It’s a first: Miami Light Project’s ‘Here and Now’ in new Miami Shores space

Arsimmer McCoy’s “I’m So Depressed,” a poetry-driven stage play, is one of five original works in Miami Light Project’s “Here and Now: 2023” at Miami Theater Center, Miami Shores. (Photo courtesy of Miami Light Project)

After a 13-year run at The Light Box at Goldman Warehouse in Miami, Miami Light Project moved in January to the Miami Theater Center in Miami Shores. From Thursday, May 11 to Saturday, May 13, its signature commission program, “Here & Now: 2023” will kick off performances in its new home.

Letty Bassart, Darius Daughtry, Carlos Fabián, Gentry George, and  Arsimmer McCoy are featured in individual original works for the 2023 program.

Beth Boone, artistic and executive director of Miami Light Project, says that she is looking forward to this year’s “Here and Now” performances, particularly since this will be the first at their new location.  She says that the move has been a good one.

“Miami Theater Center is a 330-seat proscenium theater. It has wonderful options connected to it, which is the way we’re using it. The configuration we’re using for ‘Here and Now’ . . . is an on-stage black box.” She explains: “. . . You close the main curtain, you do your sets on stage, and you’ve got a black box theater.”

There’s also the storefront space next door, which is part of the center.

“We have a rehearsal studio, which is where we do our year-round artists’ residency program. It’s where the artists for ‘Here and Now’ rehearse.”

“Here and Now” began in 1999 as a way to commission multi-media artists in South Florida. Participants receive free rehearsal space, technical assistance, and mentoring.

“We typically give a commission to between four and six artists on an annual basis but this year, five was the magic number in terms of the projects that rose to the top for our panel.”

Boone said audiences will find this year’s pieces multi-layered.

“We have a certain criterion and what I find particularly moving about all of the work is that it’s deeply personal and, at the same time, they’re tackling big ideas or big issues,” says Boone. “We’ve all been through a lot in recent years and I think artists, perhaps better than anyone else, are able to distill the human experience into something on stage that helps us to feel a sense of safety or outrage or conviction. I think you really will see that this year in the work.”

A range of ideas are explored including “Reverie in Black” by Daughtry, which is a thoughtful combination of theater, music, and spoken word poetry. Fabian tackles detachment, identity, and sensibility in the second chapter of “Ruminations” through his “Towards Now” production, which is a series of short theatrical vignettes. And Bassart’s “Here, Now” with Daniel Bernard Roumain is largely an exercise in faith.

“Trust is really the heart of this duet,” says Bassart. “It’s an improvisational performance. I will be engaging with (Roumain’s) music for the first time during the live performance.”

Bassart notes that the piece is taking the duo in a new direction.

“We’ve collaborated on multiple projects but this will be the first time we have performed in this format. It’s about a larger ethos. It’s really taking a chance on something and trusting in the process and seeing what materializes in that risk. To engage in something so raw and vulnerable, and to do it in Miami it really raises the stakes even more so.”

The nakedness of emotions, the role of fear, and triumphs achieved through pain and loss, are prominent themes in McCoy’s “I’m So Depressed” stage play.

A string of cataclysmic changes forced her to reevaluate everything, she says.

“Prior to the pandemic, I began a separation from my (now) ex-husband and that in itself was one thing to deal with. To then move into the apocalypse, which is how I viewed the pandemic . . . grappling with the world, and people having to go into isolation, my own personal family and not being able to be near them. My parents are older. They’re in their 70s and so the fear of me going out or walking into their home and harming them. The fear of my daughter, who was young at the time, not being able to go to school, her having a mask, and the world in flux.”

She says the genesis of the piece begins with isolation.

“It starts with me being alone for a couple of months. I was grieving. I was grieving and trying to organize myself in the midst of grief.”

Also born during the pandemic is Gentry George’s “Afro Blue,” which embodies movement to produce his body of work.

“You know, we had hours and hours with ourselves,” says George. “This work was done during the pandemic when I happened to come across some of this music.”

He said the program is rooted in the jazz standard “Afro Blue,” which was composed by Mongo Santamaria, and then later interpreted by many artists including vocalist Abbey Lincoln.

George says “Afro Blue” is part of a series he created entitled ‘Roots and Rhythms’ that celebrates Black musical icons in the 20th century.

Through the work, George hopes the audience leaves feeling uplifted.

“I want to share a message of love, joy, and diversity. We’re celebrating music. We’re celebrating the legacy of these great artists and how that relates to our stories and how that relates to all of us. Most importantly, this is a celebration of music, life, art and dance.”

George says that, for him, “Here and Now” is an opportunity for which he’s been waiting in the wings.

“I would walk by the Miami Light Project all the time just hoping that I could be there one day. To be welcomed to create this work, it feels really quite motivating. It feels quite special. It feels like I’m on the right track and it is so worthwhile.”

Boone says his reaction is exactly what “Here and Now” is about.

“By investing modest amounts of money incrementally over time, without fail, year in and year out, what you do is move the needle in a community in terms of how it is you create an artistic scene. A place where artists feel that they can live, feel that they can do work, feel that they can progress in their profession, and that is the very essence and goal of the program.”

WHAT: Miami Light Project’s “Here and Now: 2023″ 

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

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, May 11, 12 and 13

COST: $20-$25

INFORMATION:  305-576-4350, miamilightproject.com or  hereandnow/tickets 

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit source of theater, dance, visual arts, music and performing arts news. 

Review: Miami New Drama’s ‘Create Dangerously’ brings the beauty, sorrows of Haiti to Miami Beach

Charlene Francois, left, plays Tante Ilyana to Andrea Patterson’s Edwidge Danticat in the world premiere of “Create Dangerously” at Miami New Drama. (Photo courtesy of Vanessa Díaz with FURIOSA Productions.)

In “Create Dangerously,” a new play based on the work of Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, an actor portraying playwright-director Liliana Blain-Cruz describes what the audience is about to see.

“This isn’t a play!” declares Brittany Bellizeare, a vibrant vision in a yellow suit and jaunty red cap. “It’s a strange amalgam of celebration and memory and reflection.”

True enough, though one could go in many different directions trying to put into words exactly how Blain-Cruz has adapted Danticat’s 2010 book of essays for its Miami New Drama world premiere, which is running at Miami Beach’s Colony Theatre through May 28.

For instance:  Partially to contextualize the work, Blain-Cruz has made herself and Danticat characters in the play (a little mind-blowing on opening night since the real Danticat and Blain-Cruz were actually in the audience).  The actors, each of whom speaks as Danticat at various times in the play, dispense with theater’s imaginary fourth wall and frequently talk directly to the audience.

Stylistically, the effect is meta theater-meets-a-frame-story-meets-a-kind of visual anthropology. It’s like a hybrid of essay, theater and vivacious TED talk, with Haitian music, dance and art adding layers to the experience.

In terms of content, although “Create Dangerously” runs a fairly brisk 90 minutes, the piece incorporates a great deal of Haitian history as well as stories told in language that sometimes comes straight from the essays by Danticat, who has lived in South Florida for the past 21 years.

That’s legit, since Blain-Cruz is credited as the writer-director of the theater piece “based on the book by Edwidge Danticat.” It’s kind of lovely too, since that choice also allows you to absorb the style and impact of Danticat’s voice, one of the most important of the Haitian diaspora.

Her observant commentary on politics, art, family, courage and Haiti’s bloody history becomes the show’s throughline. A trek to visit her elderly Tante Ilyana on family land in mountainous Beauséjour – emphasizing the importance of nurturing ties through generations, collecting stories before the elderly depart this life for the next – has more of a beginning, middle and end than any other.

Other pieces are snapshots, some widely known, others not as much.  Some untranslated Creole is sprinkled into the dialogue, but the play is performed in English.

Serious, smart and sincere, “Create Dangerously” could evolve into a more thrilling piece with an even more potent impact if its creators decide to keep working on it.  But those snapshots? They’re always absorbing.

The chilling 1964 public execution of Jeune Haiti freedom fighters Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin on the orders of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier comes early on.  Edson Jean and Paul Pryce portray the lifelong friends from Jérémie, Haiti’s “city of poets,” courageous men who left the safety of exile in New York to overthrow the Duvalier regime.  There is no blood, but the sudden shocking sound of the firing squad and the actors’ physicalizing of Danticat’s words is horror enough.

In 2000, outspoken Radio Haiti Inter talk show host and journalist Jean Dominique (Pryce) was assassinated in the station’s parking lot, a murderous act conveyed in the play by gunfire and static. He, too, had been safe in exile but had come home to Haiti because, as he said, “My country needs hope. My country is suffering. It’s being held captive by criminals. My country is slowly dying, melting away.”

His wife Michèle Montas (Thiana Berrick, devastating yet powerfully tender), who customarily rode with him to work, tried to keep the station going for another three years until she too became the target of an assassination attempt in which one of her bodyguards lost his life.

Two hugely influential painters, Hector Hyppolite (Pryce) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jean), become compelling, contrasting characters.  Samples of their work are “painted” behind them by projection designer Hannah Wasileski as each artist’s story is told.

The self-taught Hyppolite, a third-generation voudou priest born in poverty, initially painted with chicken feathers on cardboard because he had no money for brushes or canvases. “Discovered” at the age of 49 by American watercolorist Dewitt Peters, Hyppolite was championed by surrealist André Breton. Prolific near the end of his life, Hyppolite painted more than 600 canvases in the three years before his death at age 54 in 1948.

Basquiat was altogether different. Born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a middle-class Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, he absorbed New York’s artistic riches and began his career as half of the graffiti duo SAMO.  An American who never visited Haiti, he pointedly sought fame (and found it) but rejected being grouped with the creators of “Haitian primatives” or being probed about the sources of his cultural memory.  One of the most unsettling scenes in “Create Dangerously” features Berrick as art historian Marc Miller and Jean as Basquiat artfully lip-synching to the recording of a contentious interview between the two.  By the time Basquiat was 27, a drug overdose took his life, though his fame and lucrative career live on; in 2017, his painting “Untitled, 1982” sold for a then-record $110.5 million at auction.

Storytelling is the key part of “Create Dangerously,” but Haitian music and dance are also among the artistic tools Blain-Cruz uses to convey the country’s culture.  The cast dances together in party and family scenes, and Francois brilliantly expresses beauty, tragedy and power in her solo dance work.

The varied music resonates especially with those in the audience who know it, making it tough to resist standing up to dance or joining in mourning for lost loved ones and Haiti itself.  Alan Cavé’s “Se pas pou dat,” Kassav’s “Zouk-la Sé Sel Médikaman Nou Ni,” Manno Charlemagne’s “Manman” and RAM’s “Symphony du Ghetto”

In the text, former Miamian Blain-Cruz acknowledges her own insecurity as an artist trying to craft a play about Haiti without ever having visited her mother’s homeland.  She underscores the price an artist can pay for truth-telling when she has Danticat speak of the controversy surrounding her 1994 debut novel “Breath, Eyes, Memory.”  In that book, the author writes of a traumatizing “virginity test” some Haitian mothers regularly administered to their daughters, prompting one offended reader to write, “You are a parasite and you exploit your culture for money and what passes for fame.”

Just six actors portray a universe of characters in “Create Dangerously,” but because the performers are so convincing and quick in their transformations, the cast seems much larger.

Pryce, tall and charismatic, conveys Hippolite’s sincere spirituality, the physical limitations of age in Danticat’s uncle, the fierce bravery of Dominique.  Miamian Jean embodies Basquiat’s anger and ambition, the teasing affection of Danticat’s cousin, and contributes the gentle guitar accompaniment to “Manman.”  Berrick, another Miamian, has a series of breakthrough moments throughout the piece in her best work to date.

Andrea Patterson is loving and curious as Danticat in her scenes with Francois as the reed-thin, devoted, stubborn Tante Ilyana, the latter transforming her limber dancer’s body into the physique of a woman who has known too many years of pain and hard work.  As Blain-Cruz, Bellizeare is as much of a magnetic life force as the director herself.

The design elements of “Create Dangerously” are, at times, breathtaking.  That’s not exactly a surprise since Blain-Cruz, the resident director at New York’s Lincoln Center, brought her longtime team with her to Miami Beach.

Tony Award-nominated set designer Adam Rigg has created a collection of boxes of various heights to represent Haiti’s countryside and hills, with Tante Ilyana’s mountain projected mountain behind. The boxes are adorned in the style of Haitian paintings, with lush greenery and vibrant flowers, and downstage a long row of flickering candles and voudou offerings to the gods serves as a reminder of those lost to the living.

Wasileski’s projections and Yi Zhao’s lighting create ever-shifting backgrounds, making stars twinkle in the blue-black night sky, sending a tiny flock of birds over the mountain.  Zhao is a kind of painter too, his lights bringing out melancholy, fear and the healing power of joy, however brief.

Montana Levi Blanco’s costumes range from vivid citrus-hued colors to elegant white for the finale.  Sound designer and composer Palmer Hefferan serves up music both subtle and bold, jolting the audience with the sudden boom of gunfire, soothing it with a soft symphony of nighttime crickets on the mountain.

In “Create Dangerously,” Blain-Cruz and Danticat have teamed up, via this hard-to-categorize piece of theater, to urge artists and those who love the arts to take risks, speak out, and display the sort of courage explored in the play.

This has a specific cultural context, but given Florida’s largest-in-the-country Haitian-American community, it should speak resonantly to those who understand the play’s world and layered nuances.  And in a region where immigrant artists from many nations have fled tyranny to work in freedom, “Create Dangerously” should have an even broader impact.

WHAT: World premiere of “Create Dangerously” by Lileana Blain-Cruz, based on the work of Edwidge Danticat

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 May 28

COST: $46.50-$76.50

INFORMATION:  305-674-1040 or miaminewdrama.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit source of theater, dance, visual arts, music and performing arts news. 

Miamian Edwidge Danticat’s book ‘Create Dangerously’ becomes an important work of theater

Miami New Drama’s Michel Hausmann, author Edwidge Danticat and writer-director Lileana Blain-Cruz joined forces to bring “Create Dangerously” to the stage, opening in previews Thursday, May 4 and running at the Colony Theater, Miami Beach, through Sunday, May 28. (Photo courtesy of FURIOSA Productions)

Artistic inspiration flows from many sources, including ideas and images created long before younger artists build upon them to fashion something new.

Take “Create Dangerously,” which began as a 1957 speech by Nobel Prize laureate Albert Camus.

When the celebrated Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat was asked to give the second annual Toni Morrison lecture at Princeton University in 2008, inspired by Camus, she delivered a speech titled “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work.” In 2010, Danticat published a book with the same title, a work blending memoir, essays and stories about the courage of Haitians at home and in exile.

This week, during Haitian Heritage Month, transformed once more, “Create Dangerously” will claim a place in the world of theater.

After previews on Thursday, May 4 and Friday, May 5, the Miami New Drama play-with-music will open at 8 p.m. Saturday, May 6 in a sold-out world premiere at the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road.

Running through Sunday, May 28, the new “Create Dangerously” has been written and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, a former Miamian who most recently staged the Off-Broadway premiere of the musical “White Girl in Danger” by Michael R. Jackson, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for drama for “A Strange Loop.”

Danticat, who has lived in Miami for more than two decades, is a frequent presence in Miami New Drama’s opening night audiences as well as a fan of the company’s multicultural mission and work.

Blain-Cruz, whose upcoming projects include “Stranger Love” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Candrice Jones’s basketball play “Flex” at New York’s Lincoln Center and the John Adams-Peter Sellars nativity opera-oratorio “El Niño” at the Metropolitan Opera, met Miami New Drama cofounder and artistic director Michel Hausmann when the two had an artistic fellowship at the New York Theatre Workshop.

In the case of the new “Create Dangerously,” Hausmann played artistic matchmaker between Danticat and Blain-Cruz.

“This project has been in the making for years,” says Hausmann.  “I came across Edwidge’s work in New York a decade ago . . . and it made such an impact on me. It’s hard to pin down what it is. The language is simple and accessible, so you lower your guard, then it punches you in the gut when you least expect it.”

Blain-Cruz had wanted to do a project based on Danticat’s work – “Lileana and I ‘fangirl’ whenever Edwidge comes in,” he says – and Hausmann received a grant to bring in the director and her creative team from last season’s acclaimed Lincoln Center production of Thornton Wilder’s 1942 Pulitzer-winning “The Skin of Our Teeth.”

Hausmann describes the world premiere as “a theatrical event” which will have more in common with the past Miami New Drama shows “Papá Cuatro” and “Viva la Parranda!”

“This is more a folkloric, nontraditional way of storytelling, with music, thoughts, dance, stories and direct address,” he observes.

It is also a piece with multiple shifts in tone and content, from the joyous to the tragic.

The very public 1964 execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, who left the safety of exile in New York to battle the regime of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, is included as is the 2000 assassination of radio personality and commentator Jean Dominique.  So is a family story about an exhausting, hours-long trek up a Haitian mountain for what will likely be the last visit with Danticat’s elderly Tante Ilyana in Beauséjour.

“Just like in writing fiction, you have to have peaks and valleys,” says Danticat.

Miami New Drama’s “Create Dangerously” is billed as a piece written and directed by Blain-Cruz, based on the work of Danticat.  In a Zoom conversation, Danticat says she was fine with having Blain-Cruz devise the piece.

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to play a role in creating it.  I never thought it could be adapted, so it’s a complete surrender.  Writing essays or fiction is not the same as writing for theater.  I have tried. It’s a whole different craft,” the author says.

Even so, Danticat has observed developmental workshops and some rehearsals, offering feedback on the representation of certain characters in the play.  She is among those characters, telling stories or narrating, and at different times the cast takes turns putting on a distinctive pair of glasses to “become” her.

“For me, it’s surreal to be a character. That was not on my Bingo card, ever. But I’m honored to be a part of it with the folks who are in the story,” she says. “The book is not about me. I see it as a book that’s about the brave creators in it.  I am sort of a filter, as Lileana is.”

Blain-Cruz says she made Danticat (and briefly herself) characters because she thought, “How do I frame the why of this? She writes from a very personal place  . . . I wanted to make sure people didn’t think we were going to do a realistic portrayal of Edwidge. It starts from one person, then opens like a prism to allow the multiplicity of voices.”

The daughter of a Haitian mother and a Puerto Rican father, Blain-Cruz attended Miami’s Immaculata-La Salle High School, then earned degrees from Princeton and Yale.

“Edwidge’s ‘Create Dangerously’ came to me when I was contemplating what it means to be an artist,” she says. “I had been wanting to connect to my mom’s side of the family, and when Michel said we should do something for Miami, I kept coming back to Edwidge’s amazing voice.”

To transform “Create Dangerously” into theater, Blain-Cruz is collaborating with her longtime creative team: scenic designer Adam Rigg, lighting designer Yi Zhao, Tony Award-winning costume designer Montana Levi Blanco, sound designer/composer Palmer Hefferan and projection designer Hannah Wasileski.

For the cast, Blain-Cruz chose a mixture of Miamians and artists based elsewhere:  Brittany Bellizeare, Thiana Berrick, dancer Charlene Francois, Edson Jean, Andrea Patterson, Paul Pryce and understudy Sydney Presendieu.

Miamian Edson Jean, who now divides his time between his hometown and Los Angeles where he has a growing career in films and television, says Miami New Drama reached out to him about “Create Dangerously,” and he has enjoyed Blain-Cruz’s collaborative way of working.

“She encourages us to bring who and what we are into the rehearsal room.  I play the guitar, and she didn’t have that planned, but it adds another layer,” says Jean, who plays artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Danticat’s cousin Nick and the author’s father.  “We’re more like a reflection of what the person was. This is not a narrative or a plot-driven piece; it’s a manifestation of the book.”

Jean adds that he’s still uncertain how Miami’s vast Haitian-American community will respond to the more intense, tragic stories in “Create Dangerously.”

“My mom and auntie respond differently when they hear the name ‘Duvalier.’ Their bodies and emotions change.  They were essentially trained as children not to talk about it. When you’re punished just for communicating, when you know if you said anything about Papa Doc you could lose your life, you have layers of trauma,” he says.

Actor Paul Pryce worked with Blain-Cruz when both were in graduate school at Yale, but this is their first professional project together. Born in Trinidad and Tobago to a mother from Martinique and a father from Jamaica, he also has family in France and next month will wed his South Korean finance. Like Blain-Cruz, he feels he brings a global perspective to theater.

“She has a playful, trickster personality.  She’s not afraid to reimagine work in a way that’s unconventional,” he says. “Theater can get very serious, important and precious. But Lileana doesn’t allow us to fall into sentimentality.”

Pryce, an actor-filmmaker who has performed in many of William Shakespeare’s plays, has a vividly evocative way of describing “Create Dangerously.”

“It’s not experimental.  There are elements that are non-linear, fragmented, movement-driven, and the text is [from the book].  Its unique structural components collage together, almost like a living painting,” he says.  “There’s not a forward arc to a resolution in an Aristotelian way, with a beginning, middle and end. It feels continuous, circular.  But we do find our connections.”

Hausmann sees “Create Dangerously” as yet another artistic way Miami New Drama is trying to speak to Miami’s diverse communities while illuminating what they have in common.

“In Miami, we live in silos. We’re so diverse, but we’re not blended. You can go all day without speaking a word of English.  We don’t share a lot of common spaces,” says Hausmann, who connects with the universality in so many different kinds of theater. “I’ve never been to Haiti. I don’t speak Creole. These characters don’t look like me. But I feel this is talking about me.”

In her book “Create Dangerously,” Danticat writes about the courageous Haitians who read or performed Camus’ “Caligula” in the aftermath of Numa and Drouin’s executions.  She makes note of playwright Franck Fouché and poet Felix Morriseau Leroy translating Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” and “Antigone” into Creole and placing the dramas into Haitian settings, “striking a dangerous balance between silence and art.”

In conversation, Danticat celebrates the courage of writers who “reached through the ages to others for inspiration” as well as plausible deniability, a kind of artistic cover given the life-and-death power of brutal regimes.

Blain-Cruz hopes that the Haitians and Haitian-Americans in the audiences who come to see “Create Dangerously” will feel loved and seen.

“It’s a very powerful theatrical recognition of who you are…So many in Miami feel a connection to a place they’ve never been to. This is a way of reflecting on the idea of what home is, and how you identify with who you are in relationship to that,” she says.

The director, who blends intellectual prowess with creative joy, describes the new “Create Dangerously” as a “strange amalgamation of memory, celebration and reflection.  I love knowing what I’m up for when I go to see something. You get to listen and relax.  It creates a sense of ease. It’s going to be crazy, but stay with us.”

WHAT: World premiere of “Create Dangerously” by Lileana Blain-Cruz, based on the work of Edwidge Danticat

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

WHEN: Previews 8 p.m. Thursday, May 4 and Friday, May 5, opens 8 p.m. Saturday, May 6 (opening night sold out);  8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through May 28

COST: $46.50-$76.50

INFORMATION:  305-674-1040 or miaminewdrama.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit source of theater, dance, visual arts, music and performing arts news. 

With Zoetic Stage’s ‘#Graced,’ playwright Vanessa Garcia is soaring

Kristian Bikic, Sabrín Diehl, Chris Anthony Ferrer and Melissa Almaguer star in the world premiere of Vanessa Garcia’s road trip play “#Graced.” (Photo courtesy of Abre Camino Collective.)

These days, playwright Vanessa Garcia’s name is popping up everywhere.

Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables recently announced it would begin its 2023-24 season in November with the Florida premiere of “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” by Garcia and Richard Blanco, the Miamian who read his poem “One Today” at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2013.

In June, Miami’s City Theatre will devote its popular Summer Shorts program at the Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater to eight brand-new short works by a diverse group of playwrights – Joel Castillo, Ariel Cipolla, Chris Anthony Ferrer, Sefanja Richard Galon, Luis Roberto Herrera, Ivan R. Lopez, Phanésia Pharel, Lolita Stewart-White – mentored by Garcia in a two-year project dubbed Homegrown.

In August, “Jenna and the Whale,” a play co-written by Garcia and journalist-author Jake Cline (who were paired creatively by producer Willie Fernandez), will have its world premiere at the Ground Floor Theatre in Austin, Texas.

But first, as anyone who has strolled by the Arsht Center lately and noticed posters touting a play titled “#Graced,” comes a big hometown world premiere for Garcia, the Miami Beach-born daughter of parents who came to South Florida from Cuba as children in the 1960s.

Zoetic Stage’s production of the play aims to take audiences on a strikingly theatrical journey of self-discovery, all within the Carnival Studio Theater space. Previewing May 4 and running May 5-21, “#Graced” makes a cross-country trek, vividly utilizes the thrilling yet treacherous world of social media, and puts together illuminating puzzles for its wandering characters.

This intersection of high-profile projects for Garcia follows her breakthrough success with 2019’s “The Amparo Experience,” a commissioned site-specific immersive play centered on the family behind Havana Club Rum. Directed by Victoria Collado, Garcia’s creative partner in their company the Abre Camino Collective, “Amparo” spoke so powerfully about the Cuban revolution and exile that its extended run in a repurposed home not far from the Arsht Center lasted more than eight months.
Collado, who is codirecting “#Graced” with New York-based Sarah Cameron Hughes, acknowledges that this is an ascendant period in Garcia’s career. But she emphasizes that her friend has spent many years putting in the hard work that has led to this moment.

“She gives me a run for my money when it comes to stamina for work…It’s her time. The world is her oyster,” says Collado. “She’s been at this for over 20 years. People forget that. Nobody sees her get up at 3 a.m. to write so she can turn in a script on time.”

Garcia, who turned 44 on the day rehearsals for “#Graced” began, does have a jam-packed life and career just now.

She and her husband Ignacio Crespi are parents to son Taika, 5, and daughter Marina, who turns 3 in mid-May. As a mother, Garcia says, “It’s challenging. I go for all of it. There’s never a dull second. The hardest thing was being away from them for so long in Maine [where “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” had its February world premiere at Portland Stage].”

In terms of her flourishing career, Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist with a lengthy and impressive list of accomplishments.

She’s a playwright, of course, but also a novelist (her award-winning debut novel “White Light” was named one of National Public Radio’s best books of 2015), a widely published journalist and essayist, a children’s book author (“What the Bread Says”), podcaster (“Never the Empty Nest” with her mother Jackie and sister Nicole), TV writer (for shows including “Sesame Street” and “Caillou”) and visual artist (that’s her painting on the cover of “White Light”).

She has also earned four college degrees, including a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Miami and a Ph.D. in English with a focus on creative nonfiction from the University of California, Irvine.

But before “Amparo?” Her career as a significant South Florida playwright didn’t look like it was on a fast track to this moment.

Yes, Garcia got readings, workshops and participated in the invaluable Playwright Development Program run by Miami-Dade’s Department of Cultural Affairs. But getting South Florida theaters to produce her plays – the golden ticket for a playwright – seemed largely elusive.

“No one was paying attention or taking risks in theater. But Ricky J. Martinez and Eileen Suarez did when they produced the world premiere of ‘The Cuban Spring’ at New Theatre in 2014,” says Garcia, whose play became a contender for the best new work Carbonell Award.

Working for Bacardi, which now produces Havana Club Rum in Puerto Rico, “was an opening of saying, ‘OK, write your dream script.’ If I had given any theater here the script for ‘The Amparo Experience,’ no way would it have been produced,” she says of the complex multitrack script with scenes that played out simultaneously to different audience groups.

Also notably, it was after a performance that she met poet Blanco in the rum garden at the “Amparo” house, beginning a friendship that over time would lead to their collaboration on “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas.”

With “#Graced,” Garcia is again making theater in a fresh, thinking-outside-the-box way with text and abundant video.

Since Zoetic Stage was founded in 2010, artistic director Stuart Meltzer has directed every show the company has done, 38 in all. This time, Collado (whom Garcia calls her “ride or die”) and Hughes, who worked with Garcia pre-COVID on what was going to be a showcase version of the play at New York’s WP Theatre Lab, are codirecting.

“They came to me several years ago, but it’s all in the timing,” Meltzer says. “I wanted to expand the scope of Zoetic world premieres with local writers…It gives us the opportunity to have varied new voices involved in the work.”

As for the play itself, Meltzer calls “#Graced” a play of this moment.

“It’s about the evolution of the American Dream and discovering it while traveling through this vast land. It’s not political; it looks at the world from the center. It also asks what does the American Dream mean? We live in a city where so many came for it,” he says. “Vanessa Garcia is in a place where her voice will have ramifications in the theatrical community for years to come…She’s really sharp, really astute.”

Melissa Almaguer, a Cuban-American actor, director, producer and Florida International University alum, has worked at numerous South Florida companies for more than a decade.

She’s making her Zoetic Stage debut in the leading role of Catherine – Cat – a divorced social media influencer who’s making a cross-country trek with her editor and sometime lover Lewis (Chris Anthony Ferrer, actor and Homegrown playwright), whose Argentinian immigrant father’s company Monteverde Moonshine is funding the trip as a brand promotion.

Along the way, they pick up a ready-to-rebel former nun named Rosalie (Dalia Aleman); Blake, a nonbinary teen at the beginning of her gender identity journey (Sabrín Diehl); and meet an Uruguayan sandwich stand owner named Gianni (Kristian Bikic), with whom Cat gets into a major beef. Influencer and media personality Lucy Lopez plays a variety of roles.

“This is a road trip story with a Cuban-American woman in her mid-30s at the center of it. I wouldn’t expect someone like me to be cast in the role,” says Almaguer, though Garcia, Collado and Hughes all sing her praises as an actor whose work is deeply felt and reflective of the character’s complexities.

“When we get to the parts that are about Cuba, I have cried in rehearsal. I credit Vanessa. She writes about it in such a beautiful way. It’s a shared experience, but as kids we didn’t talk about it…I am struck by the poetry of her language and the humanity of her characters. There are layers under layers.”

Hughes, an Elevator Repair Service Theater alumna whose focus is on new and devised work (including “collaborative, site-specific and/or genre-expanding projects”), has found both a shared vision and different ways of focusing on the piece in her collaboration with Collado.

“I think of things in a big arc, dramaturgically. Vicky does deep character work and is an incredible choreographer. She brings the amazing perspective of being a Cuban-American from Miami, and I’m bringing the outsider’s eye,” Hughes says.

In taking a hard look at social media’s effect on our lives, “#Graced” raises plenty of questions.

“Some plays say social media is bad. But it is a powerful tool for sharing stories and speaking truth to power. It’s also used for misinformation and misrepresentation in ways big and small,” Hughes says.

“The play asks what it is to be human. Do I also need to be a brand? Do I need to be performing all the time? Vanessa deals with this in a more nuanced way.”

Collado says she has loved the back-and-forth with Hughes, that they share not just similar core values but that they’re having fun bringing “#Graced” to life together. Garcia had a vision of the play premiering at Zoetic, and Collado believes that with this one, the playwright is at the top of her game.

“She’s absolutely theatrical and grounded. The language lives so well inside each character. It’s not just poetry for poetry’s sake,” says Collado, another FIU alumna who moved back home from New York after the success of “Amparo.”

She’s hoping to persuade other theater artists to do the same, hoping they can contribute to Miami’s growth as a place where new work can be launched. Coincidentally, “#Graced” is opening the same weekend as Miami New Drama’s world premiere of “Create Dangerously” by Lileana Blain-Cruz. The former Miamian has based her piece on a 2010 book of essays by celebrated Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat – one of Garcia’s former professors at the University of Miami.

“#Graced” grew from Garcia’s long-ago desire to travel the country discovering what it means to be an American, though she didn’t have the funding to do it. At last, her characters and a succession of audiences are making the trip, thanks to the theatrical magic of a long-gestating world premiere.

WHAT: World premiere of “#Graced” by Vanessa Garcia

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

WHEN: Previews 7:30 p.m. May 4, opens 7:30 p.m. May 5; 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday (additional performance 7:30 p.m. May 10, no matinee May 13), through May 21

COST: $55-$60

INFORMATION:  305-949-6722 or arshtcenter.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit source of theater, dance, visual arts, music and performing arts news. 

With LGBTQ issues at stake, Miami Filmmakers’ ‘Clocked’ at OUTshine is lesson in empathy

Armand “Cleo” Fields in Miami filmmaker Noah Salzman’s “Clocked,” getting its East Coast premiere at the OUTshine Film Festival on Wednesday, April 26. The festival opened Thursday, April 20 and runs through Sunday, April 30 at Silverspot Cinemas, Miami. (Photo courtesy of “Clocked.)

When Miami filmmaker Noah Salzman started writing his movie “Clocked” in 2019, two years later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would sign into law House Bill 1557, the Parental Rights in Education Act, now notorious known as the “Don’t Say Gay Law,” banning the subject of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools for children in kindergarten through third grade. Only days before Salzman’s film about an 18-year-old struggling with his gender identity makes its Florida premiere at the Outshine Film Festival, the governor expanded the law to include all public classrooms through senior year.

Another bill, while not specifically mentioning drag shows, is to block venues from admitting children to “adult live performances.” This after the DeSantis’ administration moved to revoke the liquor license from the Hyatt Regency Miami for hosting “A Drag Queen Christmas.”

Salzman’s film is about 18-year-old Adolfo Rivera (played by Germain Arroyo) a talented lightweight boxer living in Miami with his tight-knit Hispanic —  and very Catholic family —  including his older brother, Ramon. They support his boxing ambitions and while he contributes his financial winnings to help the household, he’s secretly saving up for his own dream – he wants to be a woman.

Adolfo finally confides in one person.

“I wasn’t expecting to tell someone,” he says. “Hey, it’s OK I always wanted a gay friend,” says Camilla, a girl who he has been paired with on a date by his mother.

“I’m not gay,” responds Adolfo, “I want to be a woman. I want to be a woman. I’m a woman. I just don’t like me. I don’t like my body,” he cries.

The movie follows the teen’s quest to be comfortable enough to appear in a local drag show.

“I wanted to write a film that was for that lost teenager who was in between the family they are born into and the other family who they find and who will accept them,” says Salzman.

While Salzman, who identifies as straight, started out with the intention of his film depicting the difficulty of people struggling with gender identity, “Clocked” now is timelier than ever, he admits, during what’s become a political war by conservatives over LGBTQ rights, especially issues concerning the transgender community.

“I think this is the best time for a film like this to be shown and honestly, I have submitted the film to festivals in states where I knew where drag and trans issues were being chastised. I think that the fact that there is this villainizing is a tragedy,” says Salzman. A subplot in his film is about a transgender woman who is shot and killed in a hate crime.

The 28-year-old says he got the idea for his script as a member of the theater community, where he would perform improv comedy at Little Haiti’s Villain Theater – the venue makes plenty of appearances in “Clocked” standing in as a nightclub where drag shows are performed.

“In theater spaces, wherever you are, you will end up interacting with talented, exuberant queer individuals, but when you get to know them on a deeper level, you discover their stories . . . that many of them were not able to come out on their own terms and that the reason they sought out other communities was that they weren’t accepted by their families or people they were close with,” he says.

“I want this film to provoke an open and honest dialogue about why empathy and why supporting the people in your community who are queer is so important. I thought at least our film showed why it is so important to empathize. The fact that festivals like OUTshine are alive and thriving and helping put a spotlight on films of this nature is so crucial, especially at times like this,” says Salzman.

Support for the writer-director’s script, and for many other aspects of the film, came from Salzman’s own family, including his father Bernard Salzman, a cinematographer for 45 years, who was the director of photography for “Clocked” and is also one of two executive producers.

There was a level that the film needed to achieve, which was cinematic quality and, above all,  genuineness.

“I am straight, but I am an ally for the LGBTQ+ community and what was most important to me was authenticity. All of the LGBTQ+ characters are played by LGBTQ+ actors. The drag queens in the film are professional drag artists who have performed off Broadway, on television . . .”

Armand Fields who plays one of the main characters, Cleo, has worked on multiple Showtime series including “Work in Progress” and “The Chi,”  the television movie “The Thing About Harry,” plus on NBC’s “Chicago Fire.”

While the film was 100 percent shot in Miami, the casting was done nationally with actors from Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and many from Miami. Miami stage and screen actress Elena Maria Garcia, plays Alma, the mother of Adolfo and Ramon, played by Danell Leyva.

Leyva, a Cuban-born, Miami native is the first Cuban-American on the United States Olympic men’s gymnastics team. He says his entire life was spent training for gymnastics and competitions. So, when he retired at the age of 24 in 2016, he moved from Miami to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, something he had always wanted to do.

However, the 31-year-old remembers vividly when he decided that he wanted to be an Olympic gymnast. “My mother (who was a member of Cuba’s national gymnastics team) met up with someone who used to do gymnastics with her in Cuba. He came over and brought an old tape and I was mesmerized. I thought it was people flying and I was like, ‘I want to do that.’ ”

Competing in the London games in 2012, he won a bronze medal in the individual all-around competition and in Rio, was awarded two silver medals – one for parallel bars and one for horizontal bar.

Now, he jokes that he’s run away to join the circus. Leyva lives in Las Vegas where he performs in Cirque du Soleil’s show “KÀ” at the MGM Grand.

Leyva says that early in the casting of “Clocked,” his manager, now one of the producers on the film, Maritza Cabrera, was approached about him playing the role of Adolfo. “They reached out to her to say, ‘Hey, we have this great script we think Danell would be great as the lead.’ ” And while Leyva came out as bisexual in 2021, both he and his manager believed that Adolfo should be played by someone who was, “at least, non-binary.”

After reading through the script, the part of Ramon, the older brother, felt more suited for Leyva. On one of the first days on set, Leyva met with Arroyo, who had already been taking boxing lessons (there are no stunt doubles in the film and Arroyo did his own boxing). “I wanted us to go to this gym because I felt like it would build the chemistry between us onscreen as brothers.”

The Olympian will be honored with Outshine Film Festival’s Vanguard Award before the screening of “Clocked” on Wednesday, April 26. The prize recognizes notable individuals in entertainment for their contributions in helping to tell LGBTQ+ stories, as well as exemplifying outstanding leadership and support of community equality, representation and education.

Salzman says Leyva auditioned against 50 to 100 people and “he truly won out and his athleticism was nothing more than a benefit to add to the authenticity of the film.”

As far as the movie’s title, the writer-director explains that it has several meanings – double entendres, if you will. “In boxing, clocked means to be punched in the face, while in the drag community, to be ‘clocked’ is when someone calls you by your ‘dead’ name, i.e. your real name while you are in your drag attire.”

Whatever the meaning, with the current state of affairs in Florida, “Clocked” couldn’t be timelier.

WHAT: OUTshine Film Festival-Miami East Coast premiere of “Clocked.”

WHEN: 7:15 p.m. awards ceremony followed by the film, Wednesday, April 26. Also available to stream online May 1 to May 5. Film festival runs Thursday, April 20 through Sunday, April 30.

WHERE: Silverspot Cinemas, 300 SE 3^rd St., Miami.

COST: $15  for in-person screening or online streaming.

INFORMATION: 305-751-6305 or outshinefilm.com

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit source of theater, dance, visual arts, music and performing arts news. 

Review: ‘El huracán’ is a Miami story whose time has come at GableStage

Adriana Sevan as Ximena with, from left, James Puig, Barbara Bonilla and Emma Garcia Seeger in “El huracán” at GableStage through May 14.  (Photo courtesy of Magnus Stark)

Love and loss, fury and forgiveness are at the heart of Charise Castro Smith’s “El huracán” (“The Hurricane”), a profoundly insightful and moving play now getting its belated Florida premiere at GableStage.

After a successful world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2018, “El huracán” had several other productions, but like nearly everything else in theater, its momentum was disrupted by the pandemic.

But maybe the “rough magic” referenced in “El huracán” and William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” an inspiration for former Miamian Castro Smith, was working overtime to get it to a theater in the playwright’s hometown at just the right time with just the right people involved. Certainly, the result is magical and as fine a production as you’ll see in South Florida all season.

“El huracán” is a 100-minute play in two parts, with a glamorous Cuban origin story at the beginning and a linking interlude in the middle. It is written in English, but certain words, phrases or speeches are in Spanish. Not a stretch for Miami-area audiences, but the playwright has other characters translate or restate that content.

In the first part, set in 1992, Hurricane Andrew is roaring toward Miami on its path of unfathomable destruction.  In the second, 25 years have passed.  Some characters have died, only to resurface as spirits; others have been born or matured or now face a frightening future.

When we first meet Valeria (Barbara Bonilla), she’s a beautiful up-and-coming magician in pre-revolutionary Cuba, with the handsome Alonso (James Puig) as her assistant (the younger versions of those characters are played by Thais Menendez and Gabriell Salgado).

Then the play shifts to Miami and pre-Andrew urgency, as Valeria’s middle-aged daughter Ximena (Adriana Sevan) and granddaughter Miranda (Menendez) try to quickly pack Valeria’s most important things – the items used in her magic act, especially – to keep them safe at Ximena’s.

Three things become evident:  Alonso, Valeria’s devoted husband, is nowhere to be found; Ximena and Miranda, a student at Harvard, squabble frequently over their different agendas for Miranda’s life; and Valeria is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Frequently, she’ll have conversations with her long-gone sister Alicia (Emma Garcia Seeger). Now and then, she’ll put on the top hat from her act, grab a huge bag and announce that she’s going out (in the torrential rain) to find Alonso.  Ximena diverts Valeria by saying Alonso has gone to the pharmacy and will be back soon; in fact, he left after his wife’s diagnosis, unable to bear watching the woman he loved for a lifetime slowly vanish.

Near the end of the first section, as Hurricane Andrew is about to pulverize so much of the world outside Ximena’s home, Castro Smith expertly propels the action from lust to tragedy. Miranda and Fernando (Salgado), a neighbor’s son who was a high school crush, have their own Cuba Libre-fueled hurricane party, one that will have life-changing consequences.

After they’ve retired to Miranda’s bedroom, Valeria awakens, grabs her hat and bag, and walks out the front door into that peculiar green light that can transform the sky during hurricanes. Hers is the ultimate vanishing act, though she and Alonso surface as spirits unseen by the living after the play jumps to 2017.

Now it’s Ximena, fierce as ever, who is facing Alzheimer’s.  Her Cuban cousin’s son Theo (Salgado) is staying with her as he takes the first steps toward forging a life in Miami. Inevitably, he has noticed her memory lapses, agitation and confusion.  So an emailed SOS has gone out to Miranda, who left home the day after her grandmother’s disappearance. The prodigal daughter returns to her still-furious mother, her own daughter Val (Garcia Seeger) in tow.  Expect fireworks and tears.

Castro Smith, coauthor of the Oscar-winning Disney animated movie “Encanto,” mixes realistic dialogue with evocatively poetic imagery, sometimes crossing into the terrain of magical realism.

One small example, as Alonso is translating what Valeria says in Spanish: “As old age floods your mind, hidden away boxes and trunks float to the surface. The things that the river of memory brings back to you sometimes feel random. But they are yours, and they’re home. Love is the only real magic. Although it is sometimes tricky, it is not a trick.”

Miami-born director Dámaso Rodríguez, who first brought “El huracán” to the attention of GableStage producing artistic director Bari Newport, has done a superb job of staging a piece with myriad challenges. They include time jumps, characters that are visible to some and invisible to others while making certain that lines spoken in Spanish are contextually clear.  And the performances he has helped shape?  They are exquisite and tonally cohesive.

Bonilla, seen last season in GableStage’s “Boca,” gets a far deeper and more intricate role as Valeria.  Now and then, her portrait of a woman in the last stages of Alzheimer’s is endearing, but as her face goes blank, she becomes utterly heartbreaking.

Sevan played Valeria in the world premiere of “El huracán” at Yale Rep (and won a critics’ award for her performance). Her Ximena is a towering achievement, as key to Castro Smith’s play as the aging magician Prospero is to “The Tempest.”  Her exhausted, fearful, raging Ximena is an unforgettable portrait of a strong woman shattered by loss and by a disease that would rob her of her memories.

Menendez, who grew up in Miami and is based in Los Angeles, is a beguiling performer who fully inhabits the college-age Miranda (her scenes of drunken flirtation with Salgado’s Fernando are irresistible). She then transforms before our eyes into a middle-aged woman who is, like her mother before her, now caught between caring for an elder and raising her own daughter.

The self-assured Garcia Seeger, a recent University of Florida grad, impressively meets the challenge of playing three distinct characters.  As Alicia, she’s a forever-young spirit in a one-piece bathing suit and white swim cap, a source of comfort and guilt to the aging Valeria.  As Val, she’s lovable and curious about the family she has never met.  As the neurologist Dr. Kempler, she is matter-of-fact and professional as she arrives at a diagnosis for Valeria.

As Alonso, Puig has to play notes of adoration and abandonment, defensiveness and the forever-painful realization that leaving when Valeria needed him most was the greatest mistake of his life.  He conveys the complexities of his character’s actions with a slight nervousness of a man who knows he’s doing the wrong thing.

Salgado, who has appeared at many of the region’s theaters since making his professional debut as the Creature in Zoetic Stage’s “Frankenstein” in 2021, plays two distinct supporting roles in “El huracán,” but both draw on the young actor’s comedic ability.  His Fernando is a Miami hunk who’s a magnet for Miranda. Theo is more serious – indicated by the glasses he wears – and funny as he switches from his Cuban Spanish to the English he’s trying to acquire.

Thanks to additional donor support, GableStage’s budget for “El huracán” was larger, and it shows.  Magician André Garré was hired to teach the cast the magic tricks specified in the script, while Jeni Hacker did the brief segments of choreography and intimacy coordination.

Set designer Frank J. Oliva has created Ximena’s house as a two-story playing area with walls that, if you look closely, combine old photographs with the imagery of swirling hurricane winds.  Jameelah Bailey and Constanza Celci dressed the set and gathered the props that convey place and era.

Lighting designer Blanca Forzán summons a Cuban club with an explosion of brightly colored lights.  Sound designer Rodolfo Ortega provides the sudden sounds of Hurricane Andrew, a faint musical underscoring and Frank Sinatra crooning “Come Fly With Me.” Costume designer Gema Valdés facilitates the play’s time travel and provides a beautiful blue halter dress for Valeria, a costume that will link her in youth and the spirit world.

Even before Castro Smith’s success with “Encanto,” she was focusing more on writing for film and television.  The movie’s Oscar (she was co-director as well as co-author) took that career path to a higher level, leaving her far less time for the developmental demands of writing plays and getting them produced.

The point is this:  “El huracán” is a made-for-Miami play.  It will resonate here most deeply, and it’s a thoroughly engaging story being given a great production. It will be at GableStage through May 14 – and then “poof,” like Valeria, it will be gone.

WHAT: “El huracán” by Charise Castro Smith

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 matinee May 13), through May 14 (streaming version available during regular performances April 21-May 14)

COST: $45-$75 (streaming ticket $27)

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

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit source of theater, dance, visual arts, music and performing arts news. 

Review: ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ and Audrey II come alive in east Little Havana

The girl-group Urchins surround Frank Montoto’s sadistic dentist in Loxen Productions’ “Little Shop of Horrors” at the Manuel ARTime Theater, Miami, through Sunday, April 16. (Photo courtesy of Justin Azpiazu)

Little did filmmaker Roger Corman know, when he made and released the low-budget horror flick “The Little Shop of Horrors” in 1960, that his story about a ravenous man-eating plant would morph into a lasting American musical theater hit.

Yet that’s precisely what happened, thanks to composer Alan Menken and lyricist-book writer Howard Ashman. Since 1982, their darkly comic, ‘60s-style “Little Shop of Horrors” has made megabucks Off-Broadway, on Broadway, in London and uncounted American regional theaters, including a slew of them in South Florida.

Through Sunday, Miami’s Loxen Productions is offering its own “Little Shop” at the Manuel ARTime Theater in east Little Havana.

This is the fourth production from a company dedicated to providing opportunities for young homegrown theater talent (its earlier shows were “In the Heights,” “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” and “Cabaret”), and last Saturday’s matinee proved to be a test of the troupe’s talent and willpower.

Corey Vega, who stars as the nerdy but horticulturally talented Seymour, was too sick to perform.  His understudy Tico Chiriboga wasn’t available.

So rather than cancel one of the show’s eight performances, Loxen founder and CEO Benji Leon IV stepped in to play Seymour after 18 hours of study (including five rehearsing with the cast and director Damaris López Canales).  Then he gave a nearly error-free performance without holding a script, and it was so well-sung and self-assured that you’d never guess the drama that preceded the actual show.

Which proves, yet again, that anything can happen in live theater.

Overall, Loxen’s “Little Shop of Horrors” is joyful and entertaining, if not the knockout that several other South Florida productions have been. It features a live band under musical director Ryan Crout, an expansive Skid Row set by Nobarte, lighting by Ernesto Pino and period costumes by Beth Fath, who is particularly adept at showcasing actor Chantal Bonitto’s va-va-voom curves as the abused beauty Audrey.  Choreographer Imran Hylton has worked with a larger-than-usual cast, filling in the space with additional dancers without lines.

The actors tell the familiar story about a person-eating plant, developed and dubbed Audrey II by Seymour, that turns a failing Skid Row flower shop into a moneymaking sensation.

Manipulative shop owner Mr. Mushnik (Craig Dearr) pushes Seymour to make the now-gigantic Audrey II (the puppet is voiced by Mikhael Mendoza, operated by Justin Rodríguez) an even bigger source of fame and wealth, not knowing that the plant has started demanding fresh flesh-and-blood from its creator.

Meanwhile, the actual Audrey continues showing up to work with an ever-growing collection of injuries, no thanks to her sadistic dentist boyfriend Orin Scrivello (Frank Montoto).

Throughout, a girl-group version of a Greek chorus – Fabiana Cueto as Ronnette,  Amanda López as Chiffon and Patricia Christine García subbing for an ailing Maryah VanPutten as Ronnette – musically comments on the action and sings backup.

The songs are the best thing about Loxen’s “Little Shop of Horrors,” particularly Bonitto’s amusingly wistful “Somewhere That’s Green,” her lovestruck “Suddenly Seymour” duet with Leon, and Montoto’s recounting of Orin’s sadistic evolution in “Dentist!.”  The three actors are the show’s standouts, though Leon’s performance was a one-time-only thing.

One note for parents:  “Little Shop” is very funny, but it also has its share of vulgarity and faux violence. Just saying.

Leon, in partnership with Jim Kirstead and TourDForce Theatrical, is among the long list of producers of the current Josh Groban-led Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd.”  He seems to be another of South Florida’s younger generation of theater leaders.  Here’s hoping he can realize his vision for Loxen.

WHAT: “Little Shop of Horrors”

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through April 16

WHERE: Manuel ARTime Theater, 900 SW First St., Miami

COST: $35-$85

INFORMATION: 305-575-5057 or loxenproductions.com    

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit source of theater, dance, visual arts, music and performing arts news. 

Review: Robby Ramos’s ‘The Walls Have Ears’ looks inside a Cuban prison

David Zaldívar (left) and Robby Ramos in the world premiere of “The Walls Have Ears” at the Westchester Cultural Arts Center, Miami, which is being performed first in English, then with a run in Spanish. (Photo courtesy of Yaniel Cantelar/Alpha 42)

In the mid-1950s, Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl were imprisoned for two years in the infamous Presidio Modelo, a facility on Cuba’s Isla de Pinos (now Isla de la Juventud).

There they plotted and planned with their fellow revolutionaries, and after they seized power with the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista’s government in 1959, Presidio Modelo became a place where thousands of political prisoners and dissidents were held, tortured – and sometimes executed.

Actor-turned-playwright Robby Ramos, a Miami native who plays wrestler Diego Cottonmouth on the Starz series “Heels,” understands firsthand the experiences of families whose loved ones have been Cuban political prisoners. His grandfather was once held at Presidio Modelo.

Fueled by family stories, research and his imagination, Ramos has written his first play, “The Walls Have Ears,” which has the slightly different Spanish title “Las paredes oyen” (“The walls hear”).

The world premiere is up and running at Miami’s Westchester Cultural Arts Center at Tropical Park, through April 23 in English, then April 27-May 14 in Spanish.  Its producers are the Alpha 421 Group (created by Ramos to support new works in film, television and theater), Ancestor (a bilingual multimedia company) and the not-for-profit Roxy Theatre Group.

Set during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the play takes place in a space meant to evoke the panopticon circular cell block design at Presidio Modelo, where prisoners could never tell exactly when they were being watched by a guard in a dark central tower.

Set designer Andrew Rodriguez-Triana has created a slice of stacked-up cells above the prison office that serves as the central playing area, its circular floor adorned with political prisoners’ drawings. A sparse interrogation room is nearby, and farther off, a small studio at Miami’s powerful WQAM.

The audience is seated so that it totally surrounds the actors, even sitting at the very edge of that prison office.  On the one hand, the seating arrangement greatly amplifies the sense of the characters being overheard and constantly watched, as the prisoners were at Presidio Modelo.  On the other, theatergoers are packed around the stage, so those significant drawings aren’t visible to many in the audience.

Director Gabriel Bonilla keeps the actors moving through the space, sometimes threading their way along aisles and popping up in unexpected places.  The scenes in the interrogation room and the prison office are often harrowing, while the ones in the WQAM booth are breezily entertaining as they epitomize so much of what the Cuban revolutionaries loathe about the United States.

Ramos’s story is this:  A woman called Madre (Monica Steuer), aka La Madre de la Revolución, is running the show at the prison but taking orders from someone on the other end of various phone calls.  She’s haranguing a comrade called Papo (Ramos), who has been unable to produce Rafa (David Zaldívar), a young man suspected of being behind posters of Che Guevara in drag appearing all over Havana.

When Rafa, bound and with a bag over his head, is shoved into the interrogation room, after much back-and-forth, we discover that Papo and Rafa are brothers, and that Papo’s mandatory mission is to get Rafa to sign a confession and implicate others.

Meanwhile, Madre is dealing with a seemingly unrelated incident in which a teen named Ava (Juliana Aidén Martinez) is being interrogated about a school assignment, a vulgar poem in which she calls Cuba “the whore of the Caribbean.”  Ava isn’t savvy enough to comprehend the danger she’s facing. She thinks she should be able to speak up, express her views. But Madre soon disabuses her of that notion, caressing the girl’s ponytail, then using it to yank her head back hard.

Ava, as it turns out, is the sister of Papo and Rafa.  So family loyalties and betrayals begin to figure heavily into “The Walls Have Ears.” And once Papo calls the revolution broken, perverted and immoral – to Madre’s face, no less – it’s clear this story won’t end well.

As tangential as he might seem, WQAM host Bill Kelly (Bill Schwartz) proves to be more than a voice booming toward Cuba from Miami.  Madre calls him twice to spread the revolution’s philosophy, with the second call bringing the play to an abrupt, horrific finish.

Ramos’s writing injects a simmering unease from the play’s beginning, ratcheting up the tension until it explodes in a bloody fight between Papo and Rafa in Madre’s office (Emma Berry’s lighting reinforces the violence). Note to those sitting just outside the circle: You might want to reconsider and ask for a ticket farther back.  Though some phrases – “no means no,” “I have issues,” “don’t let the door hit you where the good lord split you” – belong in 2023, not 1962.

Bonilla gets solid performances from his five-person cast (which will, except for Schwartz, change for the Spanish-language version of the play).

Steuer’s Madre is coolly observant, but there’s no doubt she can be lethal. Martinez, who trained at the Yale School of Drama, effectively walks Ava’s tightrope of defiance and fear.

The size differential between Ramos (who plays a hulking wrestler on TV) and the slight but gym-toned Zaldívar visually reinforces the danger in their interactions, and Ramos gets to make the dangerous journey from loyal revolutionary to repentant brother.

Schwartz, a veteran of productions at numerous South Florida theaters, adds a jolt of humor and polish whenever his Bill Kenny is in the spotlight.  The character is very different from the others, and Schwartz’s stage presence helps make him captivating. And as the DJ plays a slew of hits from 1962, the tension is briefly put on pause.

On opening night, sound glitches kept much of the early dialogue from being heard (do actors know how to project these days?), so the plot was harder to follow.  Obscuring sightlines with the seating setup benefits no one, even if it’s meant to serve a thematic purpose.

At the packed opening performance, some people decided to leave during the 90-minute play. Whether they were upset by the content hitting close to home, not engaged or simply in need of a personal break, they traipsed noisily over the wooden floor as they headed to the only exit, disrupting the play and the audience’s concentration.  Not cool.

Without a doubt, “The Walls Have Ears” will speak to many, whether or not their families have lived some version of Ramos’s story.  Presenting it in English and then in Spanish will broaden the audience – a smart move for any Miami theater.

WHAT: World premiere of “The Walls Have Ears” (“Las paredes oyen”) by Robby Ramos

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays; through April 23 in English, April 27-May 14 in Spanish

WHERE: Westchester Cultural Arts Center, 7930 SW 40th St., Miami

COST: $35-$65

EXHIBITION: Paintings by Cuban-American artist Kiki Valdes, all inspired by the play, are on display in the lobby

INFORMATION: 305-456-6731 or wcacenter.org   

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit source of theater, dance, visual arts, music and performing arts news. 

‘Encanto’ co-author Charise Castro Smith gets a hometown premiere at GableStage

Barbara Bonilla and James Puig play a long-married Cuban couple contending with the last part of life in “El huracán” at GableStage, written by Miami native Charise Castro Smith opening in previews on Friday, April 14 and running through Sunday, May 14. (Photo courtesy of Magnus Stark)

Though it had a successful world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre in the autumn of 2018, Charise Castro Smith’s “El huracán” has always been a play about and meant for Miami.

The moist heat. The yearly threat of hurricanes. The Cuban diaspora, with the ache of losing homeland and family.  In a new country, multigenerational affection and tension under the same roof, in English and Spanish.

Using a mixture of poetically evocative language, humor, vivid theatricality, magic, magical realism and echoes of William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Miami native Castro Smith has constructed a deeply recognizable world in “El huracán” (“The Hurricane”). The play’s Florida premiere previews Friday, April 14, opens Saturday, April 15 and runs through Sunday, May 14 at GableStage in Coral Gables.

Getting “El huracán” produced in her hometown – specifically by GableStage, one of Miami-Dade County’s most celebrated theater companies – was always one of Castro Smith’s goals.

Although she left Miami to earn degrees at Brown University and Yale, and now lives in the Los Angeles area where she focuses on writing for television and film, Castro Smith’s personal and family roots here run deep. She went to high school at New World School of the Arts (Oscar winner Tarell Alvin McCraney was a couple of years ahead of her) and was influenced by many productions staged by GableStage producing artistic director Joseph Adler, who passed away in 2020.

“I always intended to find a home for the play in Miami,” says Castro Smith, co-author and co-director of the Oscar-winning animated Disney film “Encanto.” “GableStage was the theater I aspired to when I was growing up.”

She has, in fact, acted in an ambitious GableStage co-production. In 2013-14, Castro Smith, who trained as an actor before shifting to playwriting, played Octavia and Iras in the McCraney-adapted production of “Antony and Cleopatra.” Directed by McCraney and set on the eve of the 1791 Haitian slave revolution in Saint-Domingue, the production was a joint effort of GableStage (which presented it at the larger Colony Theatre in Miami Beach), the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-Upon-Avon and New York’s Public Theater.

That Castro Smith’s own play has finally landed at GableStage was the result of long-term regional theater connections.

Bari Newport, in her second season as the theater’s producing artistic director, was at California’s Pasadena Playhouse when Miami-born Dámaso Rodríguez, who is directing “El huracán” for GableStage, was serving as associate artistic director there.

The two stayed in touch as they became regional theater leaders, with Rodríguez co-founding Furious Theatre in Los Angeles and serving as artistic director of Artists Rep in Portland, Oregon, for nine seasons.  He’s now an in-demand freelance director and vice president of the Arts Consulting Group.

“Dámaso is the real deal . . .He has a love of new plays and a love of reading plays, and he’s also a playwright . . . He would send me plays and playwrights he was discovering,” Newport says.  “Charise made it clear to me that it was extremely important to her that this play be produced by GableStage. She was active in finding additional financial resources.”

One of those was a contribution from producer-activist-businessman Henry Muñoz III (“Funny or Die,” “Funny Girl” on Broadway).  The larger budget has allowed Newport to hire a magic consultant to teach the cast tricks specified in the script, funded two sets of costumes (one appropriate to 1992, another for 2017), and helped realize the play’s many complex technical elements.  All in all, Newport feels producing “El huracán” in GableStage’s relatively small space has been more like putting up a musical.

Of Castro Smith’s strengths as a playwright, she says, “I love writers who understand the genre they’re writing for, who love theatricality and who lean into what theater does best – which is express elements of the human experience through metaphor.”

Rodríguez had directed a production of Castro Smith’s “Feathers and Teeth,” a wild, bloody and darkly comic contemporary horror play inspired in part by “Hamlet,” at Artists Rep in 2017.  But it was “El huracán,” which he had read a year earlier, that continued to haunt him.

“I mentioned it to different artistic directors, but I suggested to Bari that it would really connect with Miami audiences, who would see themselves in it. I sent it to her, and she quickly said, ‘We’re doing it next season,’ ” Rodríguez recalls.

He also loves Castro Smith’s writing in the six-actor, nine-character piece that incorporates magical realism, poetic moments and  memories – some missing or mistaken, others joyful – of a matriarch living with Alzheimer’s disease.

“Charise is an actor, too. She writes great characters, gives them depth and specificity,” the director says. “Her work is very ambitious and boldly theatrical, with a sense of fun. She wants theater to be exciting and surprising, with a lot of emotional depth.”

Castro Smith was inspired to write “El huracán,” she says, by a number of things: Her Cuban mother’s interrupted childhood, the shocking devastation of Hurricane Andrew, her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and a 2009 trip to Havana with her parents to bury her grandfather’s ashes in the family plot.  The comedy, tragedy and romance of “The Tempest,” which Castro Smith describes as “Shakespeare’s farewell to being an artist,” plus some character names and the banished nobleman Prospero’s “rough magic” figure in too.

“My mom had a childhood in one place, and then it was fractured in the middle.  I didn’t visit Cuba until I was 24, when I discovered I had been missing a place I’d never been,” says the playwright, who was surprised to discover that her grandfather’s home in Cuba was a smaller version of the one he subsequently built in Miami. “My grandmother was diagnosed around the time I left for college. It took a toll on the family. It was overwhelming, sad, confusing, funny and incredibly tragic.”

Set in Miami, the first act of “El huracán” takes place before and during Hurricane Andrew in August 1992. Abuela Valeria (Barbara Bonilla), who was a dazzling young magician in Cuba before the revolution, is now in her 70s and in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. Her daughter Ximena (Adriana Sevan) is worn out from constant caregiving and clashes with her grad student daughter Miranda (Thais Menendez).

Valeria’s husband Alonso (James Puig), her long-ago magician’s assistant, has vanished, unable to bear watching his wife’s suffering and deterioration.  The family’s hot neighbor Fernando (Gabriell Salgado) makes an appearance that will have lasting repercussions. Valeria’s younger sister Alicia and a neurologist (both played by Emma Garcia Seeger) also figure into a plot that intensifies as the massive hurricane approaches.

Castro Smith’s story then jumps ahead 25 years, with the two parts linked by some in-plain-sight theatrical magic:  As assistants help transform them, the long-estranged Ximena and Miranda become the older version of themselves.

Valeria and Alonso are present but as memories, no longer of this world. Miranda, absent since Hurricane Andrew, shows up with her now-grown daughter Val (Garcia Seeger), a young woman eager to understand the family she has never met. Theo (Salgado), the son of Ximena’s cousin, has followed the path of so many others who left Cuba to forge a new life in Miami.

The storm this time is within the family. Letting go of old wounds, reconciling and finding forgiveness figure powerfully into the second part of “El huracán.”

The vivid beauty of Castro Smith’s writing shimmers throughout the play, as in this speech by Alonso after Valeria’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis: “I could never forget you. Not as long as I breathe. If I tried to forget, my bones would remember. If my bones forgot, your scent would live in the tiny channels of my skin. And if my skin forgot, scenes from our life would play out over and over again on the insides of my eyelids, unbidden until the projector in my mind sputtered out and was no more.”

Puig, a University of Miami graduate whose long career includes productions on and off Broadway, at major regional theaters nationwide and at numerous South Florida theaters (most recently at Miami New Drama and Zoetic Stage), is making his GableStage debut as Alonso.

Alonso, Puig feels, is a loving husband and father who makes one critical mistake that ruins the rest of his life. And he sees “El huracán” as a love story that asks how to forgive the unforgivable.

“Some plays are entertaining. Some transform you, educate you, inspire you. I don’t think you can walk into this one and then walk out the same. It provides a booster of compassion,” he says, adding that having Castro Smith in the opening night audience will be “like doing Shakespeare for Shakespeare.”

Salgado, a Miamian, New World School of the Arts grad, and the only other male actor in the cast, has had a succession of significant roles since beginning his professional career a year and a half ago.

They include the title character in Zoetic Stage’s “Frankenstein” and Puig’s son in the Zoetic world premiere of Hannah Benitez’s “Gringolandia,” the Lector in the recent Nilo Cruz-directed “Anna in the Tropics” for Miami New Drama, the grieving grandson in Amy Herzog’s “4000 Miles” at Palm Beach Dramaworks, the aspiring Olympian in “Red Speedo” and a would-be matinee idol in the world premiere of Michael McKeever’s “The Code,” both at The Foundry in Wilton Manors.

“El huracán” marks his GableStage debut, and like Castro Smith, Rodríguez and his fellow actors who have large families in South Florida, he’s hoping to fill a lot of seats during the play’s run.

“My mom went to 13 performances of ‘Frankenstein,’” he says, smiling.

In rehearsal, he has shared stories about his grandmother, who has dementia, with his colleagues. She can still carry on a conversation, is still lucid, but Salgado says “this is prime time for her and her memories.”

The actor is also clear about the roles he and Puig play in “El huracán.”

“This is not about the men.  This is about the women.  It’s important to be the secondary amplification sometimes,” he says.

Sevan, who starred opposite her husband Jonathan Nichols in the 2004 Coconut Grove Playhouse production of Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Anna in the Tropics,” has dozens of credits at major New York and regional theaters as well as in film and television.  She’s also a successful playwright who looks at “El huracán” through the lens of a performer and a writer.  In the Yale world premiere, she won a Connecticut Critics Circle award for playing Valeria (opposite Nichols as Alonso); at GableStage, she’ll be Ximena.

“This play grabbed me from the first time I read it. I thought I have to do this play and wondered, ‘Who is this extraordinary writer?’,” she says.  “This is about exile, leaving home, the diaspora, trauma.  Some have to lock that away. Others have to bring it with them.  I’m so curious about the cost of exile. What you have to remember and what you have to forget to go forward.”

Castro Smith, Sevan says, “writes with epic reverberations, going back to the Greeks and Shakespeare.  It’s theater as ritual and catharsis.”

Having played Valeria and now Ximena (“I have walked in Mami’s shoes,” Sevan says), she believes that capturing stories and memories of a family’s oldest members is vital.

“When an elder dies, a library burns,” she says.  “With gentle urgency, you should get those stories that might have been lost.  And when you leave the theater, don’t check your missed messages.  Make a phone call to your family.”

WHAT: “El Huracán” by Charise Castro Smith

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

WHEN: Preview 8 p.m. Friday, April 14, opening 8 p.m. Saturday, April 15; regular performances 2 and 7 p.m. Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday (additional matinee Saturday, May 13), through Sunday, May 14 (streaming version available during regular performances beginning Friday, April 21 through Sunday, May 14)

COST:  $45-$75 (streaming ticket $27)

INFORMATION: 305-445-1119 or gablestage.org

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.

With a powerhouse leading lady, ‘Bright Star’ glows at Actors’ Playhouse

Kimberly Doreen Burns as Alice Murphy with the ensemble in the Actors’ Playhouse production of “Bright Star” at the Miracle Theatre through April 16. (Photo courtesy of Alberto Romeu)

In the 35 seasons since Barbara and Lawrence Stein founded Actors’ Playhouse, the company has established its identity as a place where big musicals like the just-opened “Bright Star” get produced.

Sure, with artistic director David Arisco at the helm, Actors’ Playhouse has also done plays, more intimate musicals and the occasional world premiere at the handsomely renovated Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables, the company’s home since 1995.  But large-scale musicals are a key reason Actors’ loyal audiences keep coming back to Miracle Mile.

Many of those musicals have familiar titles – think “Evita,” “Man of La Mancha,” “La Cage aux Folles,” “The Pajama Game.”  But “Bright Star,” overshadowed by the towering achievement of “Hamilton” at the 2016 Tony Awards, is a lesser-known, underappreciated show.

It shouldn’t be.

[RELATED STORY: Read the preview about Actors’ Playhouse’s “Bright Star.”]

As staged by Arisco and with the inextricable contributions of choreographer Sarah Crane and musical director Eric Alsford, “Bright Star” is as good as Actors’ Playhouse musicals get – which is really good.

With a story and music by actor-comedian Steve Martin (who also wrote the book) and singer-songwriter by Edie Brickell (the show’s lyricist), “Bright Star” is propelled by a sweeping, engaging story that hops back and forth in time between 1945-46 and 1923-24.

The bluegrass-roots-folk score has several knockout numbers, and it’s gloriously played by Alsford and seven other costumed, onstage musicians.

The cast is overflowing with accomplished musical theater performers, led by dynamo Kimberly Doreen Burns. As Alice Murphy, a North Carolina woman whose star-crossed life has enough content for several soap operas, the petite Burns has the looks of an ingenue, a powerhouse belt that Ethel Merman might have envied and the steely assurance of a Broadway star.

As lyricist Ira Gershwin mused in “I Got Rhythm,” who could ask for anything more?

Though a major plot point in “Bright Star” is based on an unfathomably awful real-life event, the story is the invention of Martin and Brickell.  Because of Martin’s stellar career in comedy, many come to the show expecting to laugh a lot. That doesn’t happen, though there are funny grace notes here and there, and the dynamic duo of Conor Walton as snippy editor Daryl Ames and Charity Van Tassel as his on-the-prowl coworker Lucy Grant are masterful at spinning comedy gold.

Instead, a story set long ago in the Blue Ridge Mountains explores how we navigate a path through life, unexpected joys and devastating sorrows, the power of love and forgiveness.

For Alice, who has become the accomplished editor of the Asheville Southern Journal by the mid-1940s, the flashback scenes from the early 1920s accrue to reveal a buoyant 16-year-old determined to claim the mayor’s son Jimmy Ray (Alex Jorth) as her own true love.  A baby is born, then ripped from Alice’s arms and taken away by Jimmy Ray’s iron-willed, dictatorial father Josiah (Jim Ballard), crushing the young lovers’ dreams.

In the ‘40s, “Bright Star” focuses on aspiring writer Billy Cane (Teddy Warren), a small-town guy just back from his service in World War II.  More than a little naïve and laser-focused on writing for the Asheville Southern Journal, Billy fails to notice that his grownup childhood friend, bookstore owner Margo Crawford (Alexandra Van Hasselt), is crazy about him.  Eventually, career, romance and life get sorted out, and not just for Billy. That’s what traditional musicals do.

Despite the show’s many trips back and forth in time, the storytelling in Actors’ “Bright Star” is clear and seamless. It’s impressive in Shaun Mitchell’s excellent sound design, Eric Nelson’s time-traveling lighting, Ellis Tillman’s myriad period costumes and Brandon Newton’s malleable set.

Arisco and New York-based choreographer Crane, who began her blossoming career at Actors’ Playhouse as a kid, use the ensemble and principal actors to move pieces of Newton’s set – which chillingly suggests a railroad bridge critical to the plot, rough-hewn cabins and more upscale locations – so that the show keeps flowing organically.  Crane’s one big dance number, set to “Another Round,” is ‘40s-infused and fabulous as it showcases Van Tassel’s funny, sultry Lucy.

This “Bright Star” is full of A-game performances from South Florida actors and out-of-towners alike.  Along with the show itself, that’s one of the great delights waiting to be discovered on the Miracle Theatre’s mainstage.

Warren, for instance, moved to the area from New York less than two years ago and with his Actors’ Playhouse debut as Billy convincingly makes the case that another skilled musical theater leading man has come to town.  Van Hasselt, a versatile dancer-singer-actor in so many South Florida shows, ascends to a new level as the lovelorn Margo.

Jorth, an actor-choreographer best known here for his work in big musicals, gets to play a romantic lead as Jimmy Ray.  Walton is deadpan and hilarious as Daryl.  Ballard, a Carbonell Award-winning actor who is married to Burns and now living in New York, makes Mayor Dobbs the quintessential villain.

Barry Tarallo as Billy’s warm-hearted father (and the show’s gifted mandolin player), Peter McClung as Alice’s demanding father, Paulette Oliva as her peace-making mother, and violinist/ensemble member Margaret Dudasik, whose playing helps convey the emotional tenor of so many moments, all do their parts in elevating the performance level of the production.

So do the other ensemble members: Sofi Duemichen, Brent D. Kuenning, Hugo E. Moreno, Sam Sherwood, Alexander Blanco, Keeley Anne McCormick, Alexis Semevolos-Velazquez and Paul Tuaty.

Burns is, of course, the brightest of the show’s stars.  She’s as convincing as a 38-year-old sophisticate in a curve-hugging red suit as she is when she’s playing 16-year-old Alice in a light summer dress, a hat atop her long curls.

She sets up and kicks off the show with a rousing “If You Knew My Story.” With the ensemble’s women, she sings a tender song to her unborn baby, a beautifully angelic number reminiscent of the music in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?.” Thrillingly, she delivers a show-stopping “So Familiar/At Long Last” as “Bright Star” is about to wrap up.

Sometimes, all the elements come together to transform a production of a lesser-known work into something quite special. Such is the case with Actors’ Playhouse’s “Bright Star.”

WHAT: “Bright Star” by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell

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

WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through April 16

COST: $40 to $125 (seniors 65 and over get 10 percent off weekdays only; students 25 and under with valid student ID pay $15 for a rush ticket available 15 minutes before a weekday performance)

INFO: 305-444-9293 or actorsplayhouse.org

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

Actors’ Playhouse Ready to Put the Shine in ‘Bright Star’

Kimberly Doreen Burns and violinist Margaret Dudasik in a scene from Actors’ Playhouse’s production of “Bright Star” at the Miracle Theatre, Coral Gables. (Photo courtesy of Alberto Romeu)

Of all the shows Actors’ Playhouse is presenting this season, “Bright Star” may be the most unfamiliar to potential theatergoers.

Yes, the 2016 Broadway musical has two Texas-born, big-name creators:  Steve Martin, the actor, comedian, author and banjo player extraordinaire; and songwriter Edie Brickell, lead singer of the band the New Bohemians. The two met through Brickell’s husband of more than 30 years, singer-songwriter Paul Simon.

But this traditional musical, with its bluegrass-folk score, didn’t have a lengthy run at Broadway’s Cort Theatre (30 previews and 109 regular performances). Its 2017-18 tour didn’t play South Florida. And, like the rest of 2016’s nominated Broadway musicals, it was swamped by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s heavyweight “Hamilton” at the Tony Awards.

Nonetheless, artistic director David Arisco believes the Martin-Brickell collaboration, which flowed from their Grammy Award-winning 2013 roots album “Love Has Come for You,” will be a welcome return to large-scale musicals on the Miracle Theatre’s mainstage in Coral Gables.  The show is in previews Wednesday, March 29 and Thursday, March, 30, then opens Friday, March 31 and runs through Thursday, April 6.

“I heard the cast CD, and it just grabbed me. In college, I went through a bluegrass period – I have an affinity for that fiddle and bluegrass stuff,” says Arisco, who majored in music at the University of Connecticut, plays the trumpet and is a singer as well as a director and actor. “I’m attracted to New York shows that did well but didn’t tour here.  And I realized it’s been a while since I’ve done a big musical with significance in its characters and storyline.”

“Bright Star” is set in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains in 1945-46 and 1923-24, toggling back and forth between the two time periods.  A real historical incident – the story of the Iron Mountain baby – sparked a three-year developmental journey for composer-book writer Martin and composer-lyricist Brickell.

To avoid spoiling the climactic end of the show’s first act, we’ll say simply that it involves a baby who survives a great fall and is miraculously found alive on an embankment near a railroad bridge. The rest of “Bright Star” is Martin and Brickell’s invention.

The story revolves around Alice Murphy, editor of the Asheville Southern Journal, a successful literary magazine.  The 38-year-old Alice is smart, powerful, demanding in her standards, and somewhat mysterious.

“Bright Star” unlocks a key part of that mystery when it travels back to Zebulon, North Carolina, in 1923.  Back then, Alice was a restless 16-year-old in love with Jimmy Ray Dobbs, the mayor’s son.  That passion leads to pregnancy and plans for a future together, but the families’ insistence on avoiding a scandal shatter everything, sending Alice and Jimmy Ray into very different futures.

The story’s other major thread involves Billy Cane, a soldier just back from serving in World War II.  He’s an aspiring writer who leaves his small North Carolina hometown to settle in Asheville and campaign to have Alice publish his work.  Therein lies a tale – as well as lots of songs full of hope and heartache.

Thematically, “Bright Star” deals with the evolution of values, men exercising power over women’s lives (and women fighting back), compromise, family, and forgiveness. Two love stories also play out over the course of the show.

Starring as Alice in the Actors’ Playhouse production is Kimberly Doreen Burns, a New York-based leading lady whose major roles have taken her to theaters throughout the country, including Miami’s Zoetic Stage in a pair of Stephen Sondheim musicals (she played Dot in “Sunday in the Park with George” and the Beggar Woman/Signor Pirelli in “Sweeney Todd”).  Alice’s chief nemesis in “Bright Star” is Jimmy Ray’s father, Mayor Josiah Dobbs, who is played by Carbonell Award winner Jim Ballard – Burns’s husband.

They were paired in a production of “Bright Star” at TheatreZone in Naples in early 2022. In life, the two are a happy couple. In the show, the mayor is the one who changes Alice’s future in an instant with one shocking act.

“I play a lot of bad guys,” says Ballard, an in-demand baritone with extensive South Florida experience. “I grew up in North Carolina … I knew who this guy was. He loves his son and thinks he’s doing the right thing according to the social norms and religious views of his day.”

The actor is among his wife’s biggest supporters. Arisco remembers Ballard saying of Burns, “She’s the best and only person you should cast.”

In addition to playing challenging roles all over the country, Burns runs the private KDB Studio, where she teaches voice, acting and musical theater.  She brings her skills in vocal technique to the task of playing Alice at 16 and Alice at 38.

“The approach is multilayered.  The younger Alice shifts her body, her voice and her mind. Her thoughts are quicker, more disjointed, and her voice is higher,” Burns says. “Older Alice has more strength and confidence.”

Burns and Ballard agree that the style of “Bright Star” has more in common with the Golden Age of classic Broadway musicals than with boundary-breaking contemporary shows.

“My preference is for those types of shows anyway,” says Burns of traditional musical theater.  “They pull at your emotions and heartstrings. They hit you deep.  This is just a good story.”

“Bright Star” features an eight-piece band led by music director Eric Alsford, and its cast is a mixture of South Florida performers and actors based elsewhere.

Teddy Warren, a Milwaukee native who moved to Miami almost two years ago when his wife got her residency in psychiatry at Larkin Community Hospital, has been a stay-at-home dad to the couple’s nearly two-year-old daughter. A tenor who studied acting, playwriting and directing at Southern Methodist University, he’s about to make his Actors’ Playhouse debut as Billy Cane.

Of Martin’s script, Warren observes, “His work has a certain genuineness, almost a dryness to it. There are small, specific twists, well-written jokes, sprinklings of humor to create a clean and clear contrast. Because you can’t experience darkness without light.”

The actor adds that the tempo of the scenes is akin to bluegrass music, right on the beat, and that the score is more complex than it seems.

“It tries to deceive you into thinking it’s simple, but it has four-, five-, six-part harmonies that create this beautiful sound,” says Warren. “I believe had it not been considered for the Tonys the same year as ‘Hamilton,’ it would have won. I’m excited for it to become a cult favorite.”

New Yorker Charity Van Tassel plays Lucy Grant, an editor at the Asheville Southern Journal who develops a crush on Billy.  She and Conor Walton as her sardonic fellow editor Daryl Ames get lots of Martin’s funniest lines, and she agrees with Walton that Lucy and Daryl are reminiscent of the characters Karen and Jack from TV’s “Will and Grace.”

Her pay-the-bills work in New York bars (Tiki Chick and Bathtub Gin) before, during and after the pandemic helped Van Tassel bring some verisimilitude to a particular moment involving a drink in “Bright Star.”

“I told my scene partner things about a Sloe Gin Fizz, and that it has to be red,” she says.

Typically, the former Texan says, she’s “a chorus girl, a swing, an understudy, a Fosse dancer.”  She loves the back-and-forth with Walton, and likens her big number “Another Round” (which she describes as a “Dixieland/hoedown kind of thing”) to the rollicking song about the comic villain Gaston from “Beauty and the Beast.”

Working with Arisco on “Bright Star,” a show she compares to “a warm hug or southern comfort food,” has been a wonderful, easy experience.

“I’ve worked on a lot of devised pieces and new works with directors who didn’t know what they wanted,” she says. “Dave has really got a vision. He’s great at communicating it. And he lets us be us.”

South Florida actor-choreographer Alex Jorth plays Alice’s beau Jimmy Ray, and he acknowledges that the role is also something of a departure for him.

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, mostly doing ensemble work,” says Jorth, who is choreographer for the new Broadway at LPAC series at the Lauderhill Performing Arts Center. “Here I’m taking on a leading man role, a guy who doesn’t have to do a tap number.  It has more seriousness and heft.”

Jorth finds the show itself notable for its “romance, joy, conflict, tragedy and heartbreak.  It has an old-fashioned sweetness to it.”

He also praises New York-based choreographer Sarah Crane, who got her start in showbiz as a child with roles in “The King and I” and “The Sound of Music” at Actors’ Playhouse.

“The ensemble is incredibly involved in almost every number, and she’s been instrumental in staging them. Her style is fresh, original and right for the era,” Jorth says.

Crane, now 31, has been sitting by Arisco’s side during rehearsals.  She learned about theater from him and finds his directing style “supportive but never coddling.  He’s an actor’s director; he understands an actor’s journey. He’s kind and fills the room with love.  And as a musician, he understands musical staging and musical theater.”

The choreographer is happy to be working on a Golden Age-style piece that makes the audience laugh, cry and feel on a deep level.

“It has something for everyone:  ballads, stunning singing, young characters, the band onstage. It’s beautiful,” Crane says.

Arisco, whose son Drew went to school at the New World  School of the Arts  and the Boston Conservatory of Music with Crane, says working with her on “Bright Star” has been exactly what he had in mind when he brought her on board.

“I want to bring in young blood, new artists with fresh ideas. They have so many things they want to say,” says Arisco. “There hasn’t been a day during rehearsals when we’ve worked on one of the heavier moments, and I see the ensemble wiping away tears…This is a great story, a coming-of-age story that will hopefully connect with the audience.”

WHAT: “Bright Star” by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell

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

WHEN: Previews 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 29 and Thursday, March 30. Opens 8 p.m. Friday, March 31; Performances 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through April 16.

COST: $40 to $125 (seniors 65 and over receive 10 percent off weekdays only; students 25 and younger with valid student ID pay $15 for a rush ticket available 15 minutes before a weekday performance)

INFO: 305-444-9293 or actorsplayhouse.org

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