Review: Layon Gray’s ‘The Girls of Summer’ focuses on a mystery at M Ensemble

The members of the Red Diamonds baseball team rejoice in “The Girls of Summer” by Layon Gray at M Ensemble at the Sandrell Rivers Theater,  Liberty City’s performing arts center, through Sunday, Feb. 25. (Photo courtesy of Christa Ingraham)

Playwright, director and actor Layon Gray has a talent for getting inside so many different facets of Black life and history – and for taking engaged audiences on that journey with him.

Miami’s M Ensemble, the state’s oldest Black theater company, has just begun its 53rd season with a production of Gray’s “The Girls of Summer.”

After presenting his “Kings of Harlem” in 2017 as the company’s inaugural production at the Sandrell Rivers Theater, then following it with “Meet Me at the Oak” in 2019, “Cowboy” in 2021 and “The Dahomey Warriors” in 2022, M Ensemble founders Shirley Richardson and Patricia E. Williams know their audiences respond to his signature blend of history and highly theatrical storytelling.

“The Girls of Summer,” which debuted in 2009, takes some of its inspiration from the history of Black women baseball players (and from the movie “A League of Their Own”). But this Gray play orbits around the mysterious disappearance of Coach Odessa Hicks (Lela Elam), who vanishes just before an exhibition game that could have been the triumph of her career.

It’s the mid-1940s, and Gray’s fictitious Hicks was once a barrier-breaking player in the all-male Negro Leagues (the play name checks Toni Stone, Mamie “Peanut” Johnson and Connie Morgan, three women who actually did so). Then someone threw a pitch that smashed her knee, her nascent career ended, and she became embittered and ill, carrying on as the sole caretaker for her sunny but slow daughter Lucy (Jenora Hamilton).

[RELATED: M Ensemble Celebrates 53-Year History]

For Hicks, the stakes in the exhibition game at Chicago’s Wrigley Field between the all-Black Red Diamonds and the all-white Racine Belles (the latter a real team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League) could not be higher. Personal redemption, a brighter future for Black women athletes and demanding respect for her race all swirl through the coach’s mind as she drives the Red Diamonds to the breaking point in an often-cruel style.

Unsurprisingly, the women who make up the Diamonds don’t take to their coach’s critical, dismissive style.

Piper (Mysia Anderson) lodges complaints that earn the others a session of running laps at night in the rain. Pitcher Mattie (Katchana Agama) has men on her mind as much as (or more than) baseball.  Coby Rae (Chasity Hart) left a husband and child behind, with his support, to pursue her baseball dream.  Floridian Martha Faye (Toddra Brunson) has a funny, bawdy mouth and a larger-than-life personality.

The team’s catcher Eddie (pronounced Edie and played by Dina Lewis) is an always-upbeat type who gets friendly quite fast with journalist Peter James (Milton Lyles II), who comes to interview the women about the coach’s disappearance.  Jonetta (Genesis Summers) is a late and pointedly hostile addition to the team.  And twin sisters Betty (Sophia Kenol, as a wide-eyed and insecure player) and Billie (Janine Johnson, aggressive and without boundaries) are as different as can be.

The play’s literal odd man out is Mr. West (Rick Urban), a white baseball executive who refuses to let anything – including the team’s missing coach – ruin what promises to be a huge payday, given the robust advance sales to mostly Black women ticket buyers. He wants to shut down the inquisitive Mr. James pronto, repeatedly mangling the Black reporter’s last name because he’s not really paying attention, even though he knows James poses a threat.

Structurally, Gray hops back and forth in time, utilizing Lyles’s effective James as a character and narrator to supply just enough information at any given time without ruining the mystery. As the director, his staging helps maintain the clarity of location and time.  Could the play be shorter? Is a bloody scene near the end way too drawn out? Yes and yes.

Without explicitly detailing all the twists and turns of its story, “The Girls of Summer” touches on bipolar disorder, sexual orientation, a boss crossing a line with a subordinate and the toll on those who become groundbreakers.  Gray’s dialogue is authentic and believable, and the funny parts (yes, there are funny parts) get plenty of laughs from the audience.

Although sometimes certain actors can be difficult to hear clearly, Mitchell Ost’s locker room set and lighting design, the costumes by Richardson and Dunia Pacheco, Williams’s set dressing and Diego Villada’s fight direction all work with strong performances to enhance Gray’s storytelling.

Elam has the most problematic, challenging role in the play – portraying a flawed human being is never easy – but the two-time Carbonell Award winner delivers one of the finest (perhaps the finest) performances of her career.  Her Coach Hicks has to be volatile, controlling, broken in body and spirit. Elam digs deep, then goes deeper and deeper.  Her work is both intense and, because of its excellence, electrifying.

Watching the women portraying the Red Diamonds – Hart, Lewis, Summers, Johnson, Hamilton, Agama, Anderson, Kenol and Brunson – stirs a sense of discovery and affirmation.  Some of the actors are new to M Ensemble, others familiar talents.

When they’re facing casting challenges at other South Florida theaters, some producers have been known to ask, “Where are Miami’s great Black actors?”

The answer, but only through Feb. 25, is this:  They’re appearing in M Ensemble’s “The Girls of Summer.”

WHAT:  M Ensemble’s “The Girls of Summer”  by Layron Gray

WHERE: Sandrell Rivers Theater, 6103 NW Seventh Ave., Miami

WHEN:  8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 25

COST: $36 plus $4.25 fee. (student and senior discounts at box office); special 2 for 1 tickets for certain nights at eventbrite.com.

INFORMATION:  305-705-3218 or themensemble.com

EXHIBITION:  A Golden Years exhibit of M Ensemble’s 53rd season is on the second level of the Sandrell Rivers Theater and can be viewed from noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday until Feb. 29.

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. 

Review: Area Stage’s ‘Oliver!’ at the Arsht Center wraps audiences in a classic

Frank Montoto is the menacing Bill Sikes in Area Stage Company’s immersive production of “Oliver!” at the Adrienne Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater in Miami through Sunday, Feb. 25. (Photo courtesy of Giancarlo Rodaz)

When was the last time a piece of theater made you gasp?  Thrilled you, engaged you, delivered a story in such a unique way that even the familiar felt fresh?

Go to Area Stage Company’s production of Lionel Bart’s “Oliver!” before it ends its too-brief run Feb. 25 in the Carnival Studio Theater a Miami’s Arsht Center,  and you just may experience all of the above.

“Oliver!,” the enduring 1960 musical based on “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens, won the Best Picture Academy Award for its 1968 movie version and has had numerous major revivals over the past 64 years, many from British super producer Cameron Mackintosh (or, as he was knighted in 1996, Sir Cameron Mackintosh).

High schools, colleges and universities, community theaters and regional theaters — including the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, which presented a critically acclaimed production in 2023 — have turned to “Oliver!” when they’re looking for a musical classic with a beloved score and a large cast.

But here’s a truth:  It’s doubtful you’ve seen an “Oliver!” like the one Area Stage has dreamed up.  More accurately, it’s the company’s 28-year-old artistic director Giancarlo Rodaz who has been doing the dreaming.

[RELATED: Christine Dolen’s preview of Area Stage’s “Oliver”]

The Carbonell Award-winning director has been attracting attention locally and in  broader theater circles with his immersive productions of “Annie” in 2021, Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” in 2022 and Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” in  2023.  “Oliver!,” another collaboration with Carbonell-winning set designer Frank J. Oliva, tops them all.

From the moment you enter an unrecognizable Carnival Studio Theater, you realize that Area Stage’s production is unlikely to be a jaunty musical comedy “Oliver!.”

Oliva has transformed the space into a workhouse in Victorian London, the place where the famished, orphaned Oliver (Hallie Walker) has the audacity to ask for a second helping of gruel in the opening song “Food, Glorious Food.” The walls are weathered brick, the beams above wood, and the sign at the front of the room proclaims “God Is Just.”  Theatergoers sit on benches at wooden tables edged with flickering faux candles, and the tables turn into long, narrow stages whenever actors hop up to play a scene on them.  The effect, with soft light from designer Joe Naftal filtered through the windows, is quite church-like.

Much of the story, however, is anything but balm for the spirit.

Against all odds, the impoverished Oliver is a street kid who remains rather naïve and sweetly optimistic.  After the gruel incident, he is sold into an apprenticeship by the greedy workhouse beadle Mr. Bumble (Frank Montoto) and his domineering bride-to-be Widow Corney (Annette Rodriguez).

Undertaker Mr. Sowerberry (John Mazuelos) and his Mrs. (Katie Duerr) scheme to maximize their profit from Oliver by having him walk as a paid mourner behind child-sized coffins.  Servant Charlotte (Greta Hicks) treats the new boy abominably, as she has eyes for another apprentice, Noah Claypole (Luke Surretsky), who taunts and fights Oliver until the new boy winds up confined to a coffin.

After escaping and starving on the streets of London, Oliver meets the irresistibly charming Artful Dodger (Staci Stout).  Dodger takes him home to the crafty Fagin (Mazuelos also plays that role), who runs a gang of juvenile pickpockets and calls the boys “m’dear.”

He also meets Nancy (Ashlee Waldbauer), a vibrant angel who’s something of a mother to Fagin’s gang, and her violent lover Bill Sikes (Montoto in a dual role), a ruthless devil who steals items for Fagin to fence and plays the abusive tyrant with the woman he loves.

For better or worse – and it does get much worse – Oliver has temporarily found his family of choice.

In case “Oliver!” has somehow escaped your notice over these past six-plus decades, the musical juxtaposes an often-jaunty but sometimes aching score against the harrowing story of a homeless boy who too often finds himself imperiled by the uncaring, exploitative adults around him. The stylistic range flows from Bart, the show’s British creator who did everything: adapted (and necessarily trimmed) “Oliver Twist,” then wrote the music and lyrics.

Area Stage’s production brings the joy in numbers such as “Consider Yourself,” “It’s a Fine Life,” “Be Back Soon” and the audience singalong “Oom-Pah-Pah.”  It also showcases melancholy (as Oliver sings a plaintive “Where Is Love”), an abused woman’s codependence (Nancy’s “As Long as He Needs Me), and a man unaccustomed to self-analysis doing just that (Fagin’s “Reviewing the Situation).

People know and love this score, as you’ll see if someone sitting next to you starts mouthing the lyrics or starts singing along. It’s tough to resist that impulse, particularly given the accompaniment of music director/pianist Michael Day, reeds player Frank Capoferri and violinist Liubov Ohrimenco, who sit in an alcove opposite the entryway and play impeccably.

What makes this “Oliver!” so extraordinary and so special are the ideas that came from Rodaz which were then realized by his creative collaborators under his guidance.

The acting company has just 10 adult performers, many with two or more roles, and two key roles usually played by boys – Oliver and the Artful Dodger – are here played by adult women whose work is completely convincing.

Fagin’s “gang” consists of puppets created by Erik Sanko of New York’s Phantom Limb Company. They’re operated and voiced by actors wearing masks that blend with the gaggle of puppets – who look haunted or traumatized, much like Oliver most likely feels inside.

The first massive “wow” moment in the production occurs when actors wearing full Victorian garb concealing stilts under their clothing enter the room.  Sofia Ortega’s costumes, with necessarily long skirts and pants, are era-perfect, and with some of the men wearing top hats, the adults in this “Oliver!” seem utterly frightening, particularly as backlit by Naftal. Rodaz wanted the story told from Oliver’s point of view, and the elongated adults help do just that.

The acting and singing, mostly by Area Stage Company veterans with a few newcomers, are really fine, the varied British accents quite good.  Quiana Major’s sound design is so effective and the audience so rapt (most of the time) that you can hear a pin drop,

Walker, who weaves in and out silently through the maze of tables before the show begins, has the audience in the palm of her hand from the moment she approaches Mr. Bumble with Oliver’s empty bowl and asks, “Please, sir, may I have some more?”   Her voice is lovely and light yet powerful when it needs to be, and her face radiates the goodness Oliver embodies.

Stout is simply a pistol as the Artful Dodger, joyous as she plays the banjo, just flat-out irresistible as Dodger lures the clueless Oliver into the family business.

Mazuelos is a superb Fagin, friendly yet also ruthless, not willing to cave in to Bill Sikes or anyone else. As he sings “Reviewing the Situation,” the arrangement sounds like klezmer music, underscoring his Jewish character, and Mazuelos sings it as if Fagin is just at that moment assessing his life.

Montoto is chilling as Bill Sikes, who takes a billy club to Nancy at will, and amusing as Beadle Bumble, very tall and very round.  He’s markedly different as each character, and his killer voice serves both.

As Nancy, Waldbauer is a striking red-haired beauty in a pale dress (not the character’s usual blood-red frock), and she makes “As Long As He Needs Me” the heartbreaking number it needs to be.

Rodriguez is a funny nag as Widow Corney, Duerr a bully as Mrs. Sowerberry and the soul of kindness as Ms. Bedwin, Hicks so very different as Nancy’s friend and confidante Bet vs. her look and manner in playing Charlotte. Surretsky makes Noah an overwhelming aging brat, and Carbonell winner Tico Chiriboga brings love and deliverance into Oliver’s life as Mr. Brownlow.

Immersive theater is the thing now, and it may not be to everyone’s taste.  Maybe you don’t want to watch Bill Sikes attacking Nancy right in front of you – literally.  Maybe constantly shifting your focus to different parts of the room (sometimes, the action may be behind you or off to the side) will start to annoy you.

The way Rodaz and his collaborators relate the story of “Oliver!” is unique and deeply creative as it enmeshes the audience within the story.  It will be fascinating to watch how Rodaz interprets familiar works and new plays going forward.  But “Oliver!” is his best work to date. And that’s saying something.

WHAT: Area Stage Company’s “Oliver!” 

WHERE:  Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

WHEN  7:30 p.m. Friday, 1 and 7 p.m. Saturday, 1 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 25

COST:   $68 general admission, $ 36.50 student seats with promo code OLISCHOOL (student ID required for ticket pickup), $31 lap seating (day of show only at box office)

INFORMATION: 305-949-6722 or 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. 

Miami’s M Ensemble Theater Company Turns 53 with plenty of history

Layon Gray’s “Kings of Harlem” inaugurated M Ensemble’s new home at the Sandrell Rivers Theater in 2017. Now Gray’s “The Girls of Summer” ignites M Ensemble’s 53rd season opening Thursday, April 8 at the theater in Liberty City. (Photo courtesy of Deborah Gray Mitchell)

In Miami-Dade County’s arts and culture circles or in the broader South Florida theater community, if you say “Pat and Shirley” (or “Shirley and Pat”), last names aren’t necessary.

Patricia E. Williams and Shirley Richardson, winners of the Carbonell Awards’ George Abbott Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts in 2016, have been presenting the work of Black playwrights, actors, directors (frequently John Pryor or Jerry Maple Jr.), designers, stage managers and crew members since 1971.

That’s when T.G. Cooper, his wife Grace, Williams and Richardson founded the M Ensemble Company, Florida’s oldest still-operating Black theater company.  Cooper left the University of Miami the following year to become head of the drama department at Howard University in Washington D.C., so ever since then, M Ensemble has been the Pat-and-Shirley show.

About to embark on its 53rd season, the company has put together a pair of special events to bookend its three productions in Liberty City’s Sandrell Rivers Theater.

On display through Thursday, Feb. 29 and open from noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday is a “Golden Years” photo exhibition highlighting impactful productions from each decade of M Ensemble’s existence.  A tour of the exhibition will precede the opening night of Layon Gray’s “The Girls of Summer” on Thursday, Feb. 8, with regular performances of the show at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 25.

Pearl Cleage’s “Bourbon at the Border” is on stage from April 11-28, then Lanie Robertson’s Billie Holiday play “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” folllows June 6-23.  A Golden Gala to celebrate and raise funds for M Ensemble’s future is set for Friday, Nov. 16.

Clearly, M Ensemble has come a long way since Richardson and Williams thought of an inventive way to earn seed money for their young company.

“There used to be Saturday night dances in Coconut Grove,” says Richardson, a University of Miami graduate who grew up not too far from the Coconut Grove Playhouse.  “We’d make roasted peanuts and conch fritters to sell there.”

“Dancing made everyone sweaty and hot and hungry,” adds Williams, a Northwestern University grad from the Bunche Park neighborhood of Miami Gardens.

The early days were tough.  Without grants or solid community financial support, Richardson and Williams did everything from paying the bills to cleaning the bathrooms.  One night, knowing the company couldn’t pay its rent, Richardson woke up to a strong feeling that they needed to retrieve all the M Ensemble documents at the space they were using – which they did, just before the locks were changed.

Until their retirements, both women held demanding day jobs – Richardson as a substance abuse prevention specialist with the Miami-Dade Office of Rehabilitative Services, Williams as director of the after-school programs at the YWCA of Greater Miami. Now they can pour their passion for theater into M  Ensemble fulltime.

“Shirley and Pat are missionaries. They do their jobs and never know if they’re going to get anything out of it,” says actor and drama teacher André L. Gainey, who won a Carbonell Award for his 2017 performance in Gray’s “Kings of Harlem,” M Ensemble’s first production at the Sandrell Rivers Theatre. “It’s not Black theater. It’s good theater.”

[RELATED: Read Christine Dolen’s review of “Kings of Harlem” from 2017]

M Ensemble’s stated mission is “…to preserve and promote the African American culture and experiences through the performing arts.”  The company has done just that for more than half a century, training and showcasing several generations of Black artists, giving uncounted children early theater experiences, illuminating Black lives through the powerful storytelling of playwrights like double Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson, Gray and many others.

The company has already presented all 10 of the plays in Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, with each drama set in a different decade of the 20th century.  Among the talented actors who have appeared in the cycle – some who have since left the area, others who stayed – are Sheaun McKinney (a regular on CBS’s “The Neighborhood”), Ethan Henry, Makeba Pace, Lela Elam, Carolyn Johnson, Chat Atkins, Keith C. Wade and, in “The Piano Lesson,” MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient Tarell Alvin McCraney, who is now artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.   M Ensemble continues working its way through the cycle again, with a production every two years, so that younger theatergoers can experience his powerful voice.

Beginning with “Kings of Harlem” in 2017, M Ensemble found a kindred spirit to showcase in playwright-director-actor Gray, who finds inspiration for many of his plays in Black history.

“I love telling stories from history that people don’t know,” says Gray, who is directing “The Girls of Summer.”

Of the M Ensemble founders, Gray says, “Pat and Shirley are legends here.  They bring unique stories to the stage, and I truly appreciate them for bringing me back. They give me 100 percent creative control. They’re like my family in Miami.”

The company presented Gray’s “Meet Me at the Oak” (about racism and its deadly legacy in 1955 Louisiana) in 2019, “Cowboy” (about Black U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves, an Old West legend who also inspired the recent Paramount+ limited series) in 2021, and “The Dahomey Warriors” (about a fierce women’s army in the African Republic of Benin at the end of the 19^th century) in 2022.

“Layon is very popular. Actors come from all over to audition for him,” says Williams.

Carey Brianna Hart, an actor, director and stage manager who has done all three things at M Ensemble over her many years working with the company, is stage managing “The Girls of Summer,” a rare Gray play not based on a historical event.  She has, in fact, stage managed every M Ensemble production of his plays.

She observes of Gray, “He likes bringing something fresh and new to old stories.  The event in ‘The Girls of Summer’ didn’t take place, but the play has a lot of layers. We’re looking for people to come back and see it more than once – they’ll want to look for those hidden clues.”

The play is set in the summer of 1946, as the all-Black women’s baseball team the Red Diamonds is preparing to play the white Racine Belles (a real team in the American Girls Professional Baseball League from 1943 to 1950, represented in the 1992 movie “A League of Their Own”) in an exhibition game. The Diamonds are being brutally driven by their coach, Odessa Hicks (Elam), the only woman to have played in the Negro Leagues (in reality, a number of women did so).  Shocks, secrets and a disappearance are woven into the script – those layers and clues Hart mentioned.

Performed by a cast of 10 Black women and two males, “The Girls of Summer” offers an opportunity more common in the world of musical theater.

“You don’t see a cast of all-Black women in a drama,” says Gray, who wasn’t certain he could cast the entire show locally – but did.

The fierce Coach Hicks was inspired by his father, grandfather and mother, who taught him to “stay the course” and work hard to sustain his goals.  He worried most about casting that role but was very happy when the Carbonell Award-winning Elam came to auditions.

“She came in with that energy and nailed it. I knew I wanted to work with her,” he says.

Elam had never played softball or baseball, but she immersed herself in movies about women who did, including “A League of Their Own” and, she says, “every baseball movie on the planet.”  Cast member Toddra Brunson leads movement sessions before rehearsals to help the cast bond as a team

She is thrilled to be working with Gray, whose vision she describes as both challenging and clear, and overjoyed as she thinks about what seeing a stage full of Black women artists could represent: “I didn’t have anything like that when I was a little girl.”

This is Elam’s first time performing for M Ensemble at the Sandrell Rivers Theater, though she has been in several earlier productions of Wilson plays and others for the company and works at theaters throughout South Florida.  She is quick to emphasize the company’s importance.

“If you’re Black and want to be in theater here, M Ensemble should be the first place you look. It’s where I got my start, that jumping off place when no one else would pay attention to you or see you,” says Elam.

The actor points out that M Ensemble’s fare is for diverse audiences, that these stories from the Black experience and perspective are have a universal power.

“Shirley and Pat are movin’ and shakin’. The work they’ve done is beyond impressive” says Elam. “And they get diverse crowds. Some might think, ‘That’s not for me.’ But the plays speak to everyone. Our stories are American stories.”

Chasity Hart (no relation to Carey Brianna Hart) plays Coby Rae in “The Girls of Summer.” A New World School of the Arts graduate who teaches middle school  drama, she has worked behind the scenes in multiple ways with M Ensemble since 2019. She calls Richardson and Williams “my girls.”

“They have such a commitment to honoring our voices.  I’ve watched them be so tired, stay up late to get grant writing done. They have such pride in our stories. But so many kids don’t know who they are – and who we are as a people,” says Hart.  “M Ensemble is important. It exposes Black people to work they would probably never see otherwise.”

Today, having gone from (literally) peanuts to a budget of $278,000 for their 53rd season, Williams and Richardson are necessarily looking ahead.  They remember with gratitude every home M Ensemble has ever had, every politician or government entity or foundation that has helped the company.

If Williams and Richardson ever do move on from the company they created – though they have no plans to do so – that will be a challenge for M Ensemble.  It’s always tough when an arts organization’s founders seem irreplaceable.

“Pat and Shirley are pioneers. They have high standards for the quality of  their productions, and they’re the epitome of teamwork. It’s wonderful to see them working together the way they do,” says Carey Brianna Hart. “That type of perseverance is so important to legacy building.”

Richardson and Williams remain mindful of that legacy.

“We consider M Ensemble to be an institution.  You can’t walk away and leave it in just anybody’s hands…You have to get people who won’t abandon it,” Richardson says, and given the Pat-and-Shirley track record, it seems likely that they’ll handle a future handoff as well as they’ve coped with every other challenge in their company’s history.

In that spirit: Did you ever wonder what the “M” in M Ensemble signifies?  Richardson explains that it stood for Maria, the name of the Coopers’ daughter.  When the founding couple moved away, she says, “we decided that the M would stand for magical, which always happens when we’re confronted with the many challenges of putting a show up; mystery, which was we were never quite sure what we’d be doing in the earlier years; and movement – we were always moving.”

WHAT: M Ensemble’s “The Girls of Summer” by Layon Gray

WHERE: Sandrell Rivers Theater, 6103 NW Seventh Ave., Miami

WHEN: Opens 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 8; regular performances 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 25

COST: $41 plus $4.59 fee for opening night, $36 plus $4.25 fee for other performances (student and senior discounts at box office only)

INFORMATION:  305-705-3218 or themensemble.com

EXHIBITION:  The Golden Years exhibit is on the second level of the Sandrell Rivers Theater and can be viewed from noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday until Feb. 29.

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. 

Area Stage Co. adds immersive twist to classic musical ‘Oliver!’

Hallie Walker’s Oliver sings with Fagin’s boys in the immersive Area Stage Company production of “Oliver!” in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. Previews start Wednesday, Feb. 7 with an opening set for Saturday, Feb. 10. (Photo courtesy of Giancarlo Rodaz)

Miami’s Area Stage Company has returned to the Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater this week, ready to open its newest immersive production. This time without a Disney character in sight.

As popular as the company’s earlier Disney fare has been – 2022’s “Beauty and the  Beast” came first, followed by “The  Little Mermaid” in 2023 – fans who saw artistic director Giancarlo Rodaz’s reimagined “Annie” at the company’s South Miami space in 2021 know that his passion for creating inventive immersive productions of all sorts of shows is boundless.

Lionel Bart’s much-loved “Oliver!,” which begins previews Wednesday, Feb. 7 through Friday, Feb. 9, and opens Saturday, Feb. 10, is the next big musical to ignite Rodaz’s imagination. The production runs through Sunday, Feb. 25.

“’Oliver!’ is a project, like ‘Annie,’ that is very personal to me,” says Rodaz, who succeeded his father John as Area’s artistic director in July. “It has been many years of thinking about it.”

Bart wrote the 1960 British musical’s book, music and lyrics, basing it on Charles Dickens’s hefty 1838 novel “Oliver Twist,” which was inspired in part by Dickens’s boyhood experiences living with his family in a London debtors’ prison as well as his adult opposition to prison-like workhouses. The musical follows the impoverished orphan Oliver (played in Area Stage’s production by Hallie Walker) from the workhouse to a forced apprenticeship with an undertaker to a street life with the wily Fagin (John Mazuelos) and his gang of pickpocket kids.

“‘Oliver!’ is a project that I immediately hooked onto because I was profoundly moved by the story and how it manages to connect us with these characters from all walks of life,” says Rodaz. “The musical is equally masterful in how it captures the spirit of the novel’s winding story in a two-hour show.”

What will be different about Area Stage’s “Oliver!?”  Perspective, for one thing, which the audience, sitting at tables in the “workhouse,” will experience as the actors move all around the space.

“The adults will walk on stilts, so you see the show from Oliver’s perspective.  I  wanted to reorient it to the perspective of a child — they are towering over you. It’s creepy and cool. You understand his fears,” says Rodaz.

A key partner in making the director’s immersive dreams come true is Carbonell Award-winning set designer Frank Oliva, who smiles over Zoom as he calls Rodaz “the brains of the operation.”  Oliva got his start in theater at Area Stage when he was 15 and now designs for theaters throughout the U.S. — most recently, the set for Washington D.C.’s Gala Hispanic Theatre world premiere of Cristina Garcia’s “Las Hermanas Palacios,” a version of Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” set in 1985 Miami.

Oliva and Rodaz sent drawings and images of life in Victorian London to each other, did screen sharing, texted or just spoke on the phone throughout the creative process for “Oliver!.”

“We knew that the set had to be an oppressive, historically accurate, dynamic space,” says Oliva of his Victorian workhouse design.  “We went through 25 to 30 orientations, and I think it was ultimately iteration 25 that we chose.”

As he did with “Annie,” Rodaz is using a smaller-than-usual cast of 10 adult actors (four of whom play two roles each) and no children. He had intended to cast a boy in the title role but asked Walker, who played Ariel’s sidekick Flounder in Area’s “The Little Mermaid,” to audition.

She sent me a video of her singing ‘Where Is Love?’ The depth of character, the heartbreak . . . I had to cast her as Oliver,” says Rodaz.

Walker is the first-ever adult woman to play the young Oliver in a production.

“It’s a very new take, and it works pretty well,” says the actress. “There’s so much Oliver has seen, so much innocence he’s lost. A lot of the adults use stilts, so it really does look as if I’m a child.”

The juicy part of the persuasive Artful Dodger is being played by Staci Stout, who had the title role in Area’s “Annie.”  She stepped away from acting after that show to focus on writing music, but she’s finding a connection with her role in “Oliver!.”

“I have a lot in common with him.  I feel naturally masculine and androgynous. When I sing, I drop into more of a growl. I had a lot of practice with this hardcore band I’ve been in…And I get to play the banjo and play the bucket as a drum,” says Stout.

The other boy pickpockets in Fagin’s gang will be played by puppets designed by the New York-based Phantom Limb Company. The effect, Rodaz says, is like having 20 actors onstage instead of 10.

Of course, “Oliver!” has plenty of unforgettable adult roles too.

Frank Montoto plays the violent and abusive Bill Sikes, as well as the cruel workhouse beadle Mr. Bumble.  Mazuelos has the major role of  Fagin and a smaller one as Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker.  Annette Rodriguez is the Widow Corney, who joins Mr. Bumble in mistreating the orphans.  Katie Duerr is Mrs. Sowerberry and Ms. Bedwin, Greta Hicks plays Bet and Charlotte, Luke Surretsky is Noah Claypool  and Carbonell winner Tico Chiriboga is Mr. Brownlow, the man who makes a true difference in Oliver’s life.

As Nancy, the frequent victim of Bill Sike’s cruel wrath, Ashlee Waldbauer gets to sing some of the most unforgettable songs in “Oliver!” – particularly the mournful, soaring solo “As Long as He Needs Me.”  The actor had played one of Fagin’s boys as a kid, then was Nancy in a high school production.

“That was one of my bucket list characters to revisit,” says the New York-based Waldbauer, who heard about Area Stage through her friend Marilyn Caserta, who starred in many Area shows and went on to appear on Broadway in “Six the Musical.”

“I’ve never done immersive theater,” says Waldbauer. “I wanted to try something new. I haven’t been in a space in a very long time where everything was so collaborative…Nancy is a light to Fagin’s boys. I’m not afraid to lean into her hope.”

Nor is Rodaz afraid to lean into treating a musical classic like “Oliver!” the same way he would a new work.

“Being able to approach it in a new way makes it feel like I discovered one of the greatest stories of all time, and I get to bring it to life how I see fit,” he says. “How often does a storyteller get that opportunity?”

WHAT: Area Stage Company’s “Oliver!” 

WHERE: Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

WHEN: Previews 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 7, Thursday, Feb. 8, Friday, Feb. 9, and 1 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 10. Opens 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 10 with regular performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday, 1 and 7 p.m. Saturday, 1 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 25

COST:   $68 general admission plus additional fees, $ 36.50 student seats with promo code OLISCHOOL (student ID required for ticket pickup) plus additional fees, $31 lap seating for children, 2 and under, plus additional fees. Lap seating available at box office only on day of show.

INFORMATION: 305-949-6722 or 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. 

Review: ‘Legally Blonde’ rules the Actors’ Playhouse stage

  Becca Andrews as Elle Woods and the ensemble in the Actors’ Playhouse production of “Legally Blonde the Musical” at the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables through Sunday, Feb. 25. (Photo courtesy of Gregory F Reed)

The opening number is titled “Omigod You Guys,” sung with enough effervescent peppiness to power the next moon mission.  A host of sorority hotties performs it dancing on a set which features pink “ironwork” containing silhouette images of a Barbie-style ponytailed gal.

So you know, don’t you guys, that you’re either at an as-yet-unwritten “Barbie” musical or watching a production of “Legally Blonde the Musical.”

Visit Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables and you’ll discover the latter.  Through Sunday, Feb. 25, the Main Stage at the Miracle Theatre belongs to Becca Andrews as Elle Woods, Stephen Christopher Anthony as Emmett Forrest, almost two dozen more talented humans, and a pair of well-schooled canines playing Bruiser and Rufus.

Based on the 2001 movie starring Reese Witherspoon as the SoCal Delta Nu sorority president who pursues her ex-boyfriend all the way to Harvard Law School, the 2007 Broadway version of the story was previously produced by Slow Burn Theatre at the Broward Center at the end of 2018.

Just over five years later, Actors’ Playhouse artistic director David Arisco has made “Legally Blonde the Musical” the big-budget centerpiece of the company’s season.  In the interim, COVID-19 and the 2020 election happened, as did a whole lot of world chaos.  So it’s an escapist relief to welcome back Elle Woods in her transformative, stereotype-busting story.

With a clever book by Heather Hach and a stylistically varied score by Nell Benjamin and Laurence O’Keefe, “Legally Blonde the Musical” preserves big moments from the movie original while cutting or consolidating some material to make room for the songs.

You’ll see Elle (Andrews) taking her pink-forward décor and fashion to hallowed Harvard.  Of course she teaches her tongue-tied friend Paulette (Heather Jane Rolff) her surefire “Bend and Snap” maneuver so her pal can seal the deal with the clearly interested UPS delivery guy Kyle (Diego Klock-Pérez).  The egotistical Professor Callahan (Michael Dean Morgan) hits on Elle a little harder than in the movie, but the sympathetic witness this time is Vivienne Kensington (Hana Slevin), the bride-to-be of  Elle’s judgmental ex Warner Huntington III (Alexander Zenoz).

But as fun and frothy as “Legally Blonde the Musical” can be – and it is – the musical gives Elle a bit more depth than her movie predecessor.

Some of that flows from Andrews, who also played Elle for Slow Burn and in four other productions. Even when she’s called upon to be Elle-as-beautiful-blonde (in her high-kicking personal Harvard “essay” with cheerleaders and marching band, or when she’s tricked into wearing a pale pink Playboy Bunny getup to a non-costume party), Andrews remains a smart and believable woman, not a caricature.

She also has a powerful pop voice, one that can also convey plaintive yearning as she sings the most beautiful duet on the title song with Anthony.  The latter, a New World School of the Arts high school alum, has seen his career take off with starring roles in Broadway’s “Dear Evan Hansen” and the touring “Catch Me If You Can.”  You can see – and hear – why in “Legally Blonde the Musical” with his stellar vocals and understated yet pitch-perfect comic timing.

Among the standouts in the large cast are Rolff as Paulette, warmer and less eccentric than Jennifer Coolidge was in the movie; Zenoz, effective as Elle’s smiling, ruthlessly ambitious Warren (his duet with Andrews on “Serious”  is an upbeat heartbreaker); Morgan as the ruthless Callahan; Slevin as the (somewhat) kinder, gentler Vivienne; Stephanie White as fitness queen and murder suspect Brooke Wyndham; Jessica Sanford as Elle’s activist classmate Enid; David Nick Alaya as the sarcastic pool boy; and Camryn Handler as Serena, Nicolette Hernandez as Margot and Whitney Renee as Pilar, Elle’s very own Greek chorus.

Also mega-props to Klock-Pérez and choreographer-associate director Sarah Crane for offering a different take on Kyle.  This UPS guy is no heart-melting hunk.  He’s as loose as a Slinky, twisting, turning, posing, provoking and earning every laugh.

As Elle’s beloved chihuahua Bruiser Woods and Paulette’s goofy bulldog Rufus, Cha Cha (Bruiser) and Tony (Rufus) get oohs and aahs (and treats) whenever they show up on stage.

Kudos to Actors’ Playhouse for using a live eight-piece band under the musical direction of Nick Guerrero. That doesn’t always happen at South Florida theaters, but the give-and-take with the actor-singers does make a difference.

Brandon Newton’s set, of necessity, has to morph into many locations.  The two-level Delta Nu house is on a turntable, so it can revolve to reveal the restaurant where Warner crushes Elle’s life plan, the chic Boston shop where Elle transforms Emmett from a rumpled corduroy kind of guy into a GQ type, the beauty shop where Paulette does nails, the courtroom where Brooke is on trial for her wealthy older husband’s murder.  Velvet curtains hang at either side of the centerstage set, so when the actors dash backstage to make a costume change, you can see the next set pieces waiting for their entrance. Awkward.

Eric Nelson’s lighting is first rate, as are Reidar Sorensen’s sound design, Jodi Dellaventura’s props and set dressing, and Ellis Tillman’s huge array of costumes, pink and otherwise.

Arisco and Crane, here infusing her choreography with a spirit as bubbly as the Delta Nu sisters, have brought back Elle and company with joyous finesse.  Some of the obviously adult references aren’t great for younger kids – though the double entendres will likely go over their heads – because “Legally Blonde the Musical” isn’t an all-ages “Barbie” movie.  But it’s absolutely worth a visit or revisit.

WHAT: “Legally Blonde the Musical” 

WHERE: Actors Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables

WHEN:  8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday (additional matinees at 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 3; Wednesday, Feb. 7, and Saturday, Feb. 10), through Feb. 25

COST: $40, $55, $65, $75, $85; seniors 65 and over get 10 percent off weekdays only, students with valid student ID pay $15 for a rush ticket available 15 minutes before a weekday performance

INFORMATION: 305-444-9293 or actorsplayhouse.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. 

Actors’ Playhouse builds a case for the power of pink in ‘Legally Blonde: The Musical’

Becca Andrews is Elle Woods in the Actors’ Playhouse production of “Legally Blonde: The Musical” at the Miracle Mile Theatre in Coral Gables through Feb. 25. (Photo courtesy of Gregory F Reed, MFA)

Before Elle Woods, there was the Barbie doll, Mattel’s 65-year-old ageless wonder.  After Elle Woods, there was “Barbie” the movie, the box office giant killer with a $1.4 billion (and counting) worldwide gross.

But in between?  Elle Woods triumphed in 2001’s “Legally Blonde,” 2003’s “Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde” and on Broadway in 2007’s “Legally Blonde: The Musical.”  Brainy beauties with a penchant for pink-forward fashion, Elle and Barbie are much-loved exemplars of self-empowerment.

Elle Woods, the Delta Nu sorority girl from Los Angeles who found her future at Harvard Law School, gets another turn in the spotlight as Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables opens its production of “Legally Blonde: The Musical.”  The show previews at the Miracle Theatre on Wednesday, Jan. 31, and Thursday, Feb. 1, then opens Friday, Feb. 2, for a run through Sunday, Feb. 25.

“Legally Blonde: The Musical” is the biggest show of the 2023-2024 Actors’ Playhouse season, with a $400,000 budget, a cast of 21, two swing performers and  a pair of pooches (a chihuahua to play Elle’s dog Bruiser, a bulldog as her friend Paulette’s dog Rufus).  All told, artistic director David Arisco estimates more than 40 people are working on the show, onstage and off.

Both the “Barbie” movie and “Legally Blonde” are about “girl power, pink power, women stepping up for themselves and coming together,” says Arisco. “Elle Woods is a great character. She perseveres, fights, works hard and makes better people out of the people around her.”

Though he was familiar with the “Legally Blonde” movies, he had never seen a production of “Legally Blonde: The Musical” when he chose it as the season centerpiece.  And he has become a fan.

“I think the musical does everything better, in such a sincere, honest, heartfelt way,” he says.  “This is entertainment with a capital E.”

To play Elle, Arisco cast Becca Andrews, who starred in the production by Fort Lauderdale’s Slow Burn Theatre at the Broward Center in 2018.  This will be Andrews’ sixth time playing Elle, and Arisco has found her to be “more than willing to offer up a moment or a bit she thought was missed, but also more than willing to go different ways.”

Andrews, who also sings in a country band called the Honky Tonk Chicks, loves playing Elle Woods in a show she describes as “a balance of comedy and heart.”  As with the “Barbie” movie, the musical “explores the complexity of being a woman in general, and what the world expects of us.  They want us to be ambitious and a go-getter, but not too much.”

While her actor husband Elliott Litherland is appearing in an Indiana production of “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” (the couple’s rescue dog Richie is with him), Andrews is loving playing what she considers a dream role but with new costars.

“Based on the way other people are playing their roles, what they’re giving me, it can change my line,” she says, adding of the show, “I think the story of this passionate, ambitious, amazing woman is told better through song.”

In truth, Andrews has appeared before with one of her fellow actors: Cha Cha, the chihuahua who plays Bruiser.  The dog made her theater debut opposite Andrews in a previous “Legally Blonde” production, and their reunion has been impressive.

“I have a very special place in my heart for Cha Cha. She was rescued from a hoarding situation,” says Andrews.  “The first time we did the blocking for this production, she got it right away, and she also looked up at me on the right line.”

Cha Cha and Tony, who plays Rufus, have canine understudies, and are both rescues who were adopted and trained by William Berloni. Once an aspiring actor, Berloni got his start in 1976 when lyricist Martin Charnin asked the 19-year-old to find and train a dog to play Sandy in the pre-Broadway tryout of “Annie.” A 2011 Tony Honoree for Excellence in Theatre, Berloni explains in a Zoom interview how he makes his animal performers the best in the biz.

“People ask if I can train any dog, and my answer is no.  You have to find dogs who are friendly, who can deal with stress and are food-motivated,” he says of the rescue animals, who live with Berloni and his wife. “It’s important to bond the dogs emotionally to the actors they’re working with, to teach the actors to give commands and foster a temporary relationship with the animals.  The dogs have to want to go onstage.”

Only the traveling trainer and the actors who interact onstage with Bruiser and Rufus are allowed to touch the dogs – or even look them in the eyes.  When they’re brought in for daily rehearsals, the other actors turn away.

Two of the artists involved in the new “Legally Blonde” are having a reunion/homecoming of sorts.  Stephen Christopher Anthony, who plays Elle’s mentor and future beau Emmett Forrest, and Sarah Crane, the show’s associate director and choreographer, met when they were Miami kids training with the Musical Miracles program at Actors’ Playhouse.

“I’ve known Stephen since I was 10. He’s a star now,” says Crane. “On the first day of rehearsals, we walked through the theater’s front door together, and he said, ‘I’m so happy to be back!’”

Also an actor, Crane toured nationally in “Mean Girls” and “The Prom.” She has auditioned for different productions of “Legally Blonde,” but directors always see her as a Serena (the fiancé of Elle’s college boyfriend) or Brooke (the fitness queen accused of murder). Crane already knew Andrews because she has choreographed for the Honky Tonk Chicks and believes Andrews is just right for Elle: “We had to find someone who is really smart, and Becca is that.”

Her approach to the show’s choreography, she says, is to “keep it energetic, make it new and interesting,  but also honor why it was so successful.”

So get ready to “Bend and Snap.”

Anthony went to high school at Miami’s New World School of the Arts after starting his theater career at Actors’ Playhouse when he was 11. Crane is right: He is a star now, having played the title role in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway and on tour, as well as the lead role of Frank Abagnale Jr. in the tour of “Catch Me If You Can.”

(Side note: Stephen Christopher Anthony is his stage name, the “Christopher” in memory of his late uncle because there’s already a Stephen Anthony, a Carbonell Award winner who lives in South Florida, in the Actors’ Equity union.)

Anthony calls Andrews “a superstar – so fun, so charming, magnetic, playful and charismatic. My character is drawn to Elle, who reminds me that it’s OK to play…We lift each other up.”

He also agrees that the comparisons between Barbie and Elle Woods are on-the-nose apt.

“With Barbie, there’s an assumption that every woman should fit into a box,” he says.  “This show does a very delicate job of saying you can look how you want and be what you want. It unpacks our perceptions.  You can be a feminine person and the smartest person in the room.”

WHAT: “Legally Blonde: The Musical” by Nell Benjamin, Laurence O’Keefe and Heather Hach

WHERE: Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables

WHEN: Previews 8 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 31, and Thursday, Feb. 1; opens at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb.  2; regular performances 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday (additional matinees at 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 3; Wednesday, Feb. 7, and Saturday, Feb. 10), through Feb. 25

COST: $40, $55, $65, $75, $85, $250 opening night tickets include open bar and reception. Seniors 65 and over get 10 percent off weekdays only, students with valid student ID pay $15 for a rush ticket available 15 minutes before a weekday performance

INFORMATION: 305-444-9293 or actorsplayhouse.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. 

Review: An artfully crafted ‘Two Sisters and a Piano’ by Nilo Cruz at Miami New Drama

Stephanie Machado as Sofia, left, and Thais Menendez as Maria Celia in the Miami New Drama production of Nilo Cruz’s “Two Sisters and a Piano” at the Colony Theatre, Miami Beach, through Sunday, Feb. 18. (Photo courtesy of Morgan Sophia Photography)

Cuban-born, Miami-raised playwright Nilo Cruz writes all sorts of plays – tender, bold, nostalgic, mysterious, provocative.

The first Latino winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama for “Anna in the Tropics,” Cruz is a sublime wordsmith with a distinctive style.  On opening night, Saturday, Jan. 27,  of Miami New Drama’s new production of Cruz’s “Two Sisters and a Piano,” artistic director Michel Hausmann described him as a painter with words.  And he is.

Cruz is also a director who understands deeply how to paint theatrical pictures, how to create art in three dimensions.

As he did when he staged an exquisite “Anna in the Tropics” for Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre last season, Cruz the director has infused “Two Sisters” with a spirit of adventurous reinvention, no matter that the play was written in 1998 and had its world premiere the following year.

[RELATED: Read the preview story about “Two Sisters and a Piano”]

He also gave himself a playwriting assignment, creating a monologue for the handsome piano tuner who has, in the blink of an eye, stolen the younger sister’s heart.

A summary of the story he and his collaborators are telling:  It’s 1991, and the successful Pan American Games are wrapping up in Havana just as the Soviet Union is fracturing.

Sisters Maria Celia (Thais Menendez) and Sofia (Stephanie Machado) have just returned to the Obispo family home after serving two years in prison. Their crime? Signing a manifesto demanding changes in the repressive Cuban system – and more creative freedom for artists like Maria Celia, a well-regarded novelist, and Sofia, an accomplished pianist.

As they live under house arrest, their new “prison” is familiar yet changed.  Furniture and other household items have been confiscated, now existing only as memories suspended in midair.  Still present is the home’s most treasured object: a worn baby grand piano, out of tune, plagued with wear and tear from its 90-plus years as a family heirloom.

After ransacking the tidy colonial home with another soldier (Gabriell Salgado, doubling in a brief, brutal role) to look for anti-revolutionary correspondence between Maria Celia and her exiled husband Antonio, Lieutenant Portuondo (Maurice Compte) undertakes a different way of controlling the beautiful, outspoken writer.

If Maria Celia will tell him a particular story that fascinates him, he’ll read passages from Antonio’s letters – which he’s been confiscating for months.  Their relationship evolves, turns sensual, then implodes as the prisoner and her jailer remember what they really are to each other.

As for the ebullient, restless Sofia, she wills herself into instantaneous love with Victor Manuel (Salgado), a funny, music-loving piano tuner who would be a free spirit were he living anywhere except communist Cuba. Both characters supply moments of hope and comic relief along with fear and disappointment. And in this production, their chemistry is off-the-charts intense.

Under Cruz’s guidance, the actors deliver memorable, even extraordinary moments.

The Miami-raised Compte, best known for his extensive work in film and television, makes Lieutenant Portuondo a low-key enemy, calculating and seductive with Maria Celia – making the moment when he goes ballistic all the more frightening.

Salgado’s Victor Manuel is Portuondo’s opposite. He’s loose and goofy, but particularly with the addition of the monologue (a welcome way to bring the  character back after the first act), he illuminates the dangers of taking chances in a place where vigilant neighbors watch your every move.

He, too, is adept at painting with Cruz’s words as Victor Manuel stands with his blue bicycle outside the sisters’ house, willing his newfound love to realize he’s there: “Sofia, if only you would open your window. If only I could sneak in through the blinds and come in and out, the way light enters and leaves your house.”

It’s another great, inventive performance for Salgado to add to his impressive theater portfolio.

Menendez, who appeared last season in GableStage’s production of Charise Castro Smith’s “El huracán” (“The Hurricane”), contrasts clearly with Machado in playing the elder of the two sisters. Her Maria Celia is self-possessed, unwilling to capitulate to the government that has robbed her of freedom and her beloved husband.  She is dignified, sensuous, playful and motherly with Sofia.

As Sofia, Machado is a perfect complement to Salgado, matching him in physical comedy and intensity of feeling. She’s such a ball of energy that you fear she may jump out of her skin. Childish petulance, sexual hunger and deep frustration at her inability to move forward keep her emotionally suspended.

As she says to Maria Celia, “It just feels like all my life I’ve been waiting and I haven’t lived.”

The creation of this arresting piece of theatrical art would not have been possible, Cruz would doubtless tell you, without the contributions of his collaborators, though the idea of suspension-as-metaphor came from him.

Carbonell Award-winning brothers Christopher Swader and Justin Swader have designed a set that adheres to the playwright-director’s increasingly minimalist aesthetic.

An archway serves as a portal to the tiled living room – as much an isolated island as Cuba itself – with metalwork and plantation shutters on the opposite side. The smattering of remaining furniture puts the focus on the all-important piano. In lieu of wallpaper, massive versions of Maria Celia’s handwritten letters from Antonio descend to serve as a visual reminder of lost love and political stakes.

Lighting designer David Lander’s work is stunning, often utilizing supersaturated colors to create Havana sunsets, the dark blue of a dangerous nighttime, the sun-fired heat of daytime.

Michiko Kitayama Skinner dresses Compte in uniforms and, for a visit when Portuondo arrives bearing rum (which he has obviously sampled), earth-toned casual clothes. Salgado wears glasses (maybe to make him look a wee bit nerdy?), but after he removes his rain-soaked shirt and stands around in an undershirt that showcases his toned arms, it’s bye-bye nerd.

Skinner costumes Maria Celia in skirts, blouses and eventually some lovely nightwear. Sofia’s look is younger, mainly dresses that suggest a love of style despite the sisters’ now-meager mean.  By contrast, when they invite Victor Manuel for dinner, both put on striking party dresses (a shiny magenta-and-black  print for Maria Celia, sunset orange for Sofia), do their hair and makeup, and dance with each other as they wait, then wait some more.

Composer Salomon Lerner supplies original music, evoking Cuba and threading the sound of the piano through the play as an aural reminder of its significance. Intimacy choreographer and associate director Samantha Pazos sculpts the ecstasy of unlikely lovers, while fight choreographer Lee Soroko shapes the agony of Portuondo’s fury.

As much as imagination has granted the sisters brief reprieves from the suspended state of their lives, no one escapes the oppressive reality depicted in “Two Sisters and a Piano” – not even the piano itself.  As writer and director, Cruz delivers an entrancing, cautionary story about art and the ache for freedom.

WHAT: “Two Sisters and a Piano” by Nilo Cruz, in English with Spanish subtitles

WHERE: Miami New Drama production at the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach

WHEN:  8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 18

COST: $46.50, $66.50, $69.50, $76.50, $83.50

INFORMATION:  305-674-1040 or www.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.

Repression, creative freedom clash in Nilo Cruz’s ‘Two Sisters and a Piano’ at Miami New Drama

Gabriell Salgado, Stephanie Machado, Maurice Compte and Thais Menendez in Nilo Cruz’s “Two Sisters and a Piano” at Miami New Drama opens in previews on Thursday, Jan. 25 at the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach. (Photo courtesy of Morgan Sophia Photography)

Writers draw inspiration from countless sources and experiences. For a younger Nilo Cruz, a New York Times story about the 1991 arrest and imprisonment of Cuban poet and novelist María Elena Cruz Varela helped spark his play “Two Sisters and a Piano.”

“She and her friends wrote a manifesto asking for Cuba to open up, the equivalent of perestroika,” Cruz says in a Zoom interview from his Miami apartment on a rare day off from the production of “Two Sisters” he’s directing for Miami New Drama. “Brigadiers dragged her into the street and tried to force her to eat the manifesto. She spent two years in prison and another year under house arrest.”

“Two Sisters and a Piano,” which previews at Miami Beach’s Colony Theatre on Thursday, Jan. 25, and Friday, Jan. 26, then officially opens with an already sold-out performance on Saturday, Jan. 27, follows last season’s box office and critical success with Miami New Drama’s Cruz-directed production of “Anna in the Tropics,” which was seen by 8,700 theatergoers, according to the Miami-based theater company. That play was a life-changing work of art that made Cruz the first Latino winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2003.

“Two Sisters” is an earlier play, a kind of prelude to “Anna in the Tropics” in its exploration of the power of literature, the escape that words and the imagination can provide, the relationship of two disparate sisters. It began in the 1990s as a radio play, then was expanded for its 1999 world premiere at the Tony Award-winning McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, where Cruz found ongoing champions for his work in former artistic director-playwright Emily Mann and dramaturg Janice Paran.

Returning to “Two Sisters and a Piano” in Florida at this moment in time, Cruz says, seems right – particularly since so many school districts here have banned books.

“(Cuba is) a country we criticize because of dictatorships, but here we are in the United States where books are being censored, not just because of sexual content but because of historical content as well,” says the playwright, who came to Miami from Cuba on a 1970 Freedom Flight when he was 10. “I read books like ‘The Bluest Eye,’ ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ as a teenager.  They had an impact on me, understanding words as a way to escape oppression.”

[FROM THE ARCHIVES: Nilo Cruz’s ‘Two Sisters and a Piano’ Now a Story Told In Spanish]

Cruz’s two sisters are Maria Celia (Thais Menendez), a novelist whose husband Antonio has left for Europe, where he’s working to get her out of Cuba, and the younger Sofia (Stephanie Machado), a talented pianist and imaginative romantic.  After two years in prison, the women have come back to the Obispo family’s once-stately home, now stripped of much of its furniture and treasures – except for Sofia’s precious piano.

Two men – one a dangerous official with an agenda, the other an amusing romantic who loves music as much as Sofia does – enter the sisters’ closed-off world.

Lieutenant Portuondo (Maurice Compte) has been confiscating Maria Celia’s letters to Antonio, and his to her. He’s trying to crack the coded communication between the couple – while at the same time finding himself increasingly beguiled by the writer and her prose.

Although the sisters have a permit to have their badly neglected piano tuned, they wait, then wait some more, for someone to arrive.  Victor Manuel (Gabriell Salgado) finally does, and he proves to be everything that the yearning Sofia could desire.

“Two Sisters and a Piano” has had a sporadic presence in South Florida, including a 2008 production at the now-closed Promethean Theatre in Davie, where actors Deborah L. Sherman and Ursula Cataan (who originated the roles of sisters Conchita and Marela in New Theatre’s 2002 world premiere of “Anna in the Tropics”) played Maria Celia and Sofia.

Cruz, who writes and publishes his plays in English, translated “Two Sisters” into Spanish in 2019 and staged a production for Miami’s Arca Images at Miami Dade County Auditorium’s On.Stage Black Box.  In June 2023, he directed a production at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, using his original English script; ditto at Miami New Drama.

As he did with “Anna in the Tropics” at last season, Cruz has approached the new “Two Sisters and a Piano” with deep knowledge gleaned from past productions coupled with a collaborative willingness to take a fresh approach with the actors and designers, including Carbonell Award-winning set designers Christopher and Justin Swader.

“I wanted to explore the metaphor of suspension. When you walk into the production, you’ll see the furniture that was taken hanging in midair. Later, you’ll see a suspended labyrinth of letters from Maria Celia and her husband,” says Cruz, who was inspired by his memory of a long-ago exhibition with suspended works of art at the Duomo in Naples, Italy.  “The suspension applies to the lives of the women, the island itself and the sisters’ future.”

Cruz has also added something to the script:  a monologue for Victor Manuel, the piano tuner who is deeply drawn to Sofia but afraid of the consequences if he continues to act on his feelings “in a world that is so vigilant,” says the playwright.

All four cast members grew up in Miami, though only Salgado still lives here.  Cruz has been inspired by them during the give-and-take of rehearsals, and vice versa.

The marquee name in the cast belongs to Compte, whose father Roman fought at the Bay of Pigs and later ran the Mutiny Hotel in Coconut Grove in its flashy heyday; a limited-series MGM+ crime thriller, “Hotel Cocaine,” starring Miami native Danny Pino as Roman Compte, should begin airing this summer. Of note: “Hotel Cocaine” was created by Chris Brancato, the co-creator of the Netflix series “Narcos,” which featured Maurice Compte as Horacio Carillo in a dozen episodes.

The younger Compte has done theater in the past, some in his hometown where he went to Miami Senior High, but his very long list of credits is largely focused on film and television.  He said yes to “Two Sisters and a Piano,” he says, “because of Nilo and Miami New Drama.”

Compte has a vivid memory of going to the Colony Theatre in 1995 to see a production of “Romeo and Juliet” starring Pino and Blaine Dunham.

“I thought, ‘One day I’ll come back and be the lead here in a play,” says Compte.

The actor is enthralled with the discoveries that come during the rehearsal process, making tiny adjustments, solidifying choices.  He finds Cruz’s unique writing style both descriptive and colorful, lying somewhere between reality and a dream world.

As an actor, Cruz says, “Maurice has a certain mystery, ambiguity, rawness, danger, which is like what Marlon Brando had.”

Menendez comes from a Cuban American family, Machado from a Brazilian one.  Both grew up reading or seeing Cruz’s plays and seem a little in awe of working with him.

Menendez appeared in GableStage’s intense production of Charise Castro Smith’s “El huracán” (“The Hurricane”) last season with Adriana Savan, who played Maria Celia in the 2000 Public Theater production of “Two Sisters” in New York. She says of Cruz, “Just because it’s his play doesn’t mean he knows everything. He knows what works. But you get the sense he’s doing it with fresh eyes every time.”

A Boston College graduate who speaks fluent Spanish and French as well as English, Menendez has found a key to Cruz’s distinctive style: “Nilo’s writing is like singing. It has melody, rhythm and crescendos. He writes in English, but the sentence structure is the way it is in Spanish.”

Cruz cast Menendez, who is younger than some actors who have played Maria Celia, because this time he wanted the character to be “someone who hasn’t had enough time in her marriage, someone longing for children. I wanted her to have physical beauty and a certain elegance, holding onto an Old World dignity.”

To play Sofia, he chose Machado, who has a master’s degree in acting from Yale, also because of the way she exudes elegance – and more.

“She has so many tools at her disposal – she embodies fragility and innocence, but she can also be comedic and tragic. I told her, ‘You’re meant to be in my plays,’” he says.

Machado, who speaks Portuguese as well as English, lives in New York where she teaches and acts (“I vowed I would never wait tables,” she says, laughing). When her father comes to “Two Sisters and a Piano” on opening night, it will be the first time he has seen her perform since her days as a high school musical theater major at Miami’s New World School of the Arts.

Cruz, she says, is a wonderful writer and director.

“I love heightened text. It’s what drew me to Nilo from the get-go. His language can get so poetic, but it’s rooted in truth.  His characters want big things,” she observes. “The way he directs is also poetic. He told me that the character I’m playing ‘is like a pomegranate about to explode.’ He has so much dignity and poise.”

Machado had a “pinch me” moment in rehearsals when she and Menendez were working on a scene in which the sisters “escape” by dressing up and dancing together.

“He helped us do the salsa.  It hit me all at once: Here I am dancing with Nilo Cruz, looking into his eyes, doing this play in Miami,” she says. “He’s not pompous at all. He just nonchalantly throws wisdom at us.”

Salgado, a New World college grad who appeared with Menendez in “El huracán,” has built an eclectic resume appearing at theaters throughout South Florida, most recently adding his turn as one very funny cook in “Clyde’s” for Miami’s Zoetic Stage.  Last season, he played the pivotal role of the dreamy lector in Cruz’s “Anna in the Tropics,” and though Salgado intended to focus on film projects this season, Cruz, “Two Sisters” and Miami New Drama drew him back to the stage.

“Nilo wrote this beautiful monologue, which I wasn’t aware of until the first day of rehearsals…There is definitely humor in this play. I’m practically doing clown work, borderline physical comedy for the scenes in the first act,” says Salgado.

He adds: “I have never felt more in my wheelhouse than I do now. Every time Nilo does something, it’s like he’s doing it for the first time. He puts all the same sand in the sandbox, but when he takes it out he builds a new castle…What a genuine, present, vulnerable and gracious director and artist he is.”

Once “Two Sisters and a Piano” is up and running, Cruz will have very little time before going into rehearsals for his next project: the world premiere of “Sed en la calle del agua” (“Thirst on Water Street”) for Arca Images.  The Spanish-language production, which will have simultaneous English translation, will have a brief run at the On.Stage Black Box from Thursday, March 14, to Sunday, March 17. About an artist fighting to regain her sanity after a tragedy, it is set in a New York asylum, with flashbacks to earlier days in Mexico.

Cruz is also writing a new play for Miami New Drama, creating a historical play for Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C., working on likely New York productions of “Two Sisters and a Piano” at Classic Stage Company and “Anna in the Tropics” by an as-yet unannounced major company.  In 2025, “El ultimo sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), with music by Gabriela Lena Frank and a libretto by Cruz, will mark the playwright’s Metropolitan Opera debut.

And he has other projects in the works too.

The workflow, he says with a smile, can make him “feel like Sisyphus” as he does the playwright’s equivalent of rolling a boulder up a hill over and over again.  But at the same time, he’s happy about what’s on the horizon.

“I’ll just be glad to be working in New York again,” says Cruz, who lives in Miami. “It’s my second home.”

WHAT: “Two Sisters and a Piano” by Nilo Cruz

WHERE: Miami New Drama production at the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach

WHEN: Previews 8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 25, and Friday, Jan. 26; sold-out opening 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 27; regular performances 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 18

COST: $46.50, $66.50, $69.50, $76.50, $83.50

INFORMATION:  305-674-1040 or www.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.

Review: Science weighs in on a divorce in LakehouseRanch’s ‘push.’

Lucy Marie Lopez and Michael Fernandez play a divorcing couple in the world premiere of Mackenzie Raine Kirkman’s “push.” by LakehouseRanchDotPNG at Artistic Vibes in Kendall through Sunday, Jan. 21. (Photo courtesy of Juan Gamero)

In a second season filled with world premieres, Miami’s LakehouseRanchDotPNG has already presented four plays that, to varying degrees, hewed to its focus on absurdist or experimental theater.

The young company, mostly made up of Florida International University theater grads, is for the moment embracing greater realism with its fifth play, Mackenzie Raine Kirkman’s “push.”

With three performances remaining in a two-weekend run that began Jan. 12, “push.” is a play worth seeking out.  The company’s intimate rented space at Artistic Vibes in a Kendall-area warehouse district serves the play about a divorcing couple going through mediation; the audience’s proximity to the action dials up both discomfort and empathy as it learns the details of a shattered relationship.

Science and/or a whiff of absurdism enter the picture via the Mediator (Pedro Urquia), an official (court-appointed, maybe?) whose job it is to get the couple talking about their marriage so he can submit a report on whether the divorce should be granted.

He explains, pleasantly enough, the strict rules about how the session will be conducted.  And he has help:  A button at the center of the table where the couple is sitting lights up if it detects a lie or significant omission, giving the spouse who hasn’t been talking the chance to push the button and force the other to tell the truth. Not sure how that works, but it’s a device that inevitably takes the discussion deeper.

The warring couple is called Dad (Michael “Mikey” Fernandez) and Mom (Lucy Marie Lopez).  At this fraught moment (and he’s late for the session, which doesn’t help), they’re understandably tense and combative.  But as the Mediator gets them talking about the earlier days of their meeting and marriage, we come to understand why these opposites were attracted to each other and how the embers of love can still glow.

Artistic director Brandon Urrutia, who staged the play, cast it with actors who artfully convey the essence of their characters, often without words.

The willowy Lopez, who doubles as costume designer, lets her hand caress her small belly now and then, and in the course of the play we learn that Mom is expecting a baby girl (as is Lopez herself).

When Mom rails at how little her husband does around the house, how the day-to-day responsibilities for their two boys are all hers, how Dad doesn’t even know where  various household items are kept, she seems thoroughly exhausted and overwhelmed.  (The household item mystery is a common one at my house and at the home of a friend, who asked his wife where the linen closet was.)

As Dad, Fernandez is all edgy irritation, at first bouncing one leg as he speaks, yelling instead of calmly speaking, violating the prohibition against vulgar language. Heavily tattooed, radiating a volatile strength, at times his Dad seems dangerous.  But as the actor sorts through more tender memories, Fernandez becomes the man who wishes the divorce weren’t happening.

LakehouseRanchDotPNG sticks with the simplest of design elements for “push.”  Indy Sulleiro’s set consists of a white-painted wall and a long table holding three bottles of water and that all-important button.  Urrutia’s lighting design and Kyran Wright’s sound enhance the conference-room feeling of the space.

Though it follows a more familiar stylistic path than most LakehouseRanchDotPNG plays, “push.” showcases the company at its best.

Kirkman’s writing is insightful and, particularly for anyone who has endured the end of a marriage, quite accurate. (Parents take note: Due to some of the play’s language and subjects, “push.” is OK for teens but not younger kids.)

Under Urrutia’s direction, Urquia is exactly as officious as the Mediator should be, Fernandez both scary and vulnerable as Dad, Lopez the quintessence of a Mom ready to shed her biggest “kid.” Bravo.

WHAT: World premiere of “push” by Mackenzie Raine Kirkman

WHERE: LakehouseRanchDotPNG production at Artistic Vibes, 8846 SW 129th Terrace, Suite B (second floor), Miami

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through Jan. 21

COST:  $20 (discounts for students and artists)

INFORMATION: 786-427-4721 or Lakehouseranch-png.webnode.page

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.

Review: ‘Old Wicked Songs’ Answers the Call of a Drama With Music

Keith Baker as Professor Mashkan, standing, and Teddy Warren as Stephen Hoffman in GableStage’s “Old Wicked Songs” by Jon Marans through Sunday, Feb. 4 at the theater in the Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables. (Photo courtesy of Magnus Stark)

When Bari Newport arrived in South Florida to begin her tenure as producing artistic director at GableStage a couple of years ago, one of her innumerable tasks involved asking the theater’s patrons what they’d like to see more of in the company’s intimate space at the historic Biltmore Hotel.

Plays with music, they told her, something that had been a rare but Carbonell Award-winning part of late producing artistic director Joseph Adler’s programming.  Newport listened, and the result – “Old Wicked Songs,” written and directed by Jon Marans – opened for a run through Sunday, Feb. 4.

The play, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 (“Rent” won that year), is set in Vienna in 1986 while former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim – whose past as an intelligence officer in the Wehrmacht (Nazi armed forces) had been recently revealed – was running his successful campaign to become president of Austria.

[RELATED: Read Christine Dolen’s preview of “Old Wicked Songs.”]

Marans pairs two disparate pianist/musicians in “Old Wicked Songs,” which was inspired in part by his own studies in Vienna.

Professor Joseph Mashkan (Keith Baker) is drawing closer to the end of a diminishing career, though despite having to overcome repeated obstacles and objections from his newest (and only) student, he proves himself an insightful teacher.

Stephen Hoffman (Teddy Warren) is a 25-year-old American piano prodigy who has lost the spark that compelled him to play. He has come to Vienna to study accompaniment, only to discover that he must first study singing with Mashkan, the better to understand the interplay of singer and accompanist.  Together they’ll work on Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, a song cycle with words taken from the poetry of Heinrich Heine.

Feeling outraged and deceived, the inflexible Hoffman threatens to leave but doesn’t. Good thing. Otherwise the audience would miss out on two hours of a compelling play-with-music about two eccentric men who help to change each other’s lives.

The play, Marans’ first, requires a pair of performers who can act, sing and play piano at an impressive level. Marans turned to Baker (whom he directed in a  production of “Old Wicked Songs” 14 years ago in Pennsylvania) and Warren, a Miami transplant from Milwaukee. Both men are masterful in all three facets of their roles.

Baker utilizes a courtly charm that hides Mashkan’s justifiable worries about his future and diminishing funds. Secrets lie beneath the layers of his personality and the very shirt on his back.  He sings Mashkan’s sections of the Dichterliebe in a baritone appropriate to the professor’s age, and if his adept piano playing sometimes includes a mistake or two, that’s in the script.

Warren’s Stephen is so tightly wound it’s surprising his hair doesn’t stand straight up, or perhaps the character is meant to be on the autism spectrum.  His obsessive-compulsive behavior when he sits to play the piano involves a deep breath and tugging his ears three times.  But wow, can he play.

Hoffman assures Mashkan that he’s not a prodigy, just a stylistic mimic, then delightfully demonstrates the truth of that statement.  Warren is a better singer than Hoffman is supposed to be, so he sometimes pulls back vocally.  But when the exhilarated student comes back from the opera and bursts into Mashkan’s rehearsal studio singing Vesti la Giubba from Pagliacci, Warren’s tenor soars.

That studio has been designed by Frank J. Oliva, with props by Marialexia Hernandez and set dressing by Nicole Quintana.  Like Vienna itself, it’s visually of a different time and place, with its worn gold-brushed walls affording a peek to the outside, a stopped grandfather clock, and a phonograph with a colorful horn.  And, of course, the shawl-draped piano.

Tony Galaska’s warm-hued lighting design, Sean McGinley’s sound design with its Dichterliebe bridges between scenes, and the costumes by Gema Valdes (Mashkan’s well-worn elegance for a man of a certain age, Hoffman’s evolving looks which reflect the changes within himself) deepen the artfulness of Marans’ story.

“Old Wicked Songs” contains jokes (Mashkan tells a bad but funny one about Waldheim), disturbing moments as the professor drops antisemitic remarks, and rage as Hoffman returns from a trip to the Dachau concentration camp, a visit he had promised his father he would make.  World War II, the Nazis, the Holocaust – Hoffman learns about more than music during his time in Vienna.

Music – how to teach it, how to learn it, how subtle adjustments make all the difference – is the great strength of “Old Wicked Songs.” That Marans applied his insights as a writer, musician and director to GableStage’s version of his play is a multifaceted gift to the company’s audiences.

WHAT: “Old Wicked Songs” by Jon Marans

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

WHEN: 2 and 7 p.m. Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday (additional 2 p.m. matinee Saturday, Feb. 3), through Feb. 4 (streaming version available during regular performances Jan. 19-Feb. 4)

COST: $40, $45, $50, $55, $60, $65, all with additional $10 service fee (discounts for students, teachers, artists, military and groups); streaming ticket $30

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

RELATED EVENT:    A conversation with Gerard Schwarz, artistic and music director of the Palm Beach Symphony and professor of music at the Frost School of Music, in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, will follow the 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday, Jan. 28. Visit gablestage.org/events for details.

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.

Review: Zoetic Stage’s world premiere of ‘Wicked Child’ brings conflict and a family into focus

From left, Wayne LeGette, Margery Lowe, Ben Katz, Gracie Blu, Jeff Brackett, Michael McKeever and Jeni Hacker  in the Zoetic Stage world premiere of “Wicked Child” at the Carnival Studio Theater in the Adrienne Arsht Center through Sunday, Jan. 28. (Photo courtesy of Justin Namon)

David Rosenberg’s “Wicked Child,” now getting its Zoetic Stage world premiere in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Arsht Center, is not a reaction to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

Eerily, though, it feels like one.

“Wicked Child” was written in 2016, and former Miamian Rosenberg workshopped it at Zoetic’s Finstrom Festival of new plays in 2022. Each act takes place during an April Passover Seder, the first in 2022, the second in 2023. Today’s war hadn’t happened yet.

But so many of the issues that continue to fuel furious conflict in the Middle East are artfully woven by the playwright into an extended family’s conversations as they celebrate their ancient ancestors’ deliverance from slavery in Egypt.

The traditional feast takes place in the expansive, expensive home of Mark Silver (Michael McKeever) and his wife Fay (Jeni Hacker) in affluent Rye, New York.  Fay’s sister Cindy Blumenthal (Margery Lowe), her husband Leo (Wayne LeGette) and their sons from previous marriages – Cindy’s Ben (Jeff Brackett), Leo’s Jake (Ben Katz) – are the guests, along with Jake’s Asian American girlfriend Amelia (Gracie Blu).

[RELATED: Read Christine Dolen’s preview of “Wicked Child.”]

Ben has just returned from his Birthright visit to Israel, joyously bearing gifts which he distributes as the family awaits an elegant Seder meal prepared by the Silvers’ live-in Filipino chef, Arnulfo.

The gifts run the gamut from a beautiful Haggadah in Hebrew to use in retelling the Passover story during the Seder to an antique box containing – surprise! – a dildo in Israeli colors for Jake. The latter is in keeping with the stepbrothers’ relationship. Though they’re in their mid-to-late 20s, at this reunion they regress to hurling bro/frat boy insults.  Amelia, who assumed she was dating an adult male, is not impressed.

Through the lens of this particular family, Rosenberg, director Stuart Meltzer and the seven actors touch on or dive more deeply into a host of issues, including Israel’s very existence, the necessity of educating younger Jewish generations about their heritage, antisemitism, the world-altering tragedy of the Holocaust.  But the playwright doesn’t stick with a one-sided view of Israel.

Following Ben’s shocking after-dinner announcement that he quit his successful New York job to sign up for combat duty with the Israeli Defense Forces, Rosenberg has Amelia, as the non-Jewish outsider, drop bombshells to Jake about her views of the State of Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.

A year later, Ben has come home after a shattering event that occurred when he and his fellow soldiers were on patrol, and Jake has a thriving political blog that is far too anti-Israeli/pro-Palestinian for the family’s taste – he has become in many ways the questioning, challenging “wicked child” mentioned in the Haggadah. During the second Seder, Jake makes a speech so incendiary that he and Ben come to blows. Fay then lets Jake have it with her words.

“You’ve never faced an existential threat. You don’t know what you’d do if you did. It’s not a perfect country, of course it’s not,” she says. “But if something happens? When this boils over, and it will, soon, when something happens. You’ll be awfully glad you have that place. And terrified if it’s gone.”

As serious and timely as the issues in “Wicked Child” are, the play is also an artful family dramedy.  Meltzer is deft at finding funny, lighter moments in otherwise serious material, and there are many in Rosenberg’s script.

For instance: When Cindy realizes Ben will be going to the desert to fight, she insists the two of them have to go to the Nordstrom store in White Plains the very next day to find him a hat that will give him complete sun protection. Or this:  One of Ben’s gifts to Leo and Mark is a bottle of a new Israeli whiskey – which happens to be terrible.  This gives each of the men the chance to have a taste, then make a face showing different kinds of utter disgust.

The performances, by a mix of Zoetic Stage veterans and newcomers, are impressive and uniformly strong.

McKeever, one of the company’s founders, is a prolific South Florida playwright who also happens to be a fine actor. His Mark in “Wicked Child” is a man privately battling cancer, putting on a brave host’s face for the rest of the family as Fay watches him like a hawk.  By the second act, his little pot belly has disappeared, and he’s clearly very ill.  McKeever’s performance, among the best of his career, is quietly heartbreaking.

Hacker’s Fay is a down-to-earth rock for Mark and the rest of the family.  An eloquent woman with unshakeable convictions, she’s fierce in battling for her beliefs and for those she loves.

LeGette and Lowe breathe believability into the more stereotypical Leo and Cindy. LeGette’s Leo is a dad who emotionally supports both of his sons, listening, occasionally chiming in or intervening.  Lowe’s Cindy, always impeccably turned out, is the mom who fusses over her family, her cooking and being gracious, a real home-and-hearth sort.

As part of a younger generation trying to find its place in the world, Brackett’s Ben, Katz’s Jake and Blu’s Amelia are very different people.

Brackett compellingly conveys Ben’s idealism and naïve enthusiasm, then later takes Jake and the audience through a crushing story that will likely haunt Ben for the rest of his life.

Katz embraces Jake’s flaws – his initial cluelessness about the political complexities of the Middle East, his tone-deaf criticisms of Israel at the family’s Seder – and thus serves as an effective catalyst for a great deal of conflict.

Blu, who is making her professional debut in “Wicked Child,” takes Amelia from coolly analytical to appalled about how much she doesn’t know about the attractive man sharing her bed.

Meltzer and company do their storytelling this time on a traverse stage, with audience seated on either long side of the rectangular playing area designed by B.J. Duncan with props design by Natasha Hernandez.

The round Passover table is in the center of the space atop a turntable, so occasionally it rotates a bit, giving the audience views of different actors’ faces.  The set does not, however, suggest the sort of tasteful affluence specified in the script.

Laura Turnbull, best known in South Florida as an actor, has done a beautiful job with the costume design, particularly in the way she reflects Fay and Cindy’s personalities through the way they like to dress.

Lighting designer Becky Montero helps to amplify and mute emotions, and her final framing of Jake and Ben as they ritualistically watch for the arrival of the prophet Elijah is haunting.  Sound designer Matt Corey’s work, including short musical interludes, is subtle yet potent.  Hacker has contributed intimacy direction, while Paul Homza has done the fight choreography that turns a verbal altercation into something physical.

“Wicked Child” is not, as noted, about the current war.  But Rosenberg’s script is timely, thought-provoking and prescient as it explores the ever-escalating stakes in that volatile part of the world.

WHAT: World premiere of “Wicked Child” by David Rosenberg

WHERE: Zoetic Stage production in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

WHEN:  7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday (additional 7:30 p.m. show Wednesday, Jan. 17, no matinee on Saturday, Jan. 20), through Sunday, Jan. 28

COST: $55 and $60

SPECIAL EVENT:  Talkback with playwright David Rosenberg, director Stuart Meltzer and the cast following the Jan. 21 Sunday matinee.

INFORMATION:  305-949-6722 or www.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.