the deceased, an artist who called herself Vivian Nameless.  But things take a turn, and as it happens, the service turns into an art auction

Totally Ramirez’s invention (in other words, not linked to specific art at the Rubell), “Body of Work” audaciously, sometimes hilariously skewers performance art and art world pretentions (theater has those too, by the way).

Scenic consultants Justin and Christopher Swader, costume designers Olatz Zanguitu and Saul Mendoza, and lighting designer Leo Urbina worked within the art-bedecked surroundings of the Rubell to make this collection of theatrical art come to life.

“The Museum Plays,” a collaborative experiment that pays off, is bringing theater lovers to a place not known for drama and visual arts lovers to an environment where smart playwrights are commenting on the works that are right there in front of each audience. Creative risks can have many pitfalls, but they can also bring inspiring rewards. “The Museum Plays” does the latter.

 WHAT: “The Museum Plays” by Marco Ramirez, Aurin Squire, Carmen Pelaez, Hannah Benitez, Rogelio Martinez and Harley Elias

WHERE: Miami New Drama production at the Rubell Museum galleries, 1100 NW 23^rd St., Miami

WHEN:  8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, through March 31

COST: $81.50 or $91.50 for premium seating, $45.50 for standing room

INFORMATION:  305-674-1040 or miaminewdrama.org

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Elvis Fandom In a Secret Location Propels Juggerknot’s Newest Experience

Susie K. Taylor, left, and June Raven Romero alternate as an Elvis fan club president named Avery in Juggerknot Theatre’s latest solo show “Conjuring the King” opening Friday, March 1 and running through Sunday, April 28, in a Little River location announced when tickets are purchased. (Photo courtesy of Scott McIntyre)

When it comes to extreme fandom, Elvis Presley’s devoted followers have made him the G.O.A.T. of celebrity worship for 70 years.

Sure, the Swifties have an insatiable appetite for all things Taylor Swift right now.  But almost 50 years after his untimely death, the man known as The King fuels a never-ending stream of creativity, including movies (Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” in 2022, Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” in 2023), books, TV projects, compilation CDs and stage shows (“The Million Dollar Quartet”).

Beginning Friday, March 1, and running through Sunday, April 28, the enduring spirit of Elvis will enter another realm as Miami’s Juggerknot Theatre Company presents the world premiere of “Conjuring the King” in the city’s Little River neighborhood.

Although Juggerknot made its name with various iterations of “Miami Motel Stories,” large-scale immersive experiences set in repurposed hotels and motels, the pandemic forced the company to adapt.

Two editions of “Long Distance Affair” (2020 and 2021), in which audiences watched virtually as solo actors in cities around the world performed; a virtual “Miami Bus Stop Stories” for students in 2022; and the small-scale, in-person solo show “The Blues Opera” in 2023 kept the company moving forward as it tested different ways to produce theater.

Tanya Bravo, founder and executive artistic director, says Juggerknot is workshopping a new large-scale production and expects to do a live version of “Miami Bus Stop Stories” in the future. But for “Conjuring the King,” it’s back to more intimate work.

For a script, she turned to India-born, New York-raised playwright Dipti Bramhandkar.  A five-minute scene about an Elvis fan that Bramhandkar wrote for a showcase at Manhattan’s LAByrinth Theater Company (she is a member of LAByrinth’s ensemble) had stuck with Bravo.  So, the producer pitched an idea.

“What if you had an iconic, complex figure, and a fan club, which is closed and intimate and you have to become a member?” Bravo muses. “Dipti has written such an extremely vulnerable, complex woman, and she’s holding up a mirror to the audience. Why do we become obsessed? What does it mean to be lonely?”

For her part, Bramhandkar calls the brief piece that first intrigued Bravo “the seed of an idea, not even a sapling.”  But starting a year ago, the writer developed a full-fledged play, going back and forth creatively with Romanian-born, New York-based director Ana Margineanu, a Juggerknot veteran who is credited with “immersive concept and direction” for “Conjuring the King.”

“I was less interested in creating an Elvis experience, more interested in creating a fan experience – why in some cases it becomes a huge obsession, what’s that thing that drives us toward being obsessed?  We project ourselves into that mythology,” Bramhandkar says.

Here’s how Juggerknot’s newest immersive event is structured.

Every Wednesday through Sunday during the show’s run, an audience of 15 people will gather outside a “secret” location (you’re sent the address once you buy your ticket).  A woman named Avery welcomes you into the Miami Elvis Fan Club, a place bursting at the seams with Elvis memorabilia. The evening follows Bramhandkar’s script but necessarily includes some improvisation as the actor interacts with audience members.

Avery leads trivia games, a dance session, karaoke and miscellaneous activities – a Juggerknot show always has elements of engagement and fun – but the heart of “Conjuring the King” is what its title implies.  No one plays Elvis, but as her stories accumulate, Avery (a Mississippian, like the Tupelo-born Presley) clearly makes her version of an icon seem present.

His voice and hits are part of the storytelling, of course.  You’ll hear snippets of famous Elvis recordings – “Trouble,” “A Little Less Conversation,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “That’s Alright Mama,” “Burning Love,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” – a playlist to steep you in Avery’s obsessive world.  Ticket buyers are also invited to dress in the spirit of Elvis, his different eras, his fans, however they interpret that suggestion.

Because Juggerknot wanted to present two shows per night, a pair of actors has been cast as Avery, with each performing one show a night.  Actors Susie K. Taylor and June Raven Romero have appeared in multiple Juggerknot shows, so both know their way around immersive theater.

What’s unusual in this case is that a character is being created around two performers, not one.

“Each brought a lot, so Avery became even more multidimensional than what is in the text,” says their director, Margineanu.  “Susie and June are wonderful actors with different skill sets. Susie is an unbelievable dancer. June is an unbelievable singer. They are two rivers that poured into the same character. Each came and brought to the character their own struggles as an artist, their struggles with being a woman, their personal relationship with loneliness.”

Taylor says that, rather than being competitive in working out how to play Avery, she and Romero are more like sisters.

“I’ve never had this before, two people building the same character; we’re like two different branches of the same tree,” says Taylor. “June is incredibly powerful, magnetic, and she has an incredible voice.  I’m bringing the essence of my performance art work to it.”

Although Taylor has been in three Juggerknot productions, she had never worked with Margineanu, cofounder of the international immersive group PopUp Theatrics. But being in a Margineanu-directed show was on the actor’s bucket list.

“I felt like a pretzel. I knew she would push me beyond (where) I have been before.  She’s the most powerful director I’ve ever worked with,” says Taylor, who believes she has found her tribe in a company largely made up of women. “Juggerknot is the beginning of the immersive conversation here…Tanya is one of the top immersive producers in the country. She’s always ahead of everyone.”

Romero is a transgender actor and community advocate whose professional performing career began in a 2018 Area Stage Company production of “Cabaret.”  She appeared in Area’s “She Kills Monsters,” two editions of “Miami Motel Stories” and is a member of the Pioneer Winter Collective.

“As soon as I saw the script, I said yes,” says Romero of her response to Avery.  “Tanya’s selective in the best ways. I’m lucky to be part of things that are cutting edge. Juggerknot is one of those playgrounds.”

The actor sees similarities between herself and Avery – sadness, social marginalization, glamor, power – but after initially not feeling excited about developing the character with another performer, she has flipped that script.

“We have had fusion rehearsals during the process. It’s like a cheat code to a one-woman show. You pick the best of each interpretation.  Here we are, innovating again with Juggerknot,” says Romero.

Bramhandkar finds the differences in the actors’ performances intriguing and hopes that theater fans who can afford it will try to see both Romero and Taylor in the play.

“June has a profound sense of the different identities Avery has throughout the play, starting with her first fandom. She brought that transformational story to the table,” the playwright says. “Susie connects with ageism, experiences, expectations. Both of them said, ‘I feel like the script is really speaking to me.’”

Though she had never written an immersive piece, Bramhandkar describes creating “Conjuring the King” as transformational.

“Immersive is one of the futures of theater.  It doesn’t hold people ‘hostage.’  It’s much more responsive, more like the digital world. But it’s not just style over substance,” she says.

Style does count, though. Bravo and the Juggerknot team have turned to eBay, OfferUp, collectors and fans in their quest for the Elvis memorabilia that has turned Avery’s lair into a shrine.  Even Elvis toilet paper has a place there.

One surprising query came from an actual Elvis fan club president, who let Bravo know that the vast network of Elvis fans had become aware of “Conjuring the King.” She wanted to know whether Juggerknot’s fan club was registered with Graceland, Elvis’s Memphis estate, final resting place and the mothership of Presley fandom.

“I love that, when you really blur the line with true immersive theater,” says Bravo. “I hope we get a lot of those people coming to the show. We’ve all fallen in love with Elvis.”

WHAT: World premiere of Juggerknot Theatre Company’s “Conjuring the King” by Dipti Bramhandkar

WHERE: Exact location in Little River neighborhood of Miami disclosed after ticket purchase.

WHEN: Performances begin Friday, March 1; shows at 7 p.m. and 9:20 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday and Sunday; 7:30 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. Friday-Saturday, through April 28

COST:  $81 (includes fee), $112.50 VIP (includes fee, one drink and Elvis swag)

INFORMATION: 786-757-1986 or juggerknottheatrecompany.com

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit source of theater, dance, visual arts, music and performing arts news. Sign up for our newsletter and never miss a story.

Review: Main Street Players’ ‘Christiana Lysistrata’ blends laughs with a letdown

Amanda Ortega, JaVonda Carter, Shana Goldman, Brittany Nicholson and Sara Jarrell take refuge in a church in Vinecia Coleman’s “Christiana Lysistrata” at Main Street Playhouse through Sunday, March 3. (Photo courtesy of Olimac Media)

Aristophanes’ 411 B.C. “Lysistrata,” in which the women of Greek city-states try to end the Peloponnesian War by withholding sex until peace is achieved, is an ancient Greek comedy that endured because of its author’s brilliance and the timeless truth-telling it contains.

In a place like South Florida, “Lysistrata” is more likely to be produced in an educational setting than by a professional regional theater, maybe because producers or artistic directors are wary of trying to sell a play so steeped in ancient history to their audiences. But sometimes (though not always), new takes on old plays can create fresh conduits for connection with contemporary theatergoers.

Main Street Players in Miami Lakes commissioned playwright Vinecia Coleman, a writer and actor based in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, to write a different “Lysistrata” for the company.  Coleman has retained the bones of Aristophanes’ classic in her “Christiana Lysistrata,” but she sets the play near a church in a rural village in western Europe during the High Middle Ages (which lasted from 1000 to 1300 A.D.).

So the Greek references are gone, but we must enter the High Middle Ages and deal with (likely) unfamiliar terms such as “Catharism” (a dualist Gnostic movement) and “Beguines” (a medieval lay order of women leading lives of devotion).  The former is the “crime” of a heretic who gets questioned and executed in the first scene.  The latter group becomes the latest target of the village’s always-ready-to-fight men – until the widow Christiana Lysistrata (Amanda Ortega) steps up and leads the women into a different sort of battle.

Christiana’s Best Friend (Shana Goldman) and her Husband (Sergio Tamayo) are an example of what’s wrong with married life in the village.  Best Friend cooks, cleans, takes care of the children, works the fields.  Husband, who lost an eye in a previous crusade, asks what’s for dinner.  They both enjoy sex – but is that enough to offset the imbalance in everything else?

When Christiana convinces the women to join her in the no-sex edict and lock themselves away in the church, things go swimmingly for a time. While the men walk around in agony (just ask them), the women enjoy good food and each other’s company.  Eventually, they start tossing out ideas for things that could change their  world: a wheelbarrow, glasses, a more logical market square, something like a coffee shop.

But the forces of men, the church and misogyny are mighty.  Let’s just say that “Christiana Lysistrata” doesn’t have the same sort of upbeat ending Aristophanes devised.

Coleman supplies plenty of laugh lines, but director Katlin Svadbik and the cast deliver what looks and sounds a little too reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch (not that the play is at that level), working-class British accents and all.

Except for Ortega as the earnest and intriguing Christiana, the other seven actors play multiple roles.

Goldman is charismatic as Christiana’s Best Friend, a woman who can connect with joy despite her daily drudgery.  Brittany Nicholson is funny as the Bishop, a man who mangles Christiana’s first name repeatedly and who takes it for granted that women will obey him. Sara Jarrell is deliberately annoying as the Priest, appealing as one of Christiana’s group of rebels. Stage manager Roderick Randle plays a villager who has no lines, but he does more with zero words than others do with many.

Adriana Caraballo gets two plum roles, one as the Old Man threatening to burn down the church, the other as God in all Her splendor.  JaVonda Carter is the Old Woman who is not about to let her elderly, nasty hubby incinerate her friends.  Cameron Holder sparkles as a guy who dresses in bright colors, does his makeup better than most of the women and wonders if just maybe he was born to be something else.  As the Husband, once Tamayo settles into his role, his timing and delivery are more potent than anyone’s.

The production values in “Christiana Lysistrata” are basic at best.  Ashley Rivas’ gloomy gray set requires the appearance and removal of benches throughout the play.  Angie Esposito’s costumes are colorful, but some don’t fit.  Lighting designer Amanda Sparhawk combines with sound designers Benjamin Olmos de Aguilera and Adrian Gonzalez to make God’s entrance a snazzy one.

It’s admirable that Main Street Players tried to find a way to make “Lysistrata” a funny, accessible, thought-provoking experience for its audiences, many of whom do laugh at the script’s jokes and bawdy references. But qualitatively, on too many levels, “Christiana Lysistrata” is a battle lost.

WHAT: World premiere of “Christiana Lysistrata” by Vinecia Coleman

WHERE: Main Street Playhouse, 6812 Main St., Miami Lakes

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through Sunday, March 3

COST:  $30,  $25 for students and military personell with ID

INFORMATION: 305-558-3737 or mainstreetplayers.com.

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

Miami New Drama takes its stage to Rubell Museum for a collaboration

Marco Ramirez, Carmen Pelaez, Michel Hausmann and Aurin Squire are among the theater artists working to create Miami New  Drama’s “The Museum Plays” at Miami’s Rubell Museum. (Photo courtesy of FURIOSA Productions)

Michel Hausmann, co-founder and artistic director of Miami New Drama, is an artistic innovator whose mind is often aswirl with ideas about how to get broader audiences even half as excited about theater as he is.

He earned national recognition and a Drama League Award for “Seven Deadly Sins,” a collection of commissioned short plays presented in Lincoln Road storefronts in 2020-2021. Small masked-up audiences were seated outside to do what they otherwise couldn’t during the COVID-19 pandemic: experience live world premiere theater.

Though Hausmann describes the multi-location show as “very expensive to produce,” the experiment was a smashing success, generating national coverage and critical acclaim. The other Miami New Drama cofounder, Moisés Kaufman, followed up with his own version of “Seven Deadly Sins” in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.

Now Hausmann is again creating theater away from his Miami Beach-based company’s home at the Colony Theatre.  Joining forces with Miami’s Rubell Museum, Miami New Drama will premiere “The Museum Plays,” six commissioned short works inspired by pieces in the Rubell’s superb collection.  The experience previews Thursday, Feb. 22, and Friday, Feb. 23, has a sold-out opening Saturday, Feb. 24, and runs through March 31 at the Rubell Museum, 1100 NW 23^rd St., Miami.

“When we did ‘Seven Deadly Sins,’ something in our DNA changed,” says Hausmann, who is directing all of the art-themed plays. “A lightbulb came on. Were we selling tickets to the Colony Theatre or are we in the live storytelling business?”

Hausmann’s collaboration with international art world titans Don and Mera Rubell is also a response to the post-pandemic landscape for regional theaters throughout the United States.

“Something massive has been happening in America’s regional theater, a crisis unlike anything we’ve seen. Some have gone belly up, some have canceled seasons,” says Hausmann.  “Miami New Drama has grown a lot. We’re a regional theater with a $5 million-a-year budget, so we’re more exposed…How can we explore more work outside the theater without breaking the bank?”

He describes “The Museum Plays” as work being done “in another cultural temple,” and he hopes to continue exploring collaborations with other art forms and institutions.

For her part, Mera Rubell has been enthusiastic about joining forces with Miami New Drama from the get-go.

“Any kind of cross-fertilization of creativity is dynamic and exciting.  Michel is such a creative, open-minded, exhilarating person. He has the spark which can spark more creativity,” says Rubell.  “We have artist residencies, so we understand what it is to have artists in the building.  For us, it’s an extension of what we do – encouraging art.”

The idea this time is that a half-dozen playwrights – some new to the company, others familiar to Miami New Drama regulars – have been commissioned to write 10-minute plays in response to works of art at the Rubell.  Some of the writers visited the museum to find the work that would inspire them, others used the internet to choose the piece that would start their creative process. Each submitted a short list of requests, and Hausmann played matchmaker based on factors including logistics – moving audiences from play to play, whether the sound from one play would bleed through to another and so on.

“I had to take into account the spacing within the museum,” the director says.  “Each performance will be for 150 people divided into five groups of 30.  They rotate among five plays, then everyone comes together at the end in the main gallery for Marco’s play.”

Marco is Hialeah native Marco Ramirez, whose play “Body of Work” closes out  “The Museum Plays” with a single performance for all 150 audience members.

The others, performed five times per night for the rotating groups of 30, are Aurin Squire’s “Maybe Love,” inspired by Kehinde Wiley’s “The Portrait of Charles I;” Carmen Pelaez’s “Waiting for America,” inspired by Glenn Ligon’s “America;” Harley Elias’s “Pump and Dump,” inspired by Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.’s  “Your Ad Here;” Rogelio Martinez’s “Bedfellows,” inspired by Kaari Upson’s “Rubells;” and Hannah Benitez’s “Mousa,” inspired by Jenna Gribbon’s “Scenicscape.”

Each short play is performed by two actors, but all 10 – Renata Eastlick, Jovon Jacobs, Kelly Pekar, Timothy Mark Davis, Carlos Fabian, Caleb Scott, Carlos Orizondo, Margery Lowe and actor-playwrights Benitez and Pelaez – appear in “Body of Work.”

Ramirez, whose 2016 play “The Royale” (inspired by Black heavyweight champ Jack Johnson) has had more than 30 productions throughout the country (including one at GableStage), most recently wrote the book for the Atlantic Theater Company’s Off-Broadway premiere of “The Buena Vista Social Club.” He’s also the writer of Hulu’s first Spanish-language limited series, the upcoming “La Maquina” starring Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna.

“It’s the first show I’ve written that my (Spanish-speaking) grandparents can watch,” says Ramirez, whose large Cuban-American family still lives in the Miami area.

As experienced as Ramirez is in long-form writing, he is masterful at short plays, twice winning the Heideman Award (for “I am not Batman” and “3:59 a.m.: a drag race for two actors”) at the high-profile Humana Festival of New American Plays, which brought theater practitioners and critics to Actors Theatre of Louisville from 1976 to 2022.

“We toured the museum once or twice to see if any of the pieces struck our fancy. It was an embarrassment of riches,” he says of his favorite Miami museum.  “I was willing to help in any way. There were no creative directions given to me, but I knew the evening should end with an energetic piece that used all the actors.”

Crafting a rich short play, he says, isn’t so different from writing a short story.

 

“There has to be a whole world before the play and a whole world after – why these 10 minutes?” asks Ramirez, whose play is the only one not inspired by a piece at the Rubell. “Short plays often have their own rules.  I thought it might be really interesting to do a funeral, an event with a beginning, middle and end.”

And what he came up with for “Body of Work” isn’t just energetic.  On the page, anyway, it’s deeply observant of art world particulars and peculiarities, as well as very, very funny.

Squire’s ongoing association with Miami New Drama has so far led to productions of “Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy” (coauthored with Miamian Billy Corben), the Louis Armstrong musical “A Wonderful World” (Squire wrote the book), “Defacing Michael Jackson” and the “Seven Deadly Sins” play “Blackfish” (about cultural appropriation).  He’s working on the fifth and final season of the Paramount+ series TV’s “Evil,” where he’s co-executive producer, and Miami New Drama has commissioned him to write a dark comedy related to the O.J. Simpson trial.

When Squire said yes to participating in “The Museum Plays,” he was thrilled to discover that the museum’s works by Wiley – painter of President Barack Obama’s official portrait – could be chosen.  An art collector friend had taken him to a Wiley exhibition two years ago, and Squire remembers thinking, “I don’t even have a wall that big.”

Known in part for his paintings of Black subjects posed against bright, ornately patterned backgrounds, Wiley has taken some of his inspiration from Old Masters works.

Wiley’s stunning, massive 2008 painting “Sleep” is one of the works discussed in Squire’s “Maybe Love.” The others are the artist’s 2005 “Equestrian Portrait of the Count-Duke Olivares” (inspired by Diego Velázquez’s 1636 painting with a nearly identical title) and the 2007 triptych “Triple Portrait of Charles I” (Anthony Van Dyck painted his triple portrait in 1635-1636). In Wiley’s interpretation, two of the three perspectives of King Charles I present him with a hoodie partially obscuring his face as he gazes at the viewer.

Squire, a world traveler who has sought out great art all over the planet, wrote “Maybe Love” as a first-date play steeped in discovery.  Regina surprises Terrence with a visit to the Rubell and its works by Wiley.  She is deeply into art. He’s more about nightlife – and food, because he’s very hungry. They verbally fence as they get to know each other, working in some speculative art analysis.

The characters, Squire says, represent the ways he looks at art:  “Part of me is a more serious aficionado.  The other part is free-styling.”

Calling the Rubells “the artistic lynchpin of Miami” in the world of visual art, Squire believes “The Museum Plays” is an example of how theater is evolving.

“Theater isn’t just at the Colony or in a small black box.  To grow the audience, you have to go to different spaces to wake people up.  Theater is happening all around us – on boats, in cargo containers, in museums,” he says.

Hausmann anticipates that “The Museum Plays” will attract different kinds of audiences, some from the visual arts world, others fans of theater.  He’s a little nervous about his latest experiment in off-site theater, as the location doesn’t allow for sets or theatrical lighting, so “the play is everything.”  He describes the plays as having “very different flavors” and hopes to do productions in unconventional spaces every season or two.

As for Rubell, she’s game for anything the playwrights have created.

“The playwrights were free to do as they pleased.  There were no limits on their creativity,” says Rubell, whose name comes up in the course of the evening.  “It’s exciting to fall in love with a work of art, which I’ve done my whole life. I can’t wait to see how these playwrights responded.”

WHAT: Miami New Drama’s “The Museum Plays” by Marco Ramirez, Aurin Squire, Carmen Pelaez, Hannah Benitez, Rogelio Martinez and Harley Elias

WHERE: Rubell Museum galleries, 1100 NW 23^rd St., Miami

WHEN: Previews 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 22, and Friday, Feb. 23; sold-out opening 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 24; regular performances 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, through March 31

COST: $81.50 or $91.50 for premium seating, $45.50 for standing room

INFORMATION:  305-674-1040 or miaminewdrama.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

Dark Musical Comedy, ‘The Great Soviet Bucket,’ Gets Premiere With Miami Light Project

“The Great Soviet Bucket” will have its world premiere on Thursday, Feb. 22 through Saturday, Feb. 24 at the Miami Theater Center, Miami Shores. From left, Matt Podd, pianist, Puppet “Comrade Bucket” (designed by Rachel Burson), Timur Bekbosunov, creator and lead performer, and Yvette Cornelia Holzwarth, violinist. (Photo courtesy of Sandra Powers)

In the German film Good Bye Lenin! from 2003, there is an unforgettable sequence in which a statue of Lenin is seen, through a window, flying over the city like a ghost. It should be remembered that the Bolshevik leader—father of the 1917 Russian Revolution that first implemented a Communist system—was one of the great symbols of the Eastern Bloc.

In many of those countries’ cities stood statues of Lenin, murals bearing his likeness, streets and town squares bearing his name . . .  all celebrating the deceased leader and the once triumphant Russian Revolution and Communism. In that ideology, Lenin was practically a sacred figure. Therefore seeing him being carried by helicopter in Wolfgang Becker’s film vividly reinforced the idea that change had taken place in the Soviet Bloc. A change so radical and profound that it affected even the great “god” of the Communist model: Lenin.

Much has been done in the arts universe to document how suffocating it was to live under a system bent on total power over and control of its territory, even at the cost of the lives (and minds) of many affected citizens. The aftermath is evident in the devastated psyches of survivors of totalitarian regimes.

This and much more is what “The Great Soviet Bucket,” a multimedia show featuring protest and resistance songs from the former Soviet Union, intends to address. Grammy Award-nominated Kazakh-American opera singer Timur Bekbosunov, who is said to be “gifted with a spectacular vocal and emotional range,” is the headliner of this project.

He is backed on stage by pianist, composer, arranger and musical director Matt Podd, and versatile violinist, vocalist and composer, Yvette Cornelia Holzwarth. The production is directed by Sandra Powers, an Emmy-nominated Peruvian-American filmmaker, screenwriter and editor.

“The Great Soviet Bucket” will have its world premiere at the Miami Theater Center, Miami Shores, opening Thursday, Feb. 22 through Saturday, Feb. 24. It’s part of the National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network (NPN/VAN) Creation and Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects in partnership with Miami Light Project and NPN.

Its producers describe the show as a dark musical comedy that follows Timur, a dutiful Soviet citizen, and his unhinged puppet of “Mother Russia,” Comrade Bucket. A true believer, Timur patiently tolerates the complexities of the USSR, knowing that a better future is just around the corner. His local commander, Comrade Bucket—named for an enamel bucket now part of Soviet-era folklore—encourages him to understand and embrace the way of life of the masses.

One must imagine the relationship between Timur and his puppet as a dramatic device, advancing the story from political stubbornness through its absurdity. In this parody comprised of dialogue and song, the anti-heroes represented by Timur and Comrade Bucket can be a sort of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and even Batman and Robin. Anachronistic Soviet slogans and hymns serve as its backdrop, and a completely collapsed fourth wall recalls Bertlodt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera.

But as the empire of the Soviet Union begins to crumble, so does Timur’s Soviet identity. The brilliant tenor uses the songs of his childhood to raise pressing questions about the intertwined forces of identity, politics and history.

“The play is not a monodrama, but a genuine conversation with the audience, using dark satire—very bitter humor—to question, mock and dismantle certain stereotypes of the Soviet Union, trying to understand its history and relevance to contemporary events in Russia,” explains Timur, who boasts a classical background but is also a rock musician.

The play has a confessional, almost intimate tone, and is intended to be an interactive experience between the audience and what happens on stage. “The Great Soviet Bucket” explores the phenomenon of mass “brainwashing” in the Socialist Bloc’s countries, and how difficult the “de-programming” of state propaganda has been for so many.

“(Writing this work) I went back to my childhood, having grown up in the Soviet Union, in Soviet Kazakhstan, and realized that for years I had been singing official songs approved by the regime, which concealed the true Soviet reality,” says the musician. “It is very difficult to understand today’s Russia without first examining the pernicious past of the USSR.”

But in “The Great Soviet Bucket,” Timur departs from specifics to delve into much more encompassing questions: what is it that leads to the formation and establishment of oppressive regimes? What is it that leads people to be complacent under those regimes and—why not?—what lessons can we learn from the past so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes today and in the future?

“Russia is the example of a country that is committing atrocities (right now) and never apologized for its past,” says Timur. “(There were) families there who lost their loved ones and (also lost) their cultural identity . . . I myself, being part Kazakh and part Russian, was never allowed to speak my own native language.”

He continues, “So what does it take to carve your way out of that very difficult situation? Behind a dictator there are much bigger forces, external and internal, working to undermine democracies. And democracies are for me very fragile; people (make) the heart of them, and it is (people) who carry the resistance against the absolute powers.”

For Beth Morrison, founder, president and creative producer of BMP, it was not difficult to collaborate with an artist who she says is as complex and brilliant as Timur.  Morrison’s and BMP’s mission is “discovering” emerging or established composers dedicated to experimentation and innovation, and who take artistic risks in the realms of “opera-theater” and music theater.

“I’ve worked with him for about ten years, even a little longer, and we’ve collaborated together on a number of shows,” says Morrison. “Timur is someone I really believe in wholeheartedly, not only as a creative force, but also as an artist.”

On how the collaboration with the Miami Light Project came about, Beth Morrison says there was no doubt in her mind that MLP was the right partner for a premiere of this caliber. “Beth Boone (Miami Light Project’s artistic and executive director since 1998) I’ve known for fifteen years. She is someone who has done, and is doing, the most interesting work with experimental artists, artists who really don’t have a home in traditional institutions,” says Morrison.

WHAT:  “Timur: The Great Soviet Bucket”

WHERE: Miami Theater Center. 9806 NE 2nd Ave Miami Shores

WHEN:  8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 22, Friday, Feb. 23 and Saturday, Feb. 24

COST: $30 general admission (plus a $3.37 fee), $20 for students and seniors (plus a $2.92 fee),  $100, VIP include preferred seating and admission to post performance party. (VIP tickets only available for Friday, Feb. 23 performance.)  Tickets at www.eventbrite.com

INFORMATION: 305-576-4350 or miamilightproject.com

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.