Review: In Little Havana, Uncle Scotchy is serving up his heart and soul in immersive ‘Blues Opera’

Eric Garcia, a.k.a. Uncle Scotchy, plays the blues and tells stories in Juggerknot Theatre Company’s “The Blues Opera,” an immersive theater show in a house in Little Havana, running Thursdays through Sundays until June 26. (Photo courtesy of Scott Mclntyre)

Eric Garcia’s friends told him he was a storyteller. He knew he was a musician. One friend told him he should combine the two and create an opera. An opera? “Yeah,” the friend said. “Something like a rock opera à la ‘The Who’s Tommy.’ ”

Well, Garcia was a blues musician, and he did have plenty of stories.

That’s part of the genesis of “The Blues Opera,” a one-man autobiographical experience. With plenty of help from the Juggerknot Theatre Company, “The Blues Opera” is another ace in Miami’s immersive theater experience scene. Known for its Miami Motel Stories series, Juggerknot’s first production, in 2017, was in Little Havana inside The Tower Hotel. Now it is the same Miami neighborhood to immerse an audience with Garcia in the company’s first one-person show.

This time the setting is a duplex just off Calle Ocho where the audience play “friends” invited over to Garcia’s Little Havana house for game night.

The exact location is kept secret until only a few hours before the day of the performance. A text and an email arrive from “Uncle Scotchy,” a nickname Garcia earned because of his love for Scotch whisky. “It’s Uncle Scotchy here. I can’t wait to see you for game night at my house tonight!”

Scotchy gives you the address, tells you not to be late, to wear comfortable shoes, to bring a picture of your mom (yes, it can be on your phone), and most importantly, “bring your tough skin. My games are NOT Candyland.”

The experience begins from the get-go, really, just searching for the address. It doesn’t lead to a house but a Calle Ocho bakery. Out in front, a guide checks in ticketholders. Only 10 tickets are sold for each performance to keep it intimate — four performances per week, Thursday through Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons.

Everyone gets a name tag and is handed a Sharpie. The name tag serves a few purposes, one of which is immediate —  your name on the sticker gets you a free croqueta inside the bakery.

Once the group is checked in, Scotchy’s friend, Adele (actress Adele Robinson, who also works the show on-site as the production manager), shows up. She’s been sent to walk everyone over to the duplex.

Things kick off on a fun note on the short jaunt. Think kindergarten, think school patrol. Let’s leave it at that. No spoilers here.

Garcia, a.k.a., Uncle Scotchy opens the door. He’s dressed in a black tank top, black pants, and skin and arms full of tattoos. One that particularly stands out is that of an attractive woman on his left wrist.

Have a seat in the living room, and if you please, Adele will get you a Kentucky Owl Scotch whisky on the rocks.  Otherwise, there’s Perrier on ice in a bucket atop the coffee table.

Then, let the games begin.  Toss a soft fuzzball onto the wheel of fortune painted on the wall. Each one leads to a story. Participants get poker chips for hitting different subjects. Sande in the center is worth 50, other topics, such as Ballerina, I’m Late, and Mirror, for instance, are worth 20 and 10 points.

Someone hits Song for 10. Garcia sits down at his one-man-band kit. Foot pedals hit against boxes for the drum beat, a hi-hat cymbal has a small rubber chicken affixed to the top. He plays a harmonica in a wire holder around his neck. He picks and strums his guitar. He trades off between harmonica and vocals. He sings the blues, a twist on the traditional “When I Lay My Burden Down.”

Hearing Garcia perform in this intimate space is a treat and yet another added bonus of “The Blues Opera.” In 2006, Garcia founded Juke, a touring blues band that’s played from Florida to Southern California. Garcia is a great musician.

The song’s over and it’s another person’s turn to toss the fuzzball. They hit the big one. Sande for 50 points. That’s when the whole of “The Blues Opera” comes to light. Sande is the woman drawn on Garcia’s wrist, his mother who was diagnosed in 2002 with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease at age 59. In 2009, she died. “People call those with Alzheimer’s disease patients, I call them victims,” Garcia says.

And this is what Garcia’s “The Blues Opera” is all about. His days of caregiving. The only son who became responsible for his two parents. If you ask him, he’d tell you he’d do it again.

The stories are personal and raw, and, yes, no Candyland.

New York director, Ana Margineanu, who has collaborated with Juggerknot previously, is a master at site-specific productions. Her skill is what keeps the glue together here as she finds creative ways to keep the audience moving through the space. To get from the first set, the living room, to the next, we hear a voice that calls out to Garcia. It’s presumably Sande and he leaves for a minute. Adele motions everyone to follow.

Garcia’s in the bathroom with the door open so the audience can look in. It appears as if he is tending to someone. He stops and looks over. He tells of the many times he had to help his mother, unable to wipe herself after she had gone to the toilet. Alzheimer’s had robbed her of memory and daily living skills so that she couldn’t remember how to perform regular tasks, including how to lift up her pants.

Again, Sande’s voice calls from another room and Garcia goes in a flash. Adele leads the way to a small pink room. Garcia sits on the bed. There are more stories about Sande. The room is filled with authentic items, all from Garcia’s own collection, remembrances of his mother and father. Before everyone leaves the room to be shuttled on to the next, they are invited to stop and look at the mementos. There’s one of a young Sande as a ballerina, pictures of Sande with Eric as a boy, of Sande and husband, Victor, in their younger years.

A seamless but thunderous transition leads to the other side of the house. It soon becomes clear that the less colorful side and the dark living room signal the next chapter. This will be the location for the stories of Garcia’s father and the days post-Sande.

Now, it’s Garcia’s taking care of aging Victor, who is battling old age and physical infirmities and, most of all, doesn’t have a will to live.

Garcia explains that the living room where everyone is seated is an “escape room” where clues are scattered about to lead the audience into different areas. His stories lead to a prop, an umbrella, for instance, that leads to the next clue, a book, then a key that leads to a locked door.

We eventually end up in Victor’s bedroom. The day he arrived at the house to do his laundry like he always did. The day of Victor’s death in 2019. Garcia folds laundry while he recalls the details of the day. More personal items are in the room. Victor’s driver’s license sits on a nightstand by the bed. There’s an empty water bottle with a straw in it.

The gray walls of the room have text handwritten on them. Photographs are tacked up around them. They are more stories, more of Garcia’s memories, yet they elicit a feeling of a prisoner’s scrawls.

They are part of the culmination of the experience. They are also a theatrical diversion so that as the audience is looking around the room, Garcia can slip out and get ready for the final scene.

He’s ended up outside of the bedroom in the hallway seated in a chair in a shadow box. The group is led out. There’s a red light overhead and the rest of the area is pitch black. He looks like a bluesman, wearing a derby hat, suspenders, a jacket, dress pants, and nice black shoes. It’s time for his final soliloquy.

He talks about the loneliness he suffered after both parents were gone; the feeling of a lack of purpose now that he wasn’t a caregiver. He speaks about the girlfriend who left him. And what everyone could relate to regarding isolation during two years of the pandemic. It’s the final baring of his soul. “The Blues Opera” is an emotional catharsis and a way for him to purge the demon that haunted him, he says, by allowing him to finally bring his  darkness into the light.

“The Blues Opera” leaves you wanting more – more of Scotchy’s soul-baring stories and music, more of Adele’s hospitality. By the end of a quick 90 minutes, you and the others have bonded through the parlor games, drinks of whisky, Perrier, Cafecito, and the black-and-white cookies served from what looks like it could have been Sande’s favorite glass-domed cake dish. But especially the time well spent with Eric, Sande and Victor Garcia.

The exit leads to the home’s backyard where there’s a chance to stick around to mingle, grab another drink and hang out for a while. It’s another wise director’s choice. After being immersed in Scotchy’s world, it takes a little time to ease back into reality.

WHAT: Juggerknot Theatre Company’s “The Blues Opera”

WHERE: Location disclosed after ticket purchased. Begins in 1300 block of SW 8th Street, Miami.

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday, through June 26

TICKETS:  $85 

INFO: 786-757-1986, juggerknottheatrecompany.com, or email info@juggerknottheatre.com

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Review: Set almost 100 years ago, M Ensemble’s ‘Alabama Sky’ rings true today

Jean Hyppolite, Chasity Hart and Chat Atkins in a scene from M Ensemble’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the Sandrell Rivers Theater weekends through May 29. (Photo courtesy of Christa Ingraham)

The characters in Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky” are caught somewhere between the creative, hopeful heaven of the Harlem Renaissance and the hellish economic collapse of the Great Depression.

The gay designer, the singer-showgirl, the neighborhood doctor and a family planning crusader aren’t blood relatives. But they have become a kind of family by choice, looking out for each other as they try to navigate the highs and lows of Harlem in 1930. And oh, does Cleage’s play give them plenty to navigate.

Miami’s M Ensemble, the 51-year-old Black theater troupe that is Florida’s oldest continuously producing professional company, first presented “Blues for an Alabama Sky” in the summer of 2001. The play is having its encore production at the Sandrell Rivers Theater in Liberty City.

What no one could have anticipated in scheduling the show is that, not long before the opening, a draft of a Supreme Court opinion striking down Roe v. Wade as settled law would be leaked.  The battle over abortion has again become a raging pro-choice/pro-life war, leading to protests throughout the United States. That most volatile of issues figures into “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” giving the play a freshly powerful resonance.

Cleage’s tale (which clocks in at just under three hours, not that it needs to be that long) takes place in neighboring Harlem apartments and on the sidewalks outside.

Guy Jacobs (Chat Atkins) and Angel Allen (Chasity Hart), longtime pals who came up from Georgia to conquer the big city, become roommates again. She’s been dumped by her shady Italian boyfriend, leading to a huge public scene and getting the friends both fired from their steady jobs at the Cotton Club.

Guy, an out-and-proud costume designer whose social circle includes poet Langston Hughes, keeps the wolf from the door by making showgirl outfits for local clubs.  But his incessant dream, his raison d’être, is to go to Paris and design for the great performer-activist Josephine Baker.  Angel? She’s a self-centered beauty with an outsized personality.  Fiercely focused on self-preservation, pragmatic when it comes to taking advantage of besotted men, she’s cut from the same cloth as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret.” To say she’s an emotionally erratic combination of hope and disillusionment is an understatement.

Their next-door neighbor is Delia Patterson (Sarah Gracel), a young woman working with birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger to set up a family planning clinic in Harlem.  To get the community on board, Delia is trying to gain the support of the dreamy Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and her fellow worshippers at the Abyssinian Baptist Church.

Both apartments become a refuge for the weary local doctor Sam Thomas (Keith C. Wade), who follows endless hours of delivering babies with imbibing Prohibition hooch or Champagne with his pals, then going out to clubs. Work hard, play hard. Or as Sam is always saying, “Let the good times roll!”

A stranger arrives in the very first scene, pitching in as Guy guides the ferociously drunken, barely ambulatory Angel back to his place.  Leland Cunningham (Jean Hyppolite) has left Tuscaloosa, Alabama, mourning the deaths of his wife and newborn son.  Like so many Southerners in the Great Migration, he has come north to start over. And after he spies Angel, who looks eerily like his late wife, Leland becomes focused on starting over with her.

Cleage, a novelist as well as a prolific playwright, paints a portrait of excess and loss with the evocative images in the play’s dialogue.  The homeless in Harlem are “a bunch of sad-eyed souls wondering who pulled the rug out.”  Angel wants to flee the shards of her romantic past, Harlem itself and “all those cryin’ colored ghosts.”  She is, she says, “tired of Negro dreams.”

Among the issues Cleage explores in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” are women’s body autonomy, homophobia, gun violence and the unending struggle of survival in hard times  – all of which make a 1995 play set in 1930 freshly impactful for audiences in 2022.

Director Carey Brianna Hart, who has a long history with M Ensemble and other South Florida companies as an actor, director and stage manager, has drawn fine performances from her talented cast, and her staging of scenes in the two apartments is intimate and effective.

However, timing glitches on opening night slowed the play down.  Mitchell Ost’s set looks unfinished, and the “outside” space requires the actors to walk around it on the black-box theater’s barren floor as they pretend to be in bustling Harlem.  The uncredited scene-bridging music contributes mightily to the play’s atmosphere, and lighting-projection designer Aatiyah Malik knows how to amplify both a romantic moment and harsh reality.  Company founders Patricia E. Williams and Shirley Richardson are part of the production’s design team, Williams with period props and Richardson with costumes (though some of the latter aren’t right for the era).

Two veteran M Ensemble actors give significant, very different performances in the play. Atkins, whose work I’ve observed for years, explores new territory here. He turns his character Guy, a man who has faced racial and sexual orientation bias, and whose dreams are on the cusp of coming true, into a layered and sympathetic figure.  Wade conveys Sam’s steadiness, his need for escape from the stress of delivering babies, and his later-in-life experience of falling in love.

Hyppolite has the tough but meaty challenge of playing Leland, a man with traditional conservative values who becomes the villain of the play after his relationship with Angel goes into a tragic spiral.  Gracel, a Carbonell Award winner for “Dreamgirls,” offers a quiet contrast to Angel as Delia, a loyal friend and a woman driven to change her community for the better.

Chasity Hart (no relation to the show’s director) gives a sublime, heartbreaking performance as Angel, who has come to yet another messy crossroads in a life full of such moments.  She’s complicated yet still surprisingly naïve for a woman who has been repeatedly exploited as she struggles to survive.

Hart gets and communicates all the facets of Angel’s character, whether through Cleage’s words or through emotions that play across her striking face.  The New World  School of the Arts grad is also a singer, a terrific one, as the audience gets to hear (all too briefly) when Angel sings a bit of  W.C. Handy’s “The Saint Louis Blues,” her equivalent of worship on a Sunday morning.  Here’s hoping someone will cast her in a musical sooner rather than later.

WHAT: “Blues for an Alabama Sky” by Pearl Cleage

WHERE: M Ensemble production at the Sandrell Rivers Theater, 6103 NW Seventh Ave., Miami

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through May 29

TICKETS:  $31 (student and senior discounts available at the door)

INFO: 305-200-5043 or themensemble.com

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Review: Smart girl magic turns dark in Zoetic Stage’s ‘Our Dear Dead Drug Lord’

Gina Fonseca, Mikayla Queeley, Rachel Eddy and Sofia Duemichen try to summon the spirit of Pablo Escobar in Zoetic Stage’s “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” at the Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater (Photo courtesy of Justin Namon)

Any way you slice it, the path from childhood to adulthood is neither simple nor trouble-free. Evolving teens have to deal with forging an identity, transitioning into independence, and imagining, then becoming, their future selves. Love and loss enter their lives, sometimes in the same situation.

In her off-Broadway hit “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” playwright Alexis Scheer, a Miami native now living in Boston, takes audiences on that journey as experienced by four smart, curious, articulate private school girls in their mid-to-late teens.

Zoetic Stage is closing out its season with a new production of the play in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Arsht Center, and as theatrical experiences go, it’s a doozy.

Co-directed by Zoetic artistic director Stuart Meltzer and Elena Maria Garcia, the genre-defying dark comedy (if you insist on classifying it) weaves plenty of observant laughs into the script, particularly if you happened to live in Miami circa 2008 when the story is set. But it’s also true that the blood rituals and gathering darkness of “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” are there from the beginning, building steadily toward a horrifying, other-worldly yet transformational final scene.

The Colombian drug lord invoked in the title is the late Pablo Escobar, the infamous founder of the Medellín Cartel. He has become the latest study focus of the Dead Leaders Club (DLC), a school group that, back in the day, focused on President John F. Kennedy and other admired leaders. But the members’ previous choice, Adolf Hitler, got the DLC suspended.

Now, as the Barack Obama-John McCain presidential race is hurtling toward election day, the four girls are meeting in a surprisingly spacious treehouse to strategize and send a little antihero worship Escobar’s way.

 

Known by the nicknames chosen for them in a revelatory ritual involving a Ouija board, the teens are distinct individuals, each representing a different facet of the Miami melting pot.

Pipe (Sofia Duemichen), the DLC leader and the one who took the club in its more controversial direction, is the daughter of Cuban-American Republicans. She’s domineering, insistent on just-so rituals, ready to out-shout the others if the overlapping talk grows too cacophonous. As she continues to grapple with the drowning death of a younger sister, she’s also struggling with how fully and openly to embrace her sexual orientation.

Squeeze (Mikayla Queeley), a theater kid who’s Haitian on her father’s side and Puerto Rican on her mother’s, is also dealing with tragic family loss – her depressed dad’s death by suicide. And she happens to be highly allergic to cats, a fact that forces Queeley to keep sneezing loudly through much of a first scene that begins in a kind of chaotic excitement and ends in a genuinely disturbing ritual.

Zoom (Rachel Eddy), at 15 and the youngest member of the group, is a Jewish girl with an outsized imagination. She’s the dramatic equivalent of an unreliable narrator, easily influenced, and though she insists she’s a virgin, she thinks she might be pregnant.

Kit (Gina Fonseca), the newest to the fold, is a Colombian-American who never knew her father. The DLC members take up the idea that just maybe she’s the daughter of Escobar and a prostitute. Despite the implications involving her single mom, cool Kit just goes with the flow.

Examining “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” without giving away its darker twists and surprises is tough, but to do so would rob Zoetic’s audiences of their startling in-the-moment experiences. We will say that two more actors, Rio Chavarro and Tai Fruitstone, appear in the play but we’ll just leave it there.

For Meltzer, Garcia, and intimacy director Jeni Hacker, staging Scheer’s play was as challenging as performing it is for the actors. The script’s use of overlapping dialogue requires split-second timing, and initially, the aural bombardment is tough to sort out, though the actors soon find a rhythmic groove.

One scene involving a sacrifice is made “real” through sound design and precise placement of the actors. A grisly later scene involves combat and bloody violence, and how the actors pull it off without anyone getting hurt is a minor miracle of staging.

At the playwright’s direction, a key interaction involves Pipe speaking English to another character who challenges her in Spanish, urging her to claim her power. Those lines are translated in the show’s digital program, but if you aren’t bilingual and don’t happen to read the translation before the show, you’ll miss the full impact of those exchanges. And they shouldn’t be missed.

The acting in “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” is necessarily fearless, and Zoetic’s young cast of college grads etches compelling portraits of girls on the cusp of womanhood.

Initially overbearing, Duemichen makes Pipe a persuasive teen who works overtime to conceal her emotional damage. Queeley, who gets to sing a bit and lead a tribute dance to Squeeze’s father, is a more subtly commanding figure, and the crimson red woven into her braids hints at the violence to come. Eddy, whose Zoom sports little-girl braids, conveys her character’s quicksilver emotions and vulnerability to influence. Fonseca makes Kit a young woman of mystery, as irresistible to the audience as she is to Pipe.

Jodi Dellaventura’s imposing treehouse set, a space made a bit cozier by properties designer Miriam Sierra and scenery-props assistant Shannon Veguilla, is a place decorated with flowers, stuffed animals, and an “isn’t-he-dreamy” poster made from Escobar’s mug shot. If you put it on the market today, it would sell in a nanosecond at way over asking price.

Lighting designer Tony Galaska is a wizard at shifting mood or summoning up a storm, as is sound designer Matt Corey, whose judicious use of thundering drums underscores the ritualistic magic to come. Together, Galaska and Corey become key players in creating the disturbing end-of-play magic.

Costume designer Marina Pareja largely works with the pale blue-burgundy-khaki palette of the teens’ school uniforms, but subtle variations in what the girls choose over the play’s four-month period convey individual differences.

If you see “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” you may find it deeply resonant, thought-provoking, and very different from Miami’s usual diet of naturalistic theater. Or you might find the storytelling a bit confusing or some key plot points too shocking to bear. But engage with it and you’ll discover a truth: Indifference to this play is impossible.

 WHAT: “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” by Alexis Scheer

WHEN:  7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday (additional performance 7:30 p.m. May 11, no matinee May 14), through May 22.

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

TICKETS:  $55-$60

INFO: 305-949-6722 or arshtcenter.org

(Read the interview with the playwright here.)

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Miami’s Alexis Scheer comes home to see her play in the city that shaped her  

The cast of “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” at Zoetic Stage through May 22 are, clockwise from top left, Gina Fonseca, Mikayla Queeley, Rachel Eddy and Sofia Duemichen. (Photo courtesy of Justin Namon)

Alexis Scheer is a young, multifaceted theater artist whose resume is already pretty mind-boggling.

The Miami native and New World School of the Arts high school grad is an award-winning playwright with commissions and premieres pending at theaters all over the country. She is a theater company founder (and producer-director), a musical theater performer, a writer on the upcoming HBO Max series “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin” and is working on an English-language adaptation of the opera “Così fan tutti” with conductor-composer Dan Ryan, her husband of three months.

Just last December, she celebrated her 30^th birthday.

“Alexis was a whole other breed,” says Elena Maria García, the Carbonell Award-winning actor-playwright who was Scheer’s acting teacher at New World and who treated her more like an artist-colleague than a student.  “She wanted to learn. She was infinite.”

Now the Boston-based Scheer is coming home, and not just for a visit.  Her hit 2019 Off-Broadway play “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” which had its run extended three times before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, is closing out the Zoetic Stage season in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Arsht Center. The playwright plans to be in the opening night audience with her family.

“I remember when the Arsht Center opened,” says Scheer, who earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in musical theater from the Boston Conservatory and a master’s of fine arts in playwriting from Boston University after graduating from New World in 2010. “It will be the first time I’ve seen one of my plays without being involved in (the production).  You write a play as a living document, and you hope it will outlive you.”

Scheer began crafting “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” after former President Donald Trump’s inauguration left her feeling disenfranchised.  She was then in her master’s program studying playwriting with Melinda Lopez, whose “Sonia Flew” was the last show produced by Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse before its abrupt shutdown in 2006.

The drug lord of the title is the notorious Pablo Escobar, the late Colombian founder-kingpin of the Medellín Cartel. Daughter of a Colombian immigrant mother and an American Jewish father, Scheer says, “Pablo Escobar was the looming figure in my family’s mythology.”

Escobar, she adds, “is my content warning” to those who see the play.

Set in 2008, “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” centers on four private school Miami teens – Pipe (Sofia Duemichen), a Cuban-American; Squeeze (Mikayla Queeley), whose parents are from Puerto Rico and Haiti; Kit (Gina Fonseca), a Colombian-American; and Zoom (Rachel Eddy), who’s Jewish – ranging in age from 15 to 18.

Members of a suspended school group called the Dead Leaders Club (choosing Adolf Hitler as a subject went many steps too far), the girls use the names given them by a Ouija board when they meet in a weathered tree house. There they talk about anything and everything: life, politics, their parents, secrets, personal crises, unwanted pregnancy, school, their sexuality, embracing their power and abortion, that hottest of hot-button issues.

Scheer says the treehouse setting likely came in part from Mary Pope Osborne’s “Magic Treehouse” books that she read as a kid, and that she thought about what might be exciting for a set designer to create.  She also wanted the space, a place “suspended above the world,” to be different.

“I think of treehouses as a very male space – you know, ‘no girls allowed,’” she says.  “So, I wanted to subvert that.”

Co-directed by artistic director Stuart Meltzer and García, both former New World teachers, the Zoetic production came about after Meltzer heard the buzz about the play and asked for the script.

“The humor in it initially struck me. I loved it. It has such wonderful (craftsmanship) in the way the jokes and circumstances are engineered,” says Meltzer, who also responded to the clear musicality of its language and overlapping dialogue.  “But then when I read it, it was a complete shock to me at the end.”

“Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” is, he says, a scary coming-of-age play about the moment in time between childhood and adulthood. Ritual and magic are vital to it, as is the shocking conclusion, but Meltzer feels prepared to deal with any blowback.

“At the funeral for (longtime GableStage producing artistic director) Joe Adler, I learned that you can’t win a war if you’re going to limit artistic freedom or freedom of speech,” he says.

The play’s ending, which requires the girls to work some serious magic, is dark and violent.  That Scheer would take her story there isn’t so surprising if you know that she’s an admirer of the late British playwright Sarah Kane and that she so loved the 2010 GableStage production of Kane’s shocking “Blasted” that she saw it twice.

“I’d never seen anything like that. It rewired my brain,” she says.  “The theater is a place where we can touch on the dark underbelly of humanity.  It’s a safe space to do that. It provides catharsis.”

The young actors in Zoetic’s cast appreciate that García and intimacy director-combat coordinator Jeni Hacker have been working with them on the harrowing final scene, taking them “step by step and moment by moment,” as García describes it.

“Having women guide us has been incredibly helpful,” says Eddy, who graduated from the University of Miami. “There has been lots of checking in with us. It’s being handled with the gravity of what the situation is.”

Says Duemichen, who counted Meltzer and García among her New World high school teachers, “This play is by a woman for women.  It shows the depths of female friendships…I know (girls like the characters) Squeeze. I went to school with Pipe. We all know Zoom . . . Setting the play in 2008 gets you thinking about culture and politics then, about the unrest over the election of the first Black president.  It feels a bit like a boiling point.”

Now based in New York, Miami native Fonseca was part of the magnet program at South Miami Middle School, as was Scheer, though the women attended at different times.

“I love Alexis’s writing,” the actor says.  “It’s dark, genuine, heartwarming and dynamic.  It’s a gift to play such complex female characters, and each is unique.”

Queeley, who earned her bachelor of fine arts degree from New World, appreciates the way Scheer so thoroughly evokes place and time in the play.

“Definitely, this is 2008 Miami – the language, the wittiness, the jokes, the banter,” she says. “There are not a lot of places that talk the way we do in Miami.  Everything we say has meaning to it . . . She really brings the outside world into this treehouse.”

As a kid, Scheer spent time working in her parents’ Wynwood button factory and singing with the Musical Miracles at Actors’ Playhouse.  At New World, she bought into the ethos of artists creating their own work, then kept right on going.

After her check-in with the city that first forged her as an artist – “a place unlike anywhere else in this country,” she says – Scheer will return to juggling myriad projects.

Her play “Laughing in Spanish,” set in a Wynwood gallery, will get its world premiere at the Denver Center Jan. 27 through March 12, 2023.   She’s working on commissions from Miami New Drama, Second Stage and other companies.  She and composer-lyricist Zoey Sarnak will premiere their commission musical “Shook,” about high school theater kids at a Shakespeare Festival, Sept. 23 through Oct. 23 at Northern Stage in White River Junction, Vermont.  She’s also developing another project with HBO Max and Salma Hayek’s production company Ventanarosa.

Scheer remains devoted to “telling stories about women, Latinas, young people. I hope people will go see this show. I’m hopeful for the future.”

She then observes, “This is a Latinx play, but not in the way you’d assume or expect.  Latinx theater is not a monolith.  I’m happy to carry Miami’s banner all over the world.”

WHAT: “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” by Alexis Scheer

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 5, opens 7:30 p.m. May 6; 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday (additional performance 7:30 p.m. May 11, no matinee May 14), through May 22

COST:  $55-$60

INFORMATION: 305-949-6722 or arshtcenter.org

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Review: ‘The Cuban Vote’ at Miami New Drama captures essence of local – Miami politics, people and places

Jonathan Nichols-Navarro and Carmen Pelaez debate the issues in the world premiere of her play “The Cuban Vote.” (Photo courtesy of Stian Roenning)

A fight-to-the-finish Miami-Dade mayoral campaign meets gentle romance, a bit of Shakespearean inspiration and lots of affectionate satire in “The Cuban Vote” by Carmen Peláez.

Commissioned by Miami New Drama, the comedy is getting its world premiere and generating abundant laughs at the Colony Theatre on Lincoln Road. At the same time, the play is another key building block in co-founder/artistic director Michel Hausmann’s mission of creating theater that reflects and speaks to Miami’s diverse communities.

Staged by former Miamian Loretta Greco, who was recently named the first woman artistic director at Boston’s 40-year-old Huntington Theatre, “The Cuban Vote” stars author-actor Peláez as Carolina Clarens, a passionate, brainy, often unfiltered candidate for Miami-Dade mayor.

In her third Miami New Drama world premiere, the playwright (who has worked on many local and national political campaigns) got boisterous entrance applause from an opening-night crowd filled with actual Miami-Dade politicians – who then proceeded to laugh and nod knowingly at Peláez’s inside-béisbol take on their world as the comedy unfolded.

The story in brief: Despite Carolina’s solid experience working with her late father, a former Miami-Dade mayor, her poll numbers are faltering, thanks in part to an easily ignited temper and her refusal to reframe any of her messages in a less confrontational way.

Two family political advisers, her elegant mother Ofelia (Evelyn Perez) and influencer kid sister Blanca (Marcela Paguaga), keep offering disregarded suggestions. So, Blanca’s fiancé, aspiring bitcoin bro Benji Carbonell (Kristian Bikic), sends for the cavalry.

That polished political knight is an old Miami friend, Alex Mesa (Andhy Mendez), now a sought-after Washington D.C. consultant with an unblemished track record. He’s both savvy and dreamy, and it isn’t long before the initially testy Carolina starts to soften, though she keeps on fighting hard for her vision of a more progressive, caring Miami.

After her chief opponent drops out of the race, the final puzzle piece slips into place. In a move patterned after the Christopher Sly prank at the beginning of William Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” Alex and Benji recruit barfly Gilberto Ruiz (Jonathan Nichols-Navarro) to run against Carolina, certain that the guayabera-sporting, slogan-spouting viejo will be easy to beat. Pero eso no es verdad.

As delivered by Peláez, Greco and company, “The Cuban Vote” is both rollicking satire and a resonant, well-informed cautionary tale. The comedy underscores the fact that Miami-Dade’s vast Cuban-American voting bloc is not a monolith, neither purely red nor blue, but a group that includes traditionalists, progressives and everyone in between.

As this is a play about a campaign, debates, interviews and speeches are part of the package, and sometimes the rhetoric slows the momentum. Some surgical trimming could keep the production, which runs about an hour and 45 minutes with no intermission, hurtling along in a more consistently engaging way.

Among its myriad topics, the script also takes on disinformation-dealing Spanish radio talk hosts, the privilege enjoyed by wealthy men whose belief systems were forged in Miami’s pricey private schools, and the sizeism that imagines larger people are somehow inferior or less deserving of happiness than others. To wit:

In their final debate, Gilberto finishes his answer to a question about climate change by saying, “Let the seas rise. I float! [To Carolina] Especially you, gorda!”
Painful though common as that barb may be in Carolina’s life, as the playwright, Peláez has crafted a more-than-worthy opponent in Gilberto Ruiz. From the moment that he transforms from barely sentient drunk into a persuasive politician with a manufactured back story, Nichols-Navarro owns the stage every time he’s on it.

Slender though the actor may be, his Gilberto is a type, a man who fills any room with his outsized personality, his declarations that Carolina’s ideas smack of comunismo or socialismo, his dated aviator glasses and toothy grin and fat hand-rolled cigar. His performance is, plain and simple, a comic treasure.

As Carolina, Peláez has a great deal to shoulder, including extensive dialogue. She must delineate the many issues that drive the candidate while transforming from a woman who habitually lives inside a protective emotional shell into someone open to romance. The political content proves to be her strong suit, the budding romance not so much.

But for the latter, she has a wonderful scene partner in Mendez as Alex, who is as surprised as Carolina when he starts falling for his client. An accomplished Miami actor with significant theater, film and television credits, Mendez comes across as genuine and sympathetic, and his playfulness in the Carolina-Alex relationship helps build an affectionate bond.

Also eminently believable is Perez as Ofelia. Costume designer Alex Jaeger has made the woman with the elegant blonde updo look perpetually chic, and the actor persuasively conveys the career sacrifices that she, a highly educated woman, made to further her family’s success. She’s also a master at getting her difficult daughter’s attention when she barks a genteel “Carolina Maria!” at precisely the right moment.

Benji and Blanca are young, striving Miami types, and Bikic and Paguaga play them as such. Bikic’s Benji, whose actions, attire and styling scream “notice me!,” is generally the loudest and most intrusive guy in any room. Paguaga’s attractive Blanca, sincerely dedicated to helping her sister become mayor, is an influencer as stereotype, a woman who lives for coupling a hashtag to just about any phrase.
The high-level storytelling in “The Cuban Vote” would literally (to borrow one of Blanca’s favorite words) not be possible without the production’s design team, particularly the collaboration of scenic designer brothers Christopher and Justin Swader and projection designer Yuki Izumihara.

They are magicians, summoning to the Colony stage everything from the iconic elements of Little Havana to the hanging gardens at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Together with composer and sound designer Obadiah Eaves, lighting designer Mary Ellen Stebbins and costume designer Jaeger they bring fast-moving 21st century Miami to life. Watch, for instance, as the two candidates frantically work the final hours before the polls open – that’s some genius staging, for sure – and consider how many artists brought that moment to life.

“The Cuban Vote” is written in English, but as in Miami itself, plenty of Spanish mixes and mingles with the dialogue, sometimes within the same sentence. Will you grasp the most if you’re fully bilingual? Sure, but Peláez skillfully contextualizes everything so that understanding is seldom a problem. Ditto with whether you happen to live in Miami-Dade or recognize every reference in the script. The play speaks to its intended audience – and to anyone else who cares to listen and laugh.

WHAT: “The Cuban Vote” by Carmen Pelaez
WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday (additional 8 p.m. performances May 5 and May 12), through May 15
WHERE: Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach.
COST: $51.50-$71.50
INFORMATION: 305-674-1040; colonymb.org

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Review: GableStage’s ‘Boca’ looks at late life with poignant affection

The characters played by Avi Hoffman (left) and Robert Zukerman sing as they wait for their cars in Jessica Provenz’s “Boca.” (Photo/Magnus Stark)

As bad news bombards us 24/7, perhaps Jessica Provenz’s “Boca” is the play we need right now.

Getting a significant second production at GableStage after its world premiere last summer at Barrington Stage in Massachusetts, this comedy about retirees in an over-55 Boca Raton condo community is resonant, playful and poignant.

If you happen to belong to the demographic represented by its characters, you’ll likely laugh harder. But the longing for love, the intricacies of friendships, the ability to survive and thrive after loss? Those themes touch everyone sooner or later.

Illuminatingly directed by Julianne Boyd, the Barrington Stage artistic director who helmed the play’s premiere, “Boca” is a collection of 10 short related scenes about life at Boca Oasis, a luxury condo development where the grass is literally always greener (and never more than a maximum 3 inches in height).

Five actors play 11 characters, giving the performers a chance to display their versatility, which they do. Style-reflecting costume changes and different wigs for the women help, but the transformations come from the actors altering their voices and physicality – a challenge for the actors and fun for the audience to watch.

A recurring situation begins the 85-minute play, as Mo (Avi Hoffman) and Marty (Robert Zukerman) sit on a bench outside the clubhouse waiting for the valet, Sergio, to bring Mo’s Tesla and Marty’s saffron-colored Porsche. The men razz each other, as guys do, and talk about their lengthy marriages. Mo is about to celebrate 48 years of wedded bliss to the sometimes-cranky Iris (Deborah Kondelik), and he has come up with a sentimental if decidedly odd gift to mark the occasion. Marty, who complains that he’s in a 45-year “spite marriage,” likens his ultra-disciplined wife Deann (Beverly Blanchette) to “Satan on a Peloton bike.”

Over in one of the condos, friends Susan (Blanchette), Janet (Kondelik) and Elaine (Barbara Bonilla) have gathered for a post-pickleball hangout. Janet is a three-time widow, Elaine a divorcee, and one of their debates involves the proper waiting period before going after a widower – used to be three months, now it’s two. Whenever the conversation gets too chaotic, former kindergarten teacher Susan puts on a sock puppet named Mr. Noodle to demand their attention in a goofy voice. She has a far more important matter to discuss, one involving her attractive podiatrist husband, Robbie (Zukerman), and a poker game.

A condo board Zoom meeting is, as anyone who tried to do business during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic would attest, a glitch-filled ordeal.

Janet lets everyone into the meeting: dictatorial board president Deann, fiercely breaking a sweat on her exercise bike; Stan (Zukerman), trembling as he holds something wrapped in a plaid blanket to his chest; and Bruce (Hoffman), the widower of the moment at the Oasis. Topics range from the mundane (what color to paint the pickleball courts) to the power politics of the upcoming board election to the deadly serious (just why is the Boca Oasis grass so green?).

In Mo’s beloved Tesla, an annoyed Iris and her latter-day hippie pal Louise (Bonilla) are stuck in Boca’s perpetually hideous traffic. A missed turn leads to a seized opportunity – why not hit the road ala Thelma and Louise? And they do.

We watch as Susan tends to her all-blue garden; Mo worries to Marty about Iris’ absence; and Susan makes a campaign speech about the importance of friendship and community as she attempts to unseat Deann.

Then comes what is arguably the play’s best scene, “Stay, Please.” Bruce returns from yet another date to find Elaine in his condo, her signature lasagna and a fine Merlot at the ready, romance on her mind.

She points out that there are 400 women living at Boca Oasis and just 105 men, only 22 of them single (and some of those are gay or weird). Bruce is, she says, “fresh meat.” But when he tries to put her off, Elaine demonstrates that “no” isn’t an answer she’s prepared to accept.

The final major scene in “Boca” is a dinner party that devolves into door-slamming farce.

Hoffman and Kondelik do quick changes so they appear in both of the roles each one plays – he as Bruce and Mo, she as Janet and Iris. Robbie is the host, though he keeps disappearing into the bedroom to tend to Susan, sick in bed with a killer migraine.

Everyone can’t help noticing how freezing cold it is in the condo – Elaine borrows Susan’s winter wear – and as it turns out, there’s a reason Robbie has turned the thermostat way, way down. But you’ll have to see “Boca” to find out what that reason is.

The seasoned “Boca” cast delivers, even in the moments when the material is so-so, which it sometimes is.

Kondelik has a tougher time making much of the sweet-though-bland Janet, but her fiery Iris is totally believable as a woman whose conversational arsenal includes many an f-bomb.

Blanchette is likable and nurturing as Susan – though the puppet bit Provenz has devised for her is, sorry, ridiculous – and as Deann, she’s as hard as the character’s toned body.

Bonilla, a New York and regional theater actor who is making her stage debut in the state she now calls home, gets every comedic flourish wielded by ex-New Yorker Elaine just right.  She’s a goofy caricature of an older New Age gal as Louise, but that’s the way Provenz has written the character.

Hoffman has a big, affable personality as Mo and a more restrained one as Bruce, playing wonderfully off Bonilla’s Elaine. Zukerman, who was in the original Barrington production of “Boca,” is a terrifically versatile actor, absolutely different as he becomes Marty, then Robbie, then Stan.

Longtime GableStage designer Lyle Baskin created the set, fitting a pair of condos on either side of the central area where Mo and Marty await their cars, and Iris and Louise take off on their extended road trip. The yellow and blue condos, decorated by Clara Fath, are true to form for an upscale 55+ community. That central area and Mo’s “Tesla,” however, are cartoonishly at odds with the condos.

Lighting designer Barbara Samuels, costume designer Camilla Haith, and music and sound designer Alexander Sovronsky effectively bring the other aspects of “Boca” to life, with Haith getting the casual Florida resort vibe just right.

Although GableStage has presented comedies and farces during its long history, the company’s usual fare has been edgier, grittier, more seriously topical. “Boca” is more like something mentioned multiple times in the play: Stevia, the sweetener the clubhouse restaurant just can’t seem to keep in stock.

Provenz’s play is a sweet contemplation of the issues and concerns that mark the autumn and winter of life. Whether you’re at that stage or not, “Boca” is likely to make you laugh.

 

WHAT: “Boca” by Jessica Provenz

WHEN: 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 7 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through May 22, 2022

WHERE: GableStage in The Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables; streaming tickets also available

COST:  $35-$65 

Cost:  $35-$65 (ticket discounts available for students, groups, artists, military personnel, veterans and Biltmore staff members)

INFORMATION: 305-445-1119; gablestage.org/boca

 

To read Christine Dolen’s preview for “Boca,” click here. 

 

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OUTshine LGBTQ+ Film Festival offers in-person, streaming options

The documentary, “Make Me Famous,” highlights the career of Edward Brezinski. (Photo/Marcus Leatherdale)

There’s something to be said about someone who just won’t quit.

Exhibit A: Artist Edward Brezinski.

He pestered people to attend his art shows, doled out death threats and was best known for dismissing Robert Gober’s sculpture, “Bag of Donuts,” as … well … just a bag of donuts and then proceeding to consume one of its contents. And even though the stunt earned him a trip to the emergency room, this did nothing to temper his in-your-face antics, which are examined in “Make Me Famous,” a documentary showing at the 24th Annual OUTshine LGBTQ+ Film Festival.

Running from April 22-May 1, 2022, the festival will feature more than 45 international features and documentary screenings including “Jimmy in Saigon,” “Young and Afraid” and “Framing Agnes.” Parties and panel discussions will also be part of the festivities in venues throughout Miami-Dade County.

“Make Me Famous” is scheduled to screen at 5 p.m. Saturday, April 23, at the Regal Cinemas South Beach and be available for streaming throughout the duration of the event.

“This is really a great time for us to get out and come back together,” said Mark Gilbert, the festival’s board chair and interim executive director. “OUTshine LGBTQ+ festival is such a terrific event for people to come together and make new friends and see movies together in a theater where everybody is experiencing somewhat similar emotions. That to me is what is important and what makes our festival really special.”

Brian Vincent, director and coproducer of “Make Me Famous,” said he’s excited to be part of the event and hopes the film will continue to shine a light on the role of Brezinski.

“I think the most surprising thing about it is how much of an impact that Edward had on not just his contemporaries, who were all delighted to talk about him, but on the actual scene itself,” he said.

Set in New York City’s East Village, the film offers an unflinching look into the bleak, dilapidated and often filthy playground of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and a motley crew of painters, poets, photographers and others. The group was known for forming a cocoon of creativity, sparking a burgeoning arts movement, and nurturing a renaissance born amid hopelessness and the trash.

There is a whirlwind cast of characters, each one more fascinating than the next, who offer amusing and insightful testimonies on the overall art scene and Brezinski’s life. In all, the group coalesces into the perfect embodiment of the “starving artist” caricature, but it’s clear that this was no gimmick. The artists truly were hungry — and perhaps Brezinski, who stood on the cusp of a dynamic art scene, was the hungriest of them all.

“I wanted to tell the story as much as possible, from the point of view of people that were there with their artwork,” Vincent said. “They were all broke, and there really was no hope of having any money in the 1980s. Their goal was not to be rich. It was to impress each other with their creativity.”

There’s even a South Florida connection, according to Heather Spore Kelly, the film’s producer.

“Actually, Edward was homeless in Miami in the ’90s. He was a poor artist selling his paintings on the street. He actually got arrested for vagrancy as he was sleeping on the beach,” she said via email. “I bet there are several Floridians who have an Edward Brezinski painting, and they will be happily surprised they supported such a talented and dedicated artist!”

At first, bringing Brezinski’s life to the screen presented a number of challenges.

“Brezinski didn’t exist online,” Vincent said. “What had to happen then was we had to go into the community and to interview everyone and dig through all kinds of suitcases, cellars and every kind of railroad apartment. People would find these Brezinski photos, and they were all very delighted to talk about Edward because [he] was someone that they hadn’t thought about in years.

“It was extremely difficult to find enough archival [information] to tell the story.”

Connecting with artists proved to be another hurdle. The filmmakers had to gain the trust of reclusive artists including Richard Hambleton, who was suffering from melanoma and was persuaded to grant interviews after being coaxed through the crack of his door.

“They’re not like actors,” explained Vincent. “An actor will just show up if you call them and say, ‘Oh, I’m thinking about doing a show.’ Then they’ll be on your doorstep. But these artists are not like that at all. They inhabit their own worlds. They’re difficult to penetrate.”

The film’s producer hopes “Make Me Famous” will help spread an important message.

“This is actually our first film and we were inspired by the ’80s artists because they were so scrappy and innovative,” she said. “They serve as a shining example for those who toil away in obscurity to pursue their lifelong passions. We believe that a life devoted to art really means something. You can make a difference as an artist, whether or not you’re famous or rich.”

 

WHAT: 24th Annual OUTshine LGBTQ+ Film Festival

WHEN: “Make Me Famous” will be screened at 5 p.m. Saturday, April 23. Additional streaming options will be available throughout the festival, which runs from Friday, April 22, through Sunday, May 1.

WHERE: Regal Cinemas South Beach, 1120 Lincoln Road Mall, Miami Beach; other festival screenings and events are scheduled throughout Miami-Dade County

COST: $8 for in-person screenings and $7 for virtual screenings

INFORMATION: outshinefilm.com

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Review: Set in the 1980s, ‘This Is Our Youth’ still holds up

Luke Surretsky’s Dennis smokes another one as Teddy Calvin’s Warren watches in Area Stage’s “This Is Our Youth.” (Photo/Giancarlo Rodaz)

Kenneth Lonergan’s play, “This Is Our Youth,” has been widely produced since its Off-Broadway debut in 1996. One of those productions (at GableStage in the spring of 2000) featured a very young movie-star-to-be Oscar Isaac in the more sympathetic of the two male roles.

Now Area Stage cofounder John Rodaz, who gave Isaac one of his earliest professional roles at the company’s first space on Lincoln Road, has directed a new production of “This Is Our Youth” as his company’s second show in its new partnership with Miami’s Arsht Center.

The play is set in 1982 during the greed-is-good era of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.  Lonergan’s three characters are rich-kid denizens of Manhattan’s Upper West Side (and it’s a bit mind-boggling to note that, were they real people, these late-teens/early 20s characters would now be pushing 60).

Materially, the kids are all right. Dennis Ziegler (Luke Surretsky) lives in a roomy enough studio apartment paid for by his father (a famous painter) and mother (a “harsh and extreme” social activist). Warren Straub (Teddy Calvin) lives with his dad, a man who made a fortune in lingerie manufacturing. Jessica Goldman (Harley Muir), an aspiring fashion designer, lives with her mom and is a friend of Dennis’ girlfriend, Valerie, never seen but the object of his telephonic wrath.

But money, of course, can’t buy happiness. And all three of these very young adults are finding the journey into maturity hard to navigate.

Dennis, whose folks would rather pay for his apartment than have him around, is a verbally abusive alpha male with a hair-trigger temper. Passing the time staring mindlessly at his small TV set when he’s not with Valerie, he spends his days and nights in search of, consuming or reselling drugs.

Warren would seem to have it worse. Low-key and more than a little lost – he’s struggling to recover from an unspeakable family tragedy – he is Dennis’ verbal whipping boy and his father’s literal punching bag. He shows up at the apartment having stolen $15,000 from his dad’s bedroom and carrying a suitcase full of valuable childhood memorabilia. What comes next isn’t clear, but once Dennis becomes aware of the dough, the manipulative shenanigans begin.

Jessica barely knows Warren, who has thus far been unlucky in the romance department, but due to his sudden influx of cash, the two go off for an adventure that both enjoy but handle awkwardly on the morning after.

All three actors in Area Stage’s cast appeared in the company’s first show at the Arsht’s Carnival Studio Theater, “Be More Chill.”  They’re the right age for their roles, but none of them imbue the characters with qualities that would make these emotionally drifting kids more compelling company for the show’s almost 2 ½-hour running time.

Calvin comes closest, conveying Warren’s vulnerability and awkwardness, but why he would suffer Dennis’ abuse remains an utter mystery. Surretsky goes for broke with the nonstop and very loud belittling of Warren, occasionally mixing in a goofy laugh, but by the time he gets to Dennis’ big monologue, it’s too late for us to care. Muir’s Jessica comes off as a wisp of a girl, an insecure cipher who won’t know who she is for a very long time.

Rodaz has created some wild and wonderful moments in his staging, as when Warren manages to throw a football and break a sculpture Valerie has made for Dennis, who knows he’ll never hear the end of it.

Warren’s attempt to cut some cocaine – a move that just might help save him from yet another beating by his father – ends disastrously yet hilariously. A little dance scene between Warren and Jessica is so sweet and appealing that you understand why she’d say yes to his proposed adventure.

Frank Oliva’s set gets the details of Dennis’ apartment just right, from the painted white brick walls to the side-by-side radiators to the kitchen with its aging appliances. Lighting designer Cheyenne Sykes charts the changes from night to day, and costumer Rebecca Verpile especially has fun with Jessica’s flair for fashion. The sound design by Giancarlo Rodaz (son of the Area Stage founders) precisely delivers the vintage vinyl songs that Warren favors.

In life and American society, much has changed since this play set in 1982 debuted in 1996. When Dennis, Warren and Jessica were roaming the Upper West Side, there were no cellphones for instant and constant communication. No TikTok, no Facebook, no Instagram. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks hadn’t yet awakened that facet of fear. The 24/7 drone of news about war, mass shootings and other tragedies hadn’t become omnipresent.

Yet “This Is Our Youth” holds up. For so many, the passage from the teenage years to adulthood is challenging, difficult, even disastrous. The world changes and evolves, but the key questions – Who am I? What should I do with my life? How do I navigate my way to a good life? – remain the same.

 

WHAT: Area Stage Co. presents “This Is Our Youth” by Kenneth Lonergan

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Fridays, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, through May 1; Sunday showings are set for 5 p.m. April 24 and 2 p.m. May 1

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

COST: $55

INFORMATION: 305-949-6722; arshtcenter.org

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GableStage’s ‘Boca’ ponders life & love in a senior world

From left, Deborah Kondelik, Barbara Bonilla, Robert Zukerman, Beverly Blanchette and Avi Hoffman star in a comedy about a familiar place in GableStage’s “Boca.” (Photo/Magnus Stark)

If you live in South Florida, you know these people — or maybe you are one of them. They could be your friends, neighbors, relatives, parents, grandparents.

They live in a restricted community for those age 55 and older, a place where the sky is cerulean blue, the perfectly maintained grass is the most verdant green, and making the most of later-in-life experiences is on everyone’s to-do list.

“They” are the characters in “Boca,” a collection of 10 short related comedies by playwright Jessica Provenz, who lives in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts, a different sort of paradise.

Revised since its August 2021 world premiere at Barrington Stage Co. in Pittsfield, Mass., the play is getting a vital second production as part of a “rolling world premiere” announced at the time of its Barrington debut. “Boca” is scheduled to preview on April 22, open on April 23 and run through May 22 at GableStage in Coral Gables. As with the commissioned premiere, Barrington cofounder and artistic director Julianne Boyd is staging the show’s second production.

At first glance, “Boca” may seem an unusual fit for GableStage, a company whose reputation was built on edgy dramas. But Bari Newport, in her first season as artistic director since succeeding the late Joseph Adler, begs to differ. In fact, the companies have about 80 subscribers in common.

“Roz [Rosalyn] Stuzin, the president of our board, is a passionate theater lover, and she’s also on the board of Barrington Stage. She sent me an early draft, and I was delighted by it,” Newport says. “I love Jessica’s writing. She has a quirky sense of humor and a gift for writing dialogue … It was brought to me, and I wanted to produce a play set in Florida first. Anyone can do it later.”

Newport — who summarizes the play’s theme as “life is short; spend it with the people you love” — sees Provenz’s script as “a love letter to Boca Raton and to making a community.”

“Boca” had its roots in a short piece titled, “Stay, Please.” The Juilliard-trained Provenz wrote it in 2019 for Barrington’s annual 10X10 New Play Festival. The single mom to a 10-year-old son has a day job working as Barrington’s development director, but she says she submitted it anonymously, and it became the hit of the festival. She wrote a second short play, and after that, Boyd and Barrington commissioned her to write an evening of short plays for the company’s senior actors. Inspired in part by an aunt who lives in Delray Beach, she began working on “Boca,” a play aimed at delighting audiences and making them laugh.

“During COVID, Julie called and asked, ‘How’s that play going?’ They really needed a comedy for last summer,” Provenz recalls. “I’ve been a playwright for 20 years, but this was the biggest platform I’d ever had.”

While writing “Boca,” Provenz wasn’t just dealing with the pressure of a deadline for a high-profile production.

“It was a bizarre existence. I would wake up at 5 a.m., writing to try to make myself laugh. Then I’d take my son to school, go in for radiation, then go to work,” says the 46-year-old playwright, who was undergoing breast cancer treatment at the time. “But it never felt like such a big deal. We’re all always going through something.”

“Boca” premiered last summer in a tent with 200 socially distanced seats and a masked audience. As with so many outdoor productions, noise was sometimes a factor – the actors had to wear microphones – and the weather was, well, unpredictable.

“Doing it in August was a tremendous challenge,” says Boyd, who plans to retire at the end of the 2022 season from the company she cofounded in 1995. “If it was hot outside, it was 95 degrees in the tent, and the actresses wear wigs – it’s hot with a wig on your head. If it was cold, we had to bring heaters into the tent. I had long johns on.”

Provenz, who notes that the temperature at the first Barrington preview was 55 degrees, says of this second production, “I’m so thrilled we will have walls!”

The actors who will bring “Boca” to life in GableStage’s space at the Biltmore Hotel are Avi Hoffman, Beverly Blanchette, Deborah Kondelik and Barbara Bonilla, all based in South Florida; and Robert Zukerman, a veteran of 16 Barrington Stage productions who appeared in last summer’s world premiere.

Originally, the play was made up of a dozen short pieces performed by three women and three men, all playing more than one role. Now, “Boca” has been slimmed down to 10 plays done by a trio of women (each playing two parts) and two men (Hoffman plays two roles, Zukerman three). The script touches on myriad subjects: life, death, romance, marital malaise, toxic homeowner associations, friendship, adventure, love, loneliness.

“Jessica is a terrific playwright. I’ve never met a younger woman writer who can write older characters so believably, especially older men,” says Zukerman, who appreciates strong roles for performers who have honed their craft over many years. “You know, we’re still here, and our experiences are important. Nothing bores me more than going to see a play about twentysomethings and their angst.”

Zukerman is also happy about the change of venue from outside in a tent to inside in a theater.

“I came to the conclusion that only pachyderms should perform under a tent. Now we can find the subtleties and explore the more serious, moving stuff. And we won’t be shrieking into microphones,” he says.

Hoffman, whose most recent GableStage appearance was in his play-with-music, “Joe Papp at the Ballroom,” in December, agrees that Provenz has a gift for creating compelling older characters.

“She gets their cadence, their struggles, their perspective, their wisdom,” he says. “It would be so easy to turn this into a stereotypical farce or comedy, but it’s not. These are real people with real problems … This is about people from all over the world who come to Boca, bringing their experiences and trying to figure out how to get old. How do you approach the last chapters of a life?”

Of the women in the play, only Blanchette has appeared at GableStage before. She likens the comedy in “Boca” to the style of “Modern Family.”

“It’s so funny that some of it is almost ridiculous, but there’s a subtle sentimentality. It’s heartfelt, with a message that isn’t overstated. I find myself easily moved to happy tears,” she says.

“There is definitely a through line with the characters and their relationships, one that culminates in the second-to-last scene,” observes Kondelik. “It’s a blast, but it has such poignant moments.”

Bonilla, a bilingual Cuban-American actor who grew up in New York, quips that she has been playing “old Jewish women since I was 14.” When she became aware of “Boca,” her thought was, “Oh my gosh, I have to audition for this. I know these people. I have been playing these people … Jessica just nailed so many things that happen in a 55+ community – the gossip, the Zoom board meetings, the card games.”

Bonilla knows about communities with rules. She lives in a home in Boynton Beach where the house numbers, exterior colors and mailboxes have to be just so.

“You’re independent, but not really. A lot of individuality is lessened,” she says. “At this stage of life, you’ve gotta laugh.”

Boyd and Provenz have been in South Florida together before, but not to work on a play. In late January each year, the women take fundraising trips to the region to raise money for Barrington, renting a car to drive around the state having breakfast, lunch and dinner with supporters. But as well as they know each other, Boyd was surprised by Provenz’s gift for crafting a comedy.

“Jessica has a wickedly funny voice,” Boyd says. “I didn’t realize she was so funny. You don’t [usually] laugh a lot when you’re raising money.”

 

WHAT: “Boca” by Jessica Provenz

WHEN: Preview 8 p.m. April 22, opening 8 p.m. April 23; regular performances 2 and 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 7 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through May 22, 2022

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

COST:  $35-$65 

INFORMATION: 305-445-1119; gablestage.org/boca

 

To read Christine Dolen’s review for “Boca,” click here. 

 

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

 

Culture, politics and romance explored in Miami New Drama’s ‘The Cuban Vote’

From left, Kristian Bikic, Marcela Paguaga, Evelyn Perez, Jonathan Nichols-Navarro, Carmen Pelaez and Andhy Mendez explore Miami politics in “The Cuban Vote.” (Photo/Rafael Guillén)

Playwright, actor and activist Carmen Pelaez is one dynamic woman. Outspoken, imaginative, always ready to fight for a better Miami, Pelaez has played a variety of roles in her family inspired works and in plays by others.

But during a talkback after Miami New Drama’s world premiere of her art world drama “Fake,” moderator-journalist Mirta Ojito pointed out that Pelaez had thus far avoided romance in her writing.

“I said, ‘I don’t write anything romantic because I don’t like writing tragedy,’” the playwright quipped. “Being a big girl, knowing how society sees you, I never thought I’d play a romantic lead.”

Never say never, as the saying goes.

With previews beginning April 22 and an official opening April 30, “The Cuban Vote” – written by and starring Pelaez – embroils her character in a race for Miami mayor, with a distinct romantic undercurrent loosely inspired by William Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.”

“I always loved the dynamic of the relationship in ‘The Taming of the Shrew,’” Pelaez says. “I only ever fall for people when they’re really challenging.”

Miami New Drama’s cofounder and artistic director Michel Hausmann commissioned “The Cuban Vote” — the company’s third Pelaez play. “Fake” was the first, then came her short play, “Strapped,” part of the company’s innovative Drama League Award-winning “Seven Deadly Sins” production from November 2020 through January 2021.

Continuing to support Miami-based artists, bringing back accomplished Miamians who have built prominent careers elsewhere, and creating seasons that feature only world premieres are all part of Hausmann’s vision for Miami New Drama.

“We’ve been a very aspirational theater company. We want to be a theater that only does world premieres, with most of them in conversation with our community. We’ve arrived at that moment — we’ve commissioned a lot of work,” Hausmann says.

“The Cuban Vote” is a comedy centering on the mayoral campaign of Carolina “Caro” Clarens (Pelaez), a blunt-to-a-fault candidate whose passion for public service was ignited when she worked with her late father, a former mayor.

Although many admire her intellect and ideas, Carolina’s penchant for brutal honesty has hurt her in the polls. So hotshot D.C. political consultant Alejandro “Alex” Mesa (Andhy Mendez) is brought on board to polish the candidate’s rough edges – thus becoming a kind of 21st century Petruchio to Carolina’s outspoken Kate, though without the blatant misogyny.

“Carmen spends the entire play making fun of herself. Carolina is an exaggerated version of Carmen. She makes fun of Miami, the Cuban community, tech bros, the failures of government,” Hausmann says. “It has to resonate with Miami and speak truth to power so we see our own defects. It’s hilarious — it shows that ‘the Cuban vote’ is not a monolith.”

To bring the play to fruition, Hausmann paired Pelaez with a Miami artistic expat he greatly admires, director Loretta Greco.

The artistic director of San Francisco’s famed Magic Theatre was recently named the first woman artistic director in the 40-year history of Boston’s Huntington Theatre Co. Her lengthy resume includes directing on Broadway, off-Broadway and at regional theaters, including Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse. In 1978, she was the Silver Knight Award winner in drama — and, after earning degrees from Loyola University and Catholic University, she came home to teach drama at her alma mater, Southwest Miami High School, in the 1980s.

Though Hausmann had earlier asked Greco to take on different Miami New Drama projects, she always had conflicts. But he persisted.

“Michel just wouldn’t give up.  I thought, ‘OMG, there’s someone with the same tenacity I have,’” Greco recalls. “I read the play, and thought it had been so long since I’ve been connected to Miami and Cuba. I felt, ‘This is really good, but it could be great.’”

When Greco is working on a world premiere — and she’s done more than two  dozen — it’s her practice to sit with the playwright and go over the script line by line, asking questions and giving notes.

Pelaez “did a very thorough, rigorous revision,” she says. “We wanted to know how substantive this could be without becoming part of the partisan noise. The play talks about issues Miamians care about, but it doesn’t get into the red-blue weeds.”

For her part, Pelaez is thrilled to be working with Greco.

“My first draft was horrible. Michel was great at homing in on what worked and what didn’t.  He asked me to work with Loretta,” the playwright says. “Within a minute and a half, I was in love with her. She pinpointed exactly the things I also knew … It’s been a real partnership.  She looked at problems and made suggestions, but she was never prescriptive.”

The play is performed by six Cuban-American actors, all living in or originally from Miami.

Mendez, who plays the political consultant, previously appeared in Miami New Drama’s “Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy,” “The Cubans” and “Seven Deadly Sins.” He most recently played Fidel Castro in the world premiere of Eduardo Machado’s “Celia and Fidel” at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. Among his extensive film, TV and stage highlights, Mendez was directed by Pulitzer Prize-winning Miami playwright Nilo Cruz in the “Sotto Voce” — and he likens Greco’s directing style to Cruz’s.

Marcela Paguaga, a New World School of the Arts graduate, plays Carolina’s sister, the social media wizard Blanca, with Evelyn Perez as their wise mother, Ofelia. Kristian Bikic is Benji Carbonell, a pal of Alex Mesa’s and a guy with two things on his mind: marrying Blanca (who, he believes, can’t wed until Carolina does) and making a killing in bitcoin.

Los Angeles-based Jonathan Nichols-Navarro, born in Havana and raised in Hialeah, plays the guayabera-wearing, old-school politician Gilberto Ruiz, a mayoral-race late entry who threatens to upend Carolina’s campaign. Once Gilberto is in, the contest becomes a study in contrasts: The younger Carolina remains focused on substantive issues (fair pay, climate change, housing, homelessness), while the cagey-but-folksy Gilberto represents an older, more conservative generation comfortable with special interest money and ready to use the hot-button words “communism” and “socialism” as weapons.

“I’d describe the play as ‘West Wing’ meets ‘Veep.’ There’s an urgency to it as well as comedy. But if people take anything away, it’s a love story,” Mendez says. “Carmen is a fair person. She doesn’t say one side is good and the other is bad. She knows how to maneuver the conversation without attacking one side or the other. It’s a piece about communication.”

Mendez also thinks that the way Pelaez strategically uses Spanish in the play — words here and there, sometimes in the middle of a sentence that is otherwise in English — rings very, very true.

“It’s genius. We live in a city that’s so different from any other one. We’re experts in starting a conversation in English and finishing it in Spanish,” he says.

Nichols-Navarro played the lector in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Anna in the Tropics” at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in 2004. Playing Gilberto in “The Cuban Vote,” he says, poses a different kind of challenge.

“You have to make him lovable, charming and conniving … I use an accent. He’s an old guy from the old country, the refugee who straddled the island and the Florida peninsula all his life,” the actor says. “I come in, get laughs and leave. You almost don’t believe someone would vote for him, until you look at the last few years.”

Campaign ads and videos are an integral part of the storytelling in “The Cuban Vote,” so one day recently Nichols-Navarro donned Gilberto’s omnipresent guayabera and went with a crew to Little Havana.

“It’s the most Cuban I’ve felt in a long, long time. They put me in a rum barrel [Gilberto’s method of transit from Cuba] in front of a picture of the Malecón. I rolled cigars. I went to a senior home, then danced and serenaded three women. I played a game of dominoes,” he says. “Listen, if you play even half of that video, the audience will fall in love with Gilberto.”

Paguaga, who played singer Margarita Maria Mendoza in the long-running immersive hit, “The Amparo Experience,” agrees that Pelaez got the substance and style of Miami’s Cuban community just right.

“Carmen is a powerhouse. Everyone on that stage is [like] someone you know,” she says. “I grew up in Hialeah, and I tell people my native language is Spanglish. For me, it’s organic. It feels natural.”

Bikic, who’s returning to Miami after working in Los Angeles and taking a pandemic career pause, is the son of a Cuban mother and an Argentine father. He describes himself as looking like “a super gringo,” and acknowledges that in the past he kept his cultural heritage at bay. But “The Cuban Vote” has already done more for him than giving him a role in a world premiere.

“It’s cool to represent a different type in this population. [During rehearsals], I’ve learned more about my culture and embracing it. I want Miamians to come see this play,” Bikic says.  “Carmen’s writing is sharp, smart, funny and true. The accuracy that’s in this script is crazy.”

That Pelaez, the grandniece of famed Cuban artist Amelia Peláez, would get Cuban-American Miami so right is no surprise. She grew up here, got her training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and lived in New York for a time, then came home after the success of her hit solo show, “Rum & Coke.”

In terms of politics, she has worked with local and national campaigns, and she has been involved with the Miami Freedom Project, founded by her sister Ana Sofia Pelaez and the late Patrick Hidalgo. “The Cuban Vote” is dedicated to that organization.

“This is highly emotional. Anything involving Cuban politics is a third rail – you have to make sure that any criticism considers all sides,” Pelaez says. “The day the play was due to Miami New Drama, Patrick died … It was an incredible shock. So much of what I learned about political service I learned from Patrick.”

Her newest role, she says, is and isn’t like her.

“I really summoned my vulnerability to create her. Her approach to political work is the same, but I’m not nearly as confident. I’m stubborn, but I’m not as arrogant. I don’t want to play me,” Pelaez says. “She’s awesome, amazing. She holds on a lot tighter to what matters. Her quick humor is modeled on my personality.”

Such as?

“People have asked me to run for office, but I have zero interest in service,” she says. “I am not strategic.  She has a plan for everything. I would be a nice dictator.”

 

WHAT: Miami New Drama’s world premiere of “The Cuban Vote” by Carmen Pelaez

WHEN: Previews April 22-24 and 29; opening night 8 p.m. April 30 by invitation only; after that, performances are 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday, through May 15, 2022

WHERE: Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach

COST: $51.50-$71.50

INFORMATION: 305-674-1040 or colonymb.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.

 

Review: Like ‘SNL’ in the early days, ‘Not Ready For Prime Time’ is a work in progress

Chris Ferrer (far right) as Lorne Michaels manages some unhappy stars in “Not Ready for Prime Time.” (Photo/George Schiavone)

So much has happened since “Not Ready for Prime Time,” a play by Miamians Erik J. Rodriguez and Charles A. Sothers, first made audiences laugh.

Two years after the play’s 2014 world premiere production by New Theatre at the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center, that influential South Florida company (which commissioned and premiered Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Anna in the Tropics”) went out of business.

But Rodriguez and Sothers (the latter the cofounder and artistic director of the nonprofit youth company, Roxy Theatre Group) kept the faith and kept working on their script about the launch and early years of NBC’s now-iconic, late-night comedy show, “Saturday Night Live,” aka “SNL.”

The pair forged new relationships with producers. Miami-Dade County built the sleek new Westchester Cultural Arts Center at the entrance to Tropical Park and chose Roxy to manage the facility and its 200-seat, black-box theater. A planned relaunch of “Not Ready for Prime Time” on New Year’s Eve 2021 was postponed as the COVID-19 pandemic lingered. Then, a key producer of the show, George Cabrera, died suddenly of a heart attack in late January at age 44.

Through it all, “Not Ready for Prime Time” keeps moving forward – and now it’s back with a fresh production and a second chance.

Running through April 17, 2022, at the Westchester center, the production has been shaped and staged by director Conor Bagley. The audience is asked to play along, with theatergoers pretending they’re at a live taping in Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan. A four-piece band holds forth, and when “Applause” signs are illuminated, the enthusiastic crowd is only too happy to oblige.

The show’s narrator – at least through the first act of a play that runs well over 2 1/2 hours, with intermission – is the man who created “Saturday Night Live,” Lorne Michaels (Chris Ferrer). The Canadian producer and showrunner, who (except for a five-year period from 1980 to 1985) has been at the helm of “SNL” since it launched in 1975 with George Carlin as host, tells us up-front exactly the kind of subversive late-night comedy show he’s determined to create: something “absurd, young and hip … and if you don’t like it, get the f**k out of the way.”

So within minutes, the audience gets not only the measure of Michaels but an idea of just how uncensored this trip through early “SNL” history will be.

We watch as actor-comedians Gilda Radner (Dayana Corton), John Belushi (Ryan Crout), Dan Aykroyd (Kristian Lugo), Chevy Chase (Caleb Scott), Garrett Morris (Roderick Randle), Jane Curtin (Ilana Isaacson) and Laraine Newman (Isabella Lopez) are hired, develop relationships and struggle to adjust to fast, massive fame.

After breakout star Chase decamps for Hollywood, Bill Murray (René Granado, who also does double-duty as NBC producer Dick Ebersol) joins the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” and makes the ever-shifting romantic alliances more complex.

Since the original “SNL” material is copyright-protected, Rodriguez and Sothers have written sketches for the cast to perform. Some are quite funny. Others, not so much. There are depictions of or allusions to Belushi’s memorable samurai, the Coneheads, Murray’s cheesy lounge singer, the “Nerds” sketches with Radner as Lisa Loopner and Murray as Todd DiLaMuca. Chase sits at the Weekend Update anchor desk, deadpan and ever-ready for a pratfall.

But – and this is a big but – for all the laughs, the playwrights remain focused on illuminating what went on behind the scenes.

“Not Ready for Primetime” is overstuffed with exposition (it could easily be trimmed by 20 to 30 minutes). The flaws of nearly every character are revealed then reemphasized: the drug habit that would kill Belushi at 33; Newman’s heroin use; Morris’ drug use and roiling anger at workplace racism; Radner’s bulimia and loneliness; Aykroyd and Murray’s damaging womanizing within the cast. That warts-and-all look at the dark side of success gets hammered home, again and again and again.

Another challenge for Bagley and the performers has been deciding how closely the actors should hew to the stars they’re portraying without doing an impersonation. Mostly, the actors play a dichotomy: There’s a difference between their persona as an “SNL” star doing a sketch and who they are in writing sessions or personal encounters.

Corton, for example, is quite deft in the way she evokes Radner as Lisa Loopner, Baba Wawa or Roseanne Roseannadanna. But when she’s “just” Gilda, she comes off as a pretty, sweet young woman who’s not easy to tell apart visually from Lopez’s perpetually dissatisfied Newman. Isaacson plays the most arguably adult performer in the bunch, but isn’t much like Curtin at all.

Crout, who looks a lot like Belushi and can skew his face in the same here-comes-trouble way, is compelling even if he doesn’t radiate a similar sense of unpredictable danger. Lugo is a charismatic actor who isn’t a bit like Aykroyd, nor does he bother with Aykroyd’s Canadian-flavored accent.

Scott is stuck playing Chase as an insufferable, insensitive narcissist – which he does well – but he is a much finer actor than you would know from his character here. Randle is really fine and furious as Morris, and the staging emphasizes the performer’s sense of exclusion.  The handsome Granado, who is fine as Michaels’ supporter and foil Ebersol, isn’t at all like Murray but rises to the occasion in his bits with Corton’s Radner. Ferrer is both a steady hand and a sometimes volatile and foul-mouthed presence as Michaels in the legendary producer’s youth.

The design team, working within the theater’s limited black-box space, gets the ’70s vibe right, from Jorgina Fernandez’s costumes (check out Morris’ white platform shoes) and Cindy Pearce’s wigs (none more striking than the one for Roseanne Roseannadanna) to Andrew Rodriguez-Triana’s necessarily compact set with its movable side units. Sound designer Ulises Otero, lighting designer Tony Galaska and music director-keyboard player Douglas McCall all contribute to the “SNL” vibe.

Like Michaels since the nascent days of “SNL,” this play has ambitions.

Those involved with the play would love for it to have a larger, longer life, and it’s a good thing that – thanks to the Roxy Theatre Group, Grove House Productions and Broadway Factor – the script is getting a second look with Bagley at the helm and new actors in the roles. Truth be told, the audience – unmasked, sipping wine and ready to party – laughs a lot and seems to have a great time.

Could “Not Ready for Prime Time” be better, more incisive, more balanced in its depiction of the highs and lows of the characters’ lives, on TV and off? Yes. That’s part of new play development, and it can make all the difference.

 

WHAT: “Not Ready for Prime Time”

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays; through April 17, 2022

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

COST: $39-$59

INFORMATION: 305-722-5674; notreadyforprimetimeplay.com

 

To read a preview of this play, click here. 

 

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.