Miami playwright Gina Montét voices a new mom’s fears in ‘Overactive Letdown’
Written By Christine Dolen March 30, 2022 at 1:14 PM
The characters played by Alex Alvarez and Lindsey Corey contemplate life in the new play, “Overactive Letdown.” (Photo courtesy of Morgan Sophia Photography)
From extensive research and personal experience, Miami playwright Gina Montét knows that pregnancy, childbirth and new motherhood are anything but simple.
Baby showers and gender reveal parties, natural childbirth options, the adventures of nursing or of getting the baby on a strict schedule — these are all “normal” parts of the journey, if we’re to believe the detailed information in that pregnancy bible, “What To Expect When You’re Expecting,” or on websites like TheBump.com. But don’t believe everything you read.
Montét, whose play “Overactive Letdown” is getting a world premiere production at Boca Raton’s Theatre Lab, has caught one of a playwright’s brass rings just now.
Written in 2018-19 when Montét was part of the Playwright Development Program run by Miami-Dade County’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the script continued to evolve through various avenues: at the Playwrights’ Center and the Center for the Performing Arts in Minneapolis; with Florida International University’s The Greenhouse play development program; and as part of Theatre Lab’s 2020 New Play Festival. But Montét and any other playwright would tell you that a full production is the real beginning of a play’s potential ongoing life.
Montét’s aim in “Overactive Letdown” is to explore how societal and personal expectations, isolation, hormonal changes and severe sleep deprivation contribute to postpartum depression — or, in extreme cases, postpartum psychosis.
Initially, “Overactive Letdown” seems to be a playful exploration of expectations vs. reality, with some naivete thrown in for good measure. In the dark, before the stage lights come up, we hear the voices of Christine (Lindsey Corey) and Mark (Timothy Mark Davis). Are they having sex? Sure sounds like it.
Wrong. Hubby is actually making a plaster cast of his pregnant wife’s belly and breasts so that once the baby arrives — soon, really soon — it can be decorated and then adorn a wall in the nursery.
The new parents (played by Timothy Mark Davis and Lindsey Corey) cope with the stresses of life with a newborn baby. (Photo courtesy of Morgan Sophia Photography)
In that getting-to-know-them first scene, we learn that Christine and Mark are excited, funny and focused on their life-changing transition into parenthood. She’s hyper-organized, with baby minutiae arranged in color-coded binders. He’s game but doesn’t always listen. He’s also ready to take on extra work so she can be an at-home mom.
Post-delivery, the world inside the couple’s modest Miami apartment feels markedly different.
Baby Jack arrived by C-section, which has left Christine with guilt and pain. Nursing soon becomes a nightmare of excruciatingly sore breasts and a problematic overactive letdown reflex: The mother’s milk comes out so fast and at such a volume that the baby can choke or stop feeding.
Not wanting to see her controlling mother or anyone else, Christine burrows into new-baby isolation, sinking into loneliness, worry and feelings of inadequacy, the latter heightened by a judgmental lactation consultant and a breezily oblivious friend (both played by Maha McCain).
Sometimes, she finds escape and respite in Netflix movies. Montét serves up a series of male cinematic archetypes played by Alex Alvarez: a wealthy Regency-era landowner; a lover on a doomed ship; a man-of-few-words cowpoke; a seemingly friendly cop who deepens Christine’s fears; a final ominous presence. As the 90-minute play goes on, she spirals into the darkest place imaginable.
Theatre Lab’s premiere production is in the infinitely capable hands of director Margaret M. Ledford, an artist who has been attached to the play for some time, as have Corey and Alvarez. With grace and precision, she helps guide the characters and the audience on the play’s journey from joy-filled hope to the depths of despair.
Corey gives a richly complex performance as a young woman who innocently imagines she’ll be able to catch up on her reading and TV watching whenever her baby is napping. Instead, increasingly frantic and detached from reality, Corey’s Christine does her best to conceal how mental illness is infiltrating her every thought. It’s a powerful, difficult role, and Corey meets its shifting challenges.
Lindsey Corey’s Christine begins experiencing movie-fueled fantasies, played out here by Maha McCain and Alex Alvarez. (Photo courtesy of Morgan Sophia Photography)
As her husband, Davis is engaging and amusing, then increasingly disturbed and put off by his wife’s behavior. Because Mark is meant to be off working a lot — thus underscoring Christine’s isolation and making time for her movie-fueled fantasies — Davis has only a moderate amount of stage time, which is too bad, because his interactions with Corey’s Christine are illuminating.
McCain and Alvarez both have the pleasurable challenge of playing multiple characters.
McCain is first seen as a belle who doesn’t want to marry Alvarez’s Regency landowner (think “Bridgerton”), then as the lactation consultant whose baby-centric words make Christine utterly miserable, then as a supermom friend whose mastery of all baby-related things sends Christine spiraling further.
The handsome Alvarez, who shifts accents as he breathes life into those cinematic archetypes, becomes increasingly dangerous to Christine. Conjured from her imagination, embodying her worst fears made real, Alvarez becomes a striking, magnetic, ominous force.
Theatre Lab’s scenic designer Michael McClain has given Christine and Mark a living space that looks like a neat, if older, Miami apartment, one with a jalousie front door that becomes the portal to Christine’s fears. Lighting designer Eric Nelson and sound designer Matt Corey summon the characters’ fantasy worlds, the last one a nightmare straight out of a horror movie. Costume designer Dawn C. Shamburger underscores Christine’s changing physical state and psychological deterioration.
Often, a first production of any play can underscore what works, what doesn’t, what could make the script stronger.
Theatre Lab’s intimate stage makes the movie sequences more challenging to pull off, physical proximity blurring the line between fantasy and reality. The play has been described as a “dark thriller,” but though it is ultimately dark, the “thriller” part doesn’t quite fit. Tonally, its shift from happy anticipation to stark tragedy is ultimately jolting.
Montét, mother to three boys, notes in the play’s program that she experienced some postpartum depression, had a C-section and, while home with her third son, binge-watched movies — all experiential threads woven into the script. But in creating Christine and writing “Overactive Letdown,” she wanted to craft a play about “the agonizing shame and secrecy that can accompany mental illness.”
New motherhood can be joyous and exhausting, fulfilling and exasperating, often on the same day. Or in the same hour. But for some unlucky women, the darkness consumes the light. In “Overactive Letdown,” Montét gives them voice.
WHAT:Theatre Lab world premiere of “Overactive Letdown”
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays, through April 10, 2022
WHERE: Parliament Hall at Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton
COST: $32 and $40 for general admission; $17 and $25 for faculty and staff; $10 for students
Live from Westchester, it’s ‘Not Ready for Prime Time’!
Written By Michelle F. Solomon March 29, 2022 at 5:09 PM
From left, Dayana Corton, Rene Granado, Ilana Isaacson, Isabella Lopez and Chris Ferrer star in the play as famous “Saturday Night Live” cast members. (Photo courtesy of Sebastian Lannes)
This isn’t the first time “Not Ready for Prime Time” opens in South Florida.
But this time around, the original play is most definitely ready, according to its Miami-Latin X creators, Erik J. Rodriguez and Charles A. Sothers.
The show — which chronicles the early years of the TV classic, “Saturday Night Live” — premiered in 2014, produced by New Theatre at the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center. Then, it underwent retooling.
Years later, with new producers at the helm and a new venue, the show was ready to ring in New Year’s Eve on Dec. 31, 2021, at the Westchester Cultural Arts Center — until the COVID-19 Omicron variant sidelined it.
But the moment has finally arrived: The revamped version opens in Westchester on Thursday, March 31, 2022.
Dayana Corton plays Gilda Radner in “Not Ready for Prime Time.” (Photo courtesy of Charles Sothers)
“There have been a few hiccups here in us opening, but like Charlie and I say: This is the little show that could,” Rodriguez said. “The show is an absolute escape. It is good that we are coming back out of COVID. It’s a way for audiences to go back in time before there ever was a pandemic.”
The play revolves around eight comedians and creator Lorne Michaels, all part of the beginnings of the NBC sketch comedy show that would become part of pop-culture history after premiering on Oct. 11, 1975. Like the scrappy origins of “Saturday Night Live,” the pair’s coming together to write this play was just as serendipitous.
Two decades ago, Sothers cofounded the nonprofit Roxy Theatre Group, a youth performing arts training center in Kendall. Rodriguez was a student there.
“We were doing our annual holiday show, ‘Holly Jolly Follies’ … we were backstage and he started telling me about a book he was reading,” Sothers said.
Rodriguez interjected: “I was on this ‘Saturday Night Live’ kick, reading ‘Live From New York’ and Gilda Radner’s memoir.”
Ilana Isaacson stars as Jane Curtin in a “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update skit. (Photo courtesy of Sebastian Lannes)
During that conversation, Rodriguez brought up the infamous story of a fight between Chevy Chase and Bill Murray during the show’s second season. This led to the idea of a play, and they put pen to paper almost immediately.
The focus wasn’t just the inner workings of the show, but also everything that surrounds celebrity culture.
“How much do we really know these people? That was the question. What’s their human story? What’s the backstory?” Sothers said. “And when it came to ‘SNL,’ how did they get this experimental new thing that was just starting on television to become this behemoth pop cultural institution that we know now?”
The playwrights tell the stories of what was happening backstage, as the newcomers were catapulted to stardom, from Laraine Newman and John Belushi’s drug addictions to Gilda Radner’s eating disorder.
Playwright Charles A. Sothers cofounded the nonprofit Roxy Theatre Group, a youth performing arts training center. (Photo courtesy of Bryant Gutierrez)
Playing the roles of the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” and their show’s creator are South Florida actors Dayana Corton (Gilda Radner), Ryan Crout (John Belushi), Chris Ferrer (Lorne Michaels), Rene Granado (Bill Murray), Ilana Isaacson (Jane Curtin), Isabella Lopez (Laraine Newman), Kristian Lugo (Dan Aykroyd) and Roderick Randle (Garrett Morris). New York-based actor Caleb Scott plays Chevy Chase.
“Not Ready For Prime Time” marks a step forward for Sothers’ Roxy Theatre Group, which is now the managing company at the Westchester Cultural Arts Center at Tropical Park. The 200-seat black box theater and art gallery space was financed by Miami-Dade County as part of the voter-approved Building Better Communities General Obligation Bond program. The theater had its official inauguration ceremony in June 2021.
“We’ve been around for two decades. Now this great resource opens up in Westchester. We’re going to produce quality shows here,” he said.
Sothers’ Roxy Theatre Group is also one of three producing partners for “Not Ready for Prime Time.” The others are Grove House Productions and Broadway Factor.
For the play’s new iteration, New York-based Conor Bagley took over directing duties and has helped shape the script.
“He’s been very insightful in many ways, including having someone asking the questions that maybe you didn’t consider before,” Rodriguez said. “[Bagley] has really helped develop the concept.”
Erik J. Rodriguez is one of the Miami-based cowriters of “Not Ready for Prime Time.” (Photo courtesy of Madina Aiupova)
There’s an element that didn’t exist in the first script: The audience is now transported to NBC Studio 8H at Rockefeller Center to experience what a taping might have been like in the 1970s.
“The whole play is structured like an episode of ‘SNL,'” Bagley said. “We have a band that plays like the late-night show’s musical act, and creator Lorne Michaels plays the host while he’s also the one that takes us through the story of ‘SNL.’ Audiences are in the studio watching everything come together.”
The playwrights also took to heart feedback from previous audiences and found that the original seemed to lack comedy — after all, the comedic sketches are at the heart of the TV show’s success.
“We couldn’t use their original sketches because of copyright issues, so we wrote our own,” Rodriguez said.
Putting themselves in the shoes of writers in 1975 was eye-opening, Sothers said.
“How do some of the characters translate today? John Belushi’s ‘Samurai’ was a hit in 1975, but now it’s cultural appropriation,” he said.
Still, “Samurai” is in the new show. “We couldn’t do it any other way or we’d be judging from the lens of the present,” Sothers said. “We had to write it as if we were there then. That was the only way it would make sense.”
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
Review: Zoetic’s ‘Side by Side by Sondheim’ is a highly entertaining, engaging memorial to a giant
Written By Christine Dolen March 21, 2022 at 7:31 PM
From left, Stuart Meltzer, Joline Mujica, Aloysius Gigl and Jeni Hacker promise some comedy in Zoetic Stage’s “Side by Side by Sondheim.” (Photo/Justin Namon)
During his singular career as a brilliant and influential composer-lyricist, the late Stephen Sondheim was nothing if not eclectic in his choice of subject matter. The vicissitudes of marriage, childhood trauma, and the price of creating art are just three of the themes Sondheim explored in his wide-ranging body of work.
Though Sondheim collaborated as a lyricist with great composers such as Leonard Bernstein (on 1957’s “West Side Story”), Jule Styne (1959’s “Gypsy”) and Richard Rodgers (1965’s “Do I Hear a Waltz?”), the 16 shows he created as both composer and lyricist between 1954 and 2003 made him an icon to generations of musical theater artists and audiences.
Sondheim, who died in November 2021 at age 91, has been celebrated in at least a half-dozen revues devoted to his work. The first of these, 1976’s “Side by Side by Sondheim,” is now playing at the Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater, where Miami’s Zoetic Stage is paying tribute to Sondheim’s art with art of its own.
“Side by Side by Sondheim” — the show and this production of it — seems simple enough. But, as with all things Sondheim, its riches run deep.
Aloysius Gigl performs a poignant rendition of “I Remember,” from Stephen Sonheim’s “Evening Primrose.” (Photo/Justin Namon)
Performed by three singers, a narrator and two pianists, the show includes tunes from “West Side Story,” “Gypsy,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Company,” “Follies,” “Anyone Can Whistle,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures,” and a 1966 television production of “Evening Primrose” — more than enough for a revue that runs two hours plus an intermission.
Because the revue was created in 1976, you’ll hear nothing from “Sweeney Todd,” “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Sunday in the Park with George,” “Into the Woods,” “Assassins,” “Passion” or “Road Show,” all post-’76 Sondheim musicals. Even so, you get some visual reminders of some of those shows via projected photos from past Zoetic productions.
Zoetic’s artistic director and cofounder, Stuart Meltzer, has a deep and abiding appreciation for Sondheim’s work, so much so that he has stepped into the role of narrator. He sings just a bit (the first bars of the opening number, “Comedy Tonight,” are his), helps drive the action, and offers context and insight through his narration. He is, in a word, charming.
And of course, since he’s also the show’s director, Meltzer (with the help of many collaborators onstage and off) is responsible for its tone. Zoetic’s “Side by Side” is playful, joyous, at times virtuosic. Here and there, a moment misses, but most meet Sondheim’s abundant challenges. The result is a highly entertaining, engaging, living piece of theater that also serves as a memorial to a giant.
Stuart Meltzer is the narrator and director of “Side by Side by Sondheim,” which is playing at the Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater through April. (Photo/Justin Namon)
With gorgeous two-piano accompaniment by music director Caryl Fantel and Jeff Hess, the versatile performers deliver everything from novelty songs to heartbreaking ballads. Jeni Hacker, Aloysius Gigl and Joline Mujica shift quickly from character to character, from solos to duets to group numbers. Three beautiful voices do justice to Sondheim, and then some.
Hacker and Gigl, who were paired as Mrs. Lovett and the title character in Zoetic’s “Sweeney Todd,” won Carbonell Awards as best actress and best actor in a musical for that show.
Hacker, who also starred as Fosca in Zoetic’s “Passion,” is an absolutely superb singing actor, as adroit with comedy (showcased in “The Boy From … ”) as she is with more serious Sondheim songs (“Send in the Clowns” — more on that in a moment). She also doubles as the show’s choreographer and fleet-footed tap dancer.
Gigl possesses a magnetic Broadway-caliber baritone, a voice that can summon tears (in “I Remember”), convey longing (“Pretty Lady”) or put the fear of God in you (“Could I Leave You?”). He’s also funny as he gazes into a hand mirror and sings “Tonight.” Think about it.
Mujica, a University of Miami graduate who played Tracy Turnblad in “Hairspray” at Actors’ Playhouse in 2011, has a lovely lyric soprano voice that doesn’t always land as impactfully as it should. “Losing My Mind,” for example, could be but isn’t yet a showstopper.
Speaking of showstoppers: Hacker’s “Send in the Clowns” is exactly that. The Grammy Award-winning number from “A Little Night Music” is among Sondheim’s best-known songs, recorded by Judy Collins, Frank Sinatra and others. Hacker delivers her version seated on a chaise longue, remaining still as her expressive voice and face take the audience on a journey of remembrance and regret. Hers is a truly exquisite, illuminating rendition.
Among other highlights of Zoetic’s “Side by Side” are Hacker’s cold-feet, furiously fast “Getting Married” (with great contributions from Gigl and Mujica); Gigl singing a self-deluding “You Must Meet My Wife;” Hacker and Mujica wallowing in double entendre as they sing “Can That Boy Foxtrot,” then singing a fierce “A Boy Like That,” followed by a tender “I Have a Love.”
From left, Jeni Hacker, Aloysius Gigl and Joline Mujica sing “Pretty Lady” from the musical, “Pacific Overtures.” (Photo/Justin Namon)
Other moments that don’t quite come off? “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” from “Gypsy,” in which the actors seem to be trying way too hard. A recurring bit in which an actor exits, followed by a loud crashing sound. The song-stuffed “Conversation Piece” near the end of the show in which the actors sing snippets of other Sondheim tunes but also repeat parts of numbers that have already been done in full.
To deliver the many shifting environments required for so many songs from so many shows, set designer Michael McKeever has created a playing area with versatile panels and screens. Tony Galaska’s lighting sometimes alters their colors, while McKeever-designed projections (with animation by Greg Duffy and projection mapping by Steven Covey) introduce still or moving images. One especially shimmering moment happens as Gigl sings an aching “I Remember,” images of snow and ice are projected, and Fantel and Hess conjure a soft snowfall through music.
Costume designer Marina Pareja supplies dozens of appropriate character pieces that can quickly be added or subtracted from an actor’s basic black outfit. Prop design is by Vanessa McCloskey (who is also the stage manager), and sound is by Matt Corey.
Although Sondheim himself has now exited the stage, his work lives on. “Company” is back on Broadway, and Steven Spielberg’s new take on “West Side Story” is up for seven Academy Awards. “Side by Side by Sondheim” serves as a reminder of a theater artisan’s greatness. And of what endures.
WHAT: Zoetic Stage presents “Side by Side by Sondheim”
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays (with additional performance 7:30 p.m. March 23, and no matinee on March 26); through April 10, 2022
WHERE: Carnival Studio Theater at Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami
Miami filmmaker’s ‘The Sweetest Girl’ tells authentic story of Haitian family
Written By Sergy Odiduro March 17, 2022 at 9:33 PM
Genji Jacques plays Lucias Goodman, the husband and father in “The Sweetest Girl.” Sandra Justice, seen in the background, plays his wife. (Photo/C.W. Griffin)
Miami Dade College entrepreneurship professor Yanatha Desouvre believes that when it comes to African-American cinema in general, and Haitian-American films in particular, there’s something sorely missing.
“People are hungry for authentic stories of people of color, Black people specifically in Miami, and authentic Haitian stories that have never been told before or are told in a different way,” says Desouvre.
His answer to that: the short film, “The Sweetest Girl,” which explores a forbidden love affair, a crumbling marriage, and the dynamics that come into play from both. It deliberately stays away from tropes often reserved for people of color, he says, and presents the dynamics of an everyday family, which is many times taken for granted in mainstream movies.
(Video courtesy of Yanatha Desouvre)
“The Sweetest Girl” was screened at the 2021 South Florida International Film Festival, where it won “Best Picture” in the Black and African category. Among the accolades in the festival circuit, it also garnered “Best Original Story” at the New York International Film Awards and “Best Short Film” at the New Jersey Film Awards. Next up, Desouvre is working on another Miami screening during Haitian Heritage Month in May.
“You get a chance to see a Haitian family,” says the film’s producer and co-screenwriter. “You get to see a husband, who happens to be a father, who is a professional policeman and who’s not corrupt. You get to see a wife that’s a mother, who is a professional journalist, who wants to not only find out about the truth about her marriage, but also the truth about politics in Haiti.
“You get to see this complex family, a Haitian family, which I thought I’d never see on television or anywhere in film.”
Genji Jacques, known as the “Haitian Denzel Washington,” plays husband and father Lucias Goodman. He says he drew inspiration from his favorite actor to help him play a role that delivers the following points: “Loyalty, honesty and being able to be upfront and forthcoming with whatever issues you’re dealing with in your marriage …
“I think the message is intriguing and it’s needed … Not only that but there’s a lot of symbolic messages in this movie that people can pick from.”
Haiti native Yanatha Desouvre is a filmmaker and Miami Dade College entrepreneurship professor. (Photo/Brittney Bomnin)
In addition to tackling matters of the heart, “The Sweetest Girl” addresses systemic issues in Desouvre’s native Haiti. The existence of “restaveks” (children who are sold into a modern-day slavery system) and the prevalence of gun violence echo throughout the 23-minute film.
“I am very proud to be part of something like this that brings awareness to an issue that Haiti is struggling with to this day,” says Ayomi Russell, who plays the role of a “restavek.”
Russell is African-American, not of Haitian descent, and says she learned a lot during the movie-making process.
“I didn’t know much about it before I joined this project, but once I joined it, I became a little bit more educated on something I was ignorant on,” she says.
Her role is also used to highlight other ongoing issues.
“We were dealing with colorism, sexism, all types of ‘isms’ in this story,” says Desouvre, pointing to prevailing perceptions of affluence or education based on the lightness of one’s skin. “Colorism is something we do in the Black community all the time.”
Seen being filmed is Ayomi Russell, who plays a “restavek” (a child sold into a modern-day slavery system) in “The Sweetest Girl.” (Photo/C.W. Griffin)
Russell can definitely relate. Once taunted for her ebony hue, she now is comfortable in her own skin.
“I grew up a victim of bullying because of my skin tone,” she says. “It took a very long time to get where I am, to get to the confidence that I have today. I started to get a little bit more comfortable because the whole movement happened where Black women were cutting off their perms and growing out their afro and accepting the way they look in their natural beauty and breaking out of European beauty standards. That’s when I really started to like myself for who I am and appreciate it.”
Russell hopes that others will be inspired by her presence in the film.
“One of my main goals in pursuing this career in acting is to create representation for little girls … and any woman that looks like me. I just want to change the way Hollywood thinks and how Hollywood casts,” she says.
Desouvre agrees that representation on screen, and even behind the scenes, matters.
He points out that many on his crew, which includes a large Miami-based crew, are of African-American or Haitian descent. This includes award winning composer Janice Muller, actress Reanna Ameline, and costume designer Prisca Milliance, who is a fashion instructor at Miami Dade College.
A dramatic scene in the award-winning “The Sweetest Girl.” Photo/C.W. Griffin)
Together with his co-screenwriter, Harry Jeudy, and director Samuel Ladouceur, Desouvre has another film in the works, which is titled “Flatbush” and set in a Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood in the 1990s. The full-length movie – expected to begin filming this summer- will serve as an additional opportunity to discuss issues such as xenophobia and the effects of crime.
“I was born in Haiti but raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., and as a child, I experienced xenophobia like, ‘Haitian, Haitian, go back to your nation,’” Desouvre says.
“Representation is so important to mental health because you get to see yourself, especially being Black and brown, in a nonstereotypical role and in a positive role. So this is really for the next generation to inspire them to see the light and the value within themselves,” he adds. “I think [the films] will also challenge other directors and producers to say, ‘Hey, you know what? We need to start bringing some positive messages and some symbols in our movies. So that we will reflect not only our people but Haiti as a whole in a positive light.’”
And for those who have already seen “The Sweetest Girl,” Desouvre has a message: He plans to address the movie’s final cliffhanger with a prequel that is currently in production.
“We don’t know if it’s going to be a series or a film,” he says. “But, yes, there’s a Part 2 coming. I’m on the 25th page.”
For more information on “The Sweetest Girl,” visit yanatha.com.
Review: Miami New Drama’s ‘When Monica Met Hillary’ sets off fireworks
Written By Christine Dolen March 7, 2022 at 8:59 PM
Danielle Skraastad, left, as Hillary Clinton meets with Kyra Kennedy’s Monica Lewinsky in the Miami New Drama world premiere of “When Monica Met Hillary.” (Photo/Ernesto Sempoll)
One question cascades into so many others: What would happen if Monica Lewinsky were to come face-to-face with Hillary Clinton for a private reckoning?
Playwright Winter Miller imagines that encounter as an intense, discomfiting, revelatory final scene in “When Monica Met Hillary,” her Miami New Drama-commissioned play now getting its world premiere at The Colony Theatre on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road.
Grounded in fact and Miller’s prodigious research, the play unfolds in a series of concise, quickly moving scenes.
They begin just after White House intern Lewinsky’s first private encounter with then-President Bill Clinton in 1995 and end some 27 years later with the meeting suggested by the play’s title – a meeting which becomes a debate between the 74-year-old former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state and two-time presidential candidate, and the 48-year-old Lewinsky, who now works to combat cyberbullying.
Between that beginning and ending, Miller considers the very different trajectories of the women’s lives, two vitally close relationships (Lewinsky’s with her mother, Marcia Lewis, and Clinton’s with her increasingly important political associate Huma Abedin), and the costs exacted by politics and fame.
Monica Lewinsky (Kyra Kennedy) meets up with her mother, Marcia Lewis (Mia Matthews). (Photo/Ernesto Sempoll)
The playwright also pinpoints generational and personal differences in feminist perspectives, points of view that factor into why Clinton and Lewinsky see the latter’s ruinous relationship with the former’s husband so differently.
“When Monica Met Hillary” is not, in any respect, a dry or heavy look at a 1990s scandal and its aftermath.
Miller and director Margot Bordelon shift the focus away from the women’s well-documented public personas, instead looking at how they may have reacted in private moments away from media scrutiny. Sorrow, fury, humor, calculation, despair and more come into play as the women cope with the fallout from the scandal that factored heavily into President Clinton’s impeachment in late 1998 (he was subsequently acquitted in a 1999 Senate trial).
Miller establishes the frank-to-a-fault nature of the relationship between Lewinsky (Kyra Kennedy) and her mother, Lewis (Mia Matthews), in the first scene.
The elegant Lewis meets her daughter in a pricey Washington, D.C., dress shop in mid-November 1995. Lewinsky, so excited she can barely get a sentence out, proceeds to give her mom a graphic step-by-step account of what the 22-year-old intern sees as a sexy romantic rendezvous with the president. Breathless, actually squealing more than once, she dismisses her mother’s cautionary advice.
Clinton (Danielle Skraastad) appears in the fourth scene, set in January 1998 on the morning after her husband’s confession that he’d lied to her about his relationship with Lewinsky.
She is angrily strategizing about how to cope with the coming fallout and how best to tell their daughter, Chelsea, the truth. Abedin (Rasha Zamamiri), the first lady’s former intern, offers her furious boss everything from soup to empathetic encouragement. Once she departs, a completely uncensored Clinton reams her husband out over the phone. Clearly, this is not a first offense.
Rasha Zamamiri as Huma Abedin, left, is consoled by Danielle Skraastad as Hillary Clinton. (Photo/Ernesto Sempoll)
“When Monica Met Hillary” is built in part on parallels as Clinton and Lewis, the older women, care for and nurture the younger ones.
When a hounded Lewinsky is hiding out at the Watergate apartment she shares with her mother, Lewis tries soup (the play’s comfort food), validation and emotional reassurance to keep her shattered daughter from doing anything drastic.
At a London hotel in 2011, as the pregnant Abedin is figuring out how she’ll cope with then-husband Anthony Weiner’s first sexting scandal, Clinton offers advice on handling the about-to-break crisis and getting beyond betrayal. Been there, done that, or as Clinton puts it, “I know all the words to that song.”
In less-adroit artistic hands, a “what if” play about a Monica Lewinsky-Hillary Clinton meeting might be unwieldy as it revisits so much history. But “When Monica Met Hillary” is 80 or so minutes of often riveting theater presented with clarity and thought-provoking emotional impact.
Augmented with a helpful-as-refresher timeline inserted into the play’s program, “When Monica Met Hillary” establishes the changing year and location via lighting designer Yuki Nakase Link’s projections at the beginning of each scene.
Reid Thompson’s set, a malleable space with striped pale-green and off-white wallpaper, swiftly transforms from the White House to a series of hotel rooms with the addition or subtraction of doorways and different furniture.
Underscored by sound designer and composer Palmer Hefferan, scene changes are so blink-of-an-eye brisk that the play feels as if it flows continuously. Kudos to director Bordelon for her vision and its execution.
With the character-transforming help of designer Dina El-Aziz’s costumes and Carol Raskin’s wigs, the actors look enough like the characters they’re playing that, for most in the audience, any mental images of the real-life women aren’t likely to intrude.
Playing Miller’s richly drawn roles, the performers go all-in with the fervor actors bring to originating a character in a significant play.
Danielle Skraastad portrays the 74-year-old former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state and two-time presidential candidate. (Photo/Ernesto Sempoll)
Skraastad shows us a carefully calibrated Hillary Clinton, a brilliant and ambitious woman who watches every word she utters in public but drops the filters with Abedin, railing after a 2007 college campaign stop, “Can we all agree to call preying on another woman’s husband a form of misogyny? And for Christ’s sake, yes, women are powerful, independent beings with sexual desire and agency! So let’s not take an autonomous woman, infantilize her and call her naive.”
Zamamiri’s Abedin has plenty to play as a woman undone by the idea that she, like her mentor, must navigate a marital scandal – not one, but two. She listens to Clinton’s advice but finally chooses a different path. Perhaps because the real Abedin chose to remain the woman behind the scenes for so many years of working with Clinton, Zamamiri most often registers as restrained and enigmatic.
As Lewinsky, Kennedy comes across at first as energetic and childlike, a Beverly Hills rich kid accustomed to validation, a girl who never had to work for anything. Lost after the scandal, taunted online by trolls, she eventually finds a purpose. Yet her in-person mea culpa to Clinton, particularly when the conversation veers into #MeToo territory, doesn’t go as planned. And in that critical final scene, the play’s payoff, Kennedy’s understandably nervous Monica doesn’t seem to have become a mature woman.
Though Matthews is playing the least-known figure in “When Monica Met Hillary,” her interpretation of Lewis is always assured and on point in terms of a mother fiercely protecting her daughter, often to the younger woman’s detriment. As the two visit a nail salon, her suggestions about ways in which her foundering child could change her life are pretty much soul-crushing.
The play’s final scene, the fulfillment of the title’s promise, mixes honesty, jolts of calculated cruelty and fireworks. Its final moments could be strengthened. But Miller’s artistic vision is powerful, making for an experience worth sharing and contemplating.
For Miami New Drama, Winter Miller imagines a Hillary Clinton-Monica Lewinsky face-off
Written By Christine Dolen March 2, 2022 at 7:47 PM
Danielle Skraastad portrays Hillary Clinton and Kyra Kennedy is Monica Lewinsky in Winter Miller’s new play. (Photo/Mauricio Donelli)
When Miami New Drama artistic director Michel Hausmann met playwright Winter Miller in 2017, the two were workshopping new plays at Utah’s Salt Lake Acting Co.
He was directing Hilary Bettis’ “Queen of Basel,” a commissioned new take on “Miss Julie” that bowed at The Colony Theatre in 2018. She was shaping her play, “No One Is Forgotten,” which premiered at New York’s Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in 2019.
The theater practitioners hit it off, and soon Hausmann was speaking with Miller about commissioning her to write a play for Miami New Drama. That play, “When Monica Met Hillary,” previews March 3-4 and opens March 5 at the company’s home in The Colony Theatre on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road, where it will run through March 27, 2022.
The multifaceted play begins in 1995 and ends at some time in the near-future with exactly what its title implies: a decades-delayed face-off or debate between Hillary Clinton, one of the most famous and accomplished women in the United States, and Monica Lewinsky, a younger woman forever linked to a scandalous White House affair with President Bill Clinton.
Initially, Hausmann proposed a different idea to Miller for her commission: What about a play focused on the late 1995 government shutdown, a standoff between President Clinton and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich?
“I was not interested in writing or watching a play about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich,” a bemused Miller says. “I told Michel I was interested in Monica Lewinsky. I had watched her TED Talk [“The Price of Shame” in 2015] and thought it was incredible. He said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ He’s been entirely hands-off throughout the process, though the one thing he did say was that he’d like me to have what he called a commercial hit.”
Hausmann laughs as he confirms Miller’s “When Monica Met Hillary” origin story.
“I come in with an idea, and the playwright comes in with a much better one,” he says. “This is a very powerful piece … It’s not angry. It’s not activist. It’s about extremely smart and prepared women who have had to clean up the messes the men in their lives made. It opens a window into the souls of women we think we know all too well. We start from scratch and meet them again in a new light.”
Winter Miller brought a feminist point of view to writing about the four women whose lives intersect in “When Monica Met Hillary.” (Photo/Winter Miller)
Directed by New York-based Margot Bordelon, whose major focus is on new play work, “When Monica Met Hillary” is a fast-moving, four-character play.
Kyra Kennedy plays Lewinsky, with South Florida actor Mia Matthews as her mother, Marcia Lewis. Danielle Skraastad portrays Clinton, and Rasha Zamamiri plays her aide, Huma Abedin, who served as vice chair of her 2016 presidential campaign – and whose marriage to U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner later imploded after his drawn-out sexting scandal.
Miller, who (like Lewinsky) was born in 1973, was working as a New York Times news clerk in 1998 when the scandal really hit the fan and the former White House intern’s face was everywhere. Story after story broke – the Starr Report from special counsel Kenneth Starr was issued in September; the House of Representatives impeached the president in December; the Senate acquitted him in February 1999 after a monthlong trial.
“Once we were familiar with the details, it was ‘enough is enough.’ The A section was [filled] with the Starr Report, the impeachment – the prurient and puritanical took up the news cycle. I remember being pissed at Clinton because I thought it meant he wouldn’t be able to govern,” the playwright recalls.
Miller, whose best-known play is 2006’s “In Darfur,” brought a feminist point of view to writing about the four women whose lives intersect in “When Monica Met Hillary.” She did prodigious research, tracking down other interns who were at the White House during Lewinsky’s time there, creating timelines, looking for “things off the beaten path, things behind the moments we know, things we never got to see. I wanted to be a fly on the wall.”
The result, which has become much leaner since Miller’s first draft, considers the mother-daughter relationship between Lewinsky and Lewis, as well as the dynamic of Clinton’s professional and personal relationship with Abedin – which has been, the play suggests, very much like a mother-daughter bond.
“We have been digging deep into the text, excavating it, defining it,” director Bordelon says. “I sent Winter a list of questions about clarifying the story, the characters and the timeline. With the actors working on it, the script has continued to evolve and change … It’s important to honor and respect these women, even though they have opposing points of view in the play.”
Kyra Kennedy (front left), Mia Matthews (rear left), Danielle Skraastad (front right) and Rasha Zamamiri (rear right) play four strong women in the Miami New Drama world premiere of “When Monica Met Hillary.” (Photo/Andrés Manner)
All of the actors agree that embodying women who are so well-known (Lewis excepted) involves conveying their essence, not doing an impersonation.
“There can be benefits of not trying to make a transformation into someone known by the audience,” says Skraastad, the play’s Clinton. “If you do that, the result can be impressive or unfortunate, but it distracts me from the conversation. I’m watching the actors behave.”
As for Lewinsky, she observes: “I was surprised by how important it felt to look again at that series of events, when someone who has not volunteered for a public life is catapulted into one in the most public way … She appeared to be acting out of a crush. She didn’t want to wreck a marriage or get a life in politics.”
Kennedy, the play’s Lewinsky, was born just three years prior to the affair. She has devoured all kinds of material about Lewinsky, watched the TED Talk, and come away impressed by the woman she’s playing.
“The TED Talk is inspiring. [After all this happened], she majored in psychology. She’s incredibly intelligent,” Kennedy says. “It’s been eye-opening and a gift that I was so young when it happened that I didn’t have preconceived notions.”
Zamamiri is getting married to her scientist fiancé in May and had been turning down multiple roles. But she found it impossible to resist playing Abedin in “When Monica Met Hillary.”
“This play is about four strong women doing everything in their power to succeed, but these men keep getting in the way … This is a story as old as time. Show me one powerful woman men haven’t tried to stomp down,” says Zamamiri. “What happened to Huma Abedin was a nightmare. She wanted to stay out of the public eye.”
The actor calls the Clinton-Abedin working relationship and friendship “beautiful” as captured by Miller; among the surprising-to-some facts that surface in the play is that Abedin was interning for the then-First Lady at the same time the Lewinsky-Clinton affair was happening. She thinks the play may cause some thinking about its subjects to shift.
“People are going to leave with a lot more questions and new perspectives on who Monica and Hillary were. I hope they’ll reflect on their own lives, and on injustices done to these women,” she says.
Director Margot Bordelon, who specializes in new play work, is staging “When Monica Met Hillary” for Miami New Drama. (Photo/Zack DeZon)
Matthews, who was part of Miami New Drama’s groundbreaking “Seven Deadly Sins” pandemic production in 2020-21, didn’t have nearly as much to go on in getting ready to play Lewinsky’s mother. Marcia Lewis participated in the 2018 documentary, “The Clinton Affair,” but she has kept a low profile since becoming her daughter’s rock, protector and confidante after the scandal broke.
Even so, “I didn’t have to find my way in,” says Matthews, who has drawn on her relationship with her two daughters while working on the play. “We’re so often cast as wives and mothers, and that’s it. These women are so powerful and multifaceted … I love the way Winter wanted to honor the truth and stick with what the truth might have been. She wasn’t villainizing or hero worshipping.”
Miller — whose children’s book, “Not a Cat: a memoir,” is expected to be published on March 22 — knew exactly what she wanted from the climactic final scene in “When Monica Met Hillary.”
“I wanted it to feel like a boxing match in which the opponents were not equally matched in terms of experience and regard,” she says. “It’s not a fair fight, but I wanted to find surprising sides of Hillary we could never imagine … For Monica, I used conjecture based on what I read or what she Tweets. She seems to be very honest about life, very grounded and intuitive, wanting to make life better for people who have been bullied.”
Kennedy sees the final scene as “a love letter or apology to Monica. It shows her as a fully formed human being. She’s debating with her past and the world via the vessel of Hillary Clinton.”
In staging the last scene, says Bordelon, “you want to craft it for maximum impact. You want people to leave with a greater respect for these women and their points of view … You never want it to skew into a cat fight. You want them to have an incredible debate.”
As for what the play could become in Miller’s eclectic career — maybe Hausmann’s vision of a much-produced hit? — the playwright is both realistic and ready.
“I write plays about things [that make] people afraid to produce them: abortions, genocide, hostage-taking,” she says. “I would like nothing more than full houses and people leaving talking about feminism.”
WHAT: Miami New Drama production, “When Monica Met Hillary,” by Winter Miller
WHEN: Previews 8 p.m. March 3-4, opens 8 p.m. March 5 (invitation only); after opening, performances are 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays (one Wednesday performance at 8 p.m. March 23); through March 27
WHERE: The Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach
Review: Claudia Rankine’s ‘The White Card’ leaves audiences with much to unpack
Written By Christine Dolen March 1, 2022 at 12:12 AM
The characters played by Tom Wahl, Rita Cole and Iain Batchelor have a discussion over bubbly in GableStage’s “The White Card.” (Photo/Magnus Stark)
Claudia Rankine’s “The White Card” opened at GableStage on Feb. 26, 2022, precisely a decade after the murder of 17-year-old Miami teen Trayvon Martin. That tragedy sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.
In the 10 years since, one name after another, one life after another, one shattered family after another have been added to the ledger of racism’s deadly cost.
Artists, poets and playwrights – MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient Rankine is all three – use their intellect, craft and aching hearts to illuminate difficult questions. Central to “The White Card” is this one: What price do all of us pay for white dominance in this country?
Rankine’s play, you should know, is a thoroughly thought-provoking, engaging, intricately layered piece of work laced with moments of surprising humor. Its 90 minutes, give or take, flow swiftly by as the playwright, director Lydia Fort and the cast tell the story of a wealthy white arts patron and an on-the-rise Black photographer going head-to-head in Manhattan’s rarefied visual arts scene.
Poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine wants to promote conversation about white dominance in the United States. (Photo/John Lucas)
The setup: Charles Hamilton Spencer (Tom Wahl), who has amassed his fortune in real estate, is a well-connected art collector and philanthropist known for his support of diverse artists. On this particular night in 2017, he and wife Virginia (Barbara Sloan), a former corporate art consultant, have invited Eric Schmidt (Iain Batchelor), an art dealer, adviser and board member of their Spencer Art Foundation, to an intimate dinner in their all-white Tribeca loft.
Their son, Alex (Joshua Hernandez), a Columbia University student involved in Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice protests, is also expected to arrive once he’s done with a protest against then-President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
But the guest of honor, the focus of this business dinner done up as a social occasion, is Charlotte Cummings (Rita Cole plays the role through March 6, followed by Lela Elam from March 9-27).
Charlotte is a Black photographer who has become a rising star through works that capture recreated moments of violence against Black people. Rumor has it that she’s working on a series depicting the aftermath of the 2015 murders of Pastor Clementa C. Pinckney and eight Black worshippers in a Bible study session at a church in Charleston, S.C.
Pushed hard by Eric, Charles is determined to acquire the new work and add Charlotte to what Virginia calls his “stable of artists.”
Joshua Hernandez plays the Spencers’ son, Alex, an outspoken Columbia University student and activist. (Photo/Darnell-Bennett)
Charles has long championed art of the kind Charlotte creates. Except for Robert Rauschenberg’s 1951 “White Painting,” the spotlighted pieces perched on the loft’s stark-white walls – including Robert Longo’s 2014 “Untitled,” Glenn Ligon’s 1996 “Hands,” and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1983 “The Death of Michael Stewart” – depict Black protest, suffering and death.
Though the evening begins with sophisticated banter and lots of bubbly, it soon disintegrates as microaggressions, clueless mistakes and Alex’s ongoing rebellion against his “woke” parents come into play.
“The White Card” has moments, many moments, that will make you grimace or recoil or laugh uncomfortably. You may think, “I can’t believe he/she just said that.” They do, though, because the playwright paints these people who are so proud of their empathetic advocacy as part of what writer Teju Cole calls the white-savior industrial complex. Rankine’s aim is to bring the realities of white privilege into sharp relief and provoke ongoing thought about the many issues referenced in the play.
Fort’s carefully calibrated direction keeps the play flowing through its tonal turns, from the breezy if loaded conversation that begins the first scene to the shattering image that ends it, through the choreographed scene change that moves the story to a different location in the following year, to a final reckoning between Charles and Charlotte – with one more devastating final image.
The experienced GableStage actors fully commit to Rankine’s characters, including the warts-and-all ones.
Director Lydia Fort keeps the play flowing through its tonal turns. (Photo/Hosea Johnson)
Wahl’s Charles, for example, says to his guest without a trace of self-awareness, “Charlotte, if I collect your dead, they’ll never be buried. You can be certain of that.” And in the final scene, when his blinders and more come off, Wahl persuasively takes us through an epiphany that, like so many things in Charles’s life, doesn’t play out as intended.
As Virginia, Sloan is skillfully playing a woman who perceives herself as sincere and empathetic. Yet her intentions cannot and do not outweigh her mistakes (she conflates the names of Eric Garner and Freddie Gray) and microaggressions (when Charlotte rises to help clear the table, an inebriated Virginia spits, “Sit down. You’re not the maid.”).
As 20-year-old Alex, Hernandez has mainly the note of rebelliousness to play, though he also conveys naivete and fervor as the character picks apart almost everything his parents do or say. He also is the vessel for introducing important information about what he sees as his father’s hypocrisy – angrily, of course.
Batchelor’s Eric comes across as a well-tailored shark ready to lunge at any opportunity. Speaking with a markedly nasal American accent that is not his own, the actor smoothly communicates the character’s flaws as Eric pretends to know everything about everything, then mangles the name “Ta-Nehisi Coates.”
In “The White Card,” Charlotte is, in essence, the playwright’s stand-in. Striking and commanding, Cole plays the photographer as an elegant, inquisitive, thoughtful artist comfortable in navigating myriad environments. Her Charlotte straightforwardly sets the record straight and shares her perspective, yet the microaggressions that come floating her way like so much dust in a shaft of sunlight never really surprise her. Cole’s key moments at the end of each scene are visceral and shattering.
The production’s design team – set designer Frank J. Oliva, lighting designer Quanikqua “Q” Bryant, sound designer Brandyé Bias, costume designer Camilla Haith – collaborate to bring to life the Spencers’ moneyed world in the first scene and Charlotte’s studio in the second.
Rita Cole’s Charlotte (second from left) makes a point in GableStage’s production of “The White Card.” (Photo/Magnus Stark)
Although “The White Card” is not a long play, it leaves audiences with much to unpack. To that end, GableStage is holding guided 20-minute engagement sessions, led by Katie Christie of Voices United, at the end of each performance. You may stay or not, but the exercises and discussion touch on multiple aspects of what theatergoers have just seen, and the diversity of reactions can spur further insights.
Rankine has a new commissioned play, “Help,” scheduled to premiere at New York’s The Shed on March 15. Meanwhile, you can see her best-known transition from the page to the stage here and now at GableStage as she asks that question: What price do all of us pay for white dominance in this country?
WHAT: “The White Card” by Claudia Rankine
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, and 2 p.m. Sundays; through March 27, 2022
WHERE: GableStage in The Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables
COST: $40-$70 (processing fee additional; discounts available for students, groups, artists, military, veterans and Biltmore staff members)
SAFETY PROTOCOLS: Masks and proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test required; visit gablestage.org/healthsafety for more details
Two Miami Film Festival documentaries unearth subcultures of the past and present
Written By Michelle F. Solomon February 25, 2022 at 10:29 PM
Appearing in the 107-minute documentary, “South Beach Shark Club,” Shannon Bustamente represents the present-day shark fisherman. (Photo courtesy of South Beach Shark Club)
Two films with decidedly different subject matters share a commonality: They both capture subcultures of South Florida.
Robert Requejo Ramos introduces the shark hunters of 1970s Miami Beach in his documentary, “South Beach Shark Club: Legends and Lore of the South Florida Shark Hunters.” Ramos focuses his lens squarely on true-life stories of a group of guys who lived to fish for shark — and one legend in particular whose obsession is, excuse the pun, a whale of a tale.
Rachelle Salnave’s “Madame Pipi” takes place in the present-day and introduces moviegoers to the lives of bathroom attendants working the nightclubs of South Florida. The film shows women of Haitian descent toting rolling luggage full of perfumes, hairsprays and candies to set up in the restrooms. They work only for tips. Most, if not all, of their money is sent to Haiti to help their families.
The documentaries are among more than 120 films to be featured in this year’s Miami Film Festival. From March 4-13, 2022, moviegoers have their pick at three Miami venues: Silverspot Cinema, 300 SE Third St.; Miami Dade College’s Tower Theater Miami, 1508 SW Eighth St.; and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts’ Knight Concert Hall, 1300 Biscayne Blvd.
The two South Florida-based films join 16 others in a juried competition for the Knight Made in MIA Award, which is supported by the Knight Foundation and has cash prizes of $30,000 for first prize, $15,000 for second prize and $10,000 for third prize. The criteria for the category is that a substantial portion of the film’s content (story, setting and filming location) has to be from South Florida and use “its story and theme for universal resonance.”
“South Beach Shark Club” director Robert Requejo Ramos was born and raised in Miami Beach and sought to preserve a moment in time in the 1970s. (Photo courtesy of South Beach Shark Club)
South Florida is, without a doubt, a character in both Ramos and Salnave’s movies.
Ramos grew up on Miami Beach — “born and raised,” he says. His uncle was a member of the South Beach Shark Club and appears in the movie.
“When I was a kid, I had it in my head that it would be cool to do some kind of origin story like a ‘Dogtown and Z-Boys,'” Ramos said, referring to Stacy Peralta’s documentary about the famed Zephyr skateboard team circa 1970 in Venice, Calif.
As a film major at Miami Dade College (MDC), Ramos kept going back to the idea. “I felt a calling to tell the story. Like, if I didn’t do it, it would go unnoticed or disappear.”
In 2017, he completed the short film, “Rene De Dios and the South Beach Shark Club,” while at MDC and won the Miami Film Festival’s CinemaSlam competition in 2018.
But he went back to the topic because, “to be honest, I always thought of it as a full-length feature,” he says.
The 107-minute documentary showcases the eccentric group that make up the South Beach Shark Club and the legendary De Dios, who Ramos says was larger than life.
“It is the story of an off-the-rails obsession,” he says.
However, there’s more to this film than that obsession. He casts a wider net than that. It’s a character study of those who spent their days on the old First Street Pier tossing fishing lines into the ocean.
“I wasn’t out to glorify shark fishing. It is more of an anthropological study of these people,” he says. “More than anything, I wanted to tell a story that happened before the ‘Cocaine Cowboys.’ The old Miami Beach, the characters there.”
He wanted to “put something out there that would preserve that era.”
As the film shares, the eventual demolition of the First Street Pier changed the lives of the close-knit group whose very existence revolved around that sanctuary.
“Miami is on the map right now with so many people moving here from other places. Hopefully, people take an interest in the film and want to learn something about this sleepy little beach town and how it became the crazy place it is now,” Ramos says.
Director Rachelle Salnave on location for her film, “Madame Pipi.” (Photo courtesy of Jayme Gershen)
Salvane’s film sheds light on a different side of Miami Beach.
On a visit to Paris, the Haitian-American filmmaker learned about “la dame pipi,” women who keep restroom toilets clean. (If you’ve watched the Netflix show, “Emily in Paris,” there’s a lesson in the trade of “la dame pipi” in the first season.)
For Salvane, it took on a different meaning when she discovered Haitian bathroom attendants working in the nightclubs of Miami.
“Being in Miami and being more aware of my Haitian identity, I’m going into these bathrooms, and it is such a juxtaposition. The crazy wild women from the clubs, the raunchy music and then you have these older women, some in their 50s, some 60s and older. They are sitting there and reading their Bibles. They are praying and singing hymns, they are on their phones with family from Haiti. I saw these two worlds converging, and I found it fascinating,” she says.
Then in January 2018, there were reports that President Donald Trump had referred to Haiti and African nations as “sh**hole” countries. It struck a nerve with Salvane.
“These women work in sh**. They have to clean up sh**. But yet the tips they make contribute to more than one-third of the GDP in Haiti,” Salvane says.
The women in Rachelle Salnave’s documentary work for only tips in the nightclub bathrooms in South Florida. (Photo courtesy of Rachelle Salnave)
Salvane says she teamed up with another local filmmaker, Jayme Gershen. to make her 25-minute documentary, “Madame Pipi.”
“We would go into the different bathrooms from Broward to Miami-Dade counties, up and down Collins Avenue, as many clubs that would allow us to go in,” Salvane says.
Among the women she discovered was Darline Francoeur, originally from Cap-Haitien, who calls it a “volunteer job” because the club doesn’t pay you, “you work with the customers and the customers pay you.”
Then there was Jacqueline Benjamin from Labadee, who returns to her bathroom attendant job wearing a mask and a face shield after COVID restrictions are lifted.
“Before I go, I put God in front of me,” she says in her native language. “God will help me with all the precautions because he sees I am not there for pleasure or for dancing. I am not going there to celebrate anything.”
Salvane says some of the women were hesitant to tell their stories.
“Many of them are conservative. They love to talk all day, especially if you tip them, but when you turn on the camera or the microphone they are like, ‘No way.’
After spending time with them, they began to trust her.
“They all come from different backgrounds, but they all symbolize for me this universal theme – of what happens when you have to migrate to another country and do what you have to do to feed your family.”
WHAT: Miami Dade College’s 39th Annual Miami Film Festival
WHEN: March 4-13, 2022
WHERE: Silverspot Cinema, 300 SE Third St., Miami; and Miami Dade College’s Tower Theater Miami, 1508 SW Eighth St., Miami; and Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Knight Concert Hall, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami
COST: $13 for general admission, $12 seniors age 65 and older; $10 for Miami Film Society members, veterans and students with ID
Claudia Rankine examines racial privilege in GableStage’s ‘The White Card’
Written By Christine Dolen February 22, 2022 at 7:28 PM
The characters played by Tom Wahl, Barbara Sloan, Iain Batchelor and Joshua Hernandez get unexpected reactions from Charlotte, played by Rita Cole, in GableStage’s “The White Card.” (Photo/Magnus Stark)
When celebrated poet, playwright and essayist Claudia Rankine was promoting her 2014 book, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” a middle-aged white man (Rankine’s descriptors for him) rose during a question-and-answer session to ask, “What can I do for you? How can I help you?”
The response from the thoughtful, thought-provoking artist and academic was not what he was expecting.
“I think the question you should be asking is what you can do for you,” she replied – which did not sit well with him, to put it mildly.
“If that is how you answer questions, then no one will ask you anything,” she recalled him saying, and his palpable anger took Rankine by surprise.
From that exchange, that inciting moment, a piece of stage art was born. Rankine makes the connection in the preface to her play, “The White Card,” a drama aimed at encouraging examination of white dominance and anti-Black racism in American life.
Premiering in 2018 in Boston in a joint production by ArtsEmerson and the American Repertory Theater, “The White Card” was produced again just before the pandemic shutdown by Saint Paul’s venerable Penumbra Theatre, Minnesota’s only professional Black theater company.
Now “The White Card” is coming to life onstage again, this time at GableStage in Coral Gables’ historic Biltmore Hotel.
Originally scheduled to open in mid-January, the production was delayed due to the surge in the Omicron variant of COVID-19. The show’s official opening night is Feb. 26 – which also happens to be the 10-year anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s fatal shooting. That tragedy and so many subsequent ones, the human cost exacted by racism, ripple through Rankine’s taut script about a “woke” white contemporary art collector and the rising-star Black photographer whose work he wants to acquire.
Poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine wants to promote conversation about white dominance in the United States. (Photo/John Lucas)
Rankine, who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (aka the “Genius Grant”) in 2016, was born in Jamaica and raised in the Bronx, earning degrees from Williams College and Columbia University. She received the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry and a host of other awards for “Citizen,” and she has taught at a number of top-tier universities – currently, at New York University.
Rankine and husband John Lucas, a white photographer and filmmaker who sometimes collaborates with her, plan to be in South Florida for the opening weekend of “The White Card.” During a recent phone interview, the poet said that the shock of her questioner’s reaction at the “Citizen” presentation sparked ideas.
“It’s one thing to express the pain of anti-Black racism. It’s another to think about what it means to have dominance, to walk around with complete mobility, to understand the mechanism of rage at having to share,” she said. “Theater is not passively being able to take what you want and leave the rest. Theater involves taking from one body into another. That’s how I got from ‘Citizen’ to ‘The White Card,’ from the page to the theater.”
GableStage producing artistic director Bari Newport saw the Boston production of “The White Card” while she was running the Penobscot Theatre Co. in Maine; Newport and her husband, photographer Magnus Stark, are friends with Rankine and Lucas. Looking around at the mostly white theatergoers at that Boston performance, then watching the play, Newport realized “The White Card” was reaching its intended audience.
“A core idea of the play is to unpack the idea of racism itself – and that racism isn’t ‘someone else’s problem.’ It isn’t a Black problem. It is a white person’s problem, and nothing will change unless we look in the mirror,” she noted in an email, adding that she had thought she’d feel guilty after watching the play.
Instead, she said, it “spoke to me with invigorating humor and with a fresh poeticism, which left me deeply thinking about difficult subjects with a different perspective.”
Director Lydia Fort, who also teaches at Atlanta’s Emory University, said working on this play “was more like stepping into a history that is my own.” (Screenshot of video by Magnus Stark)
To give GableStage audiences the chance to have the deepest communal engagement with “The White Card,” the play is the only one in the season that won’t be streamed. Every performance will be followed by an optional discussion led by Katie Christie of Voices United, a Miami nonprofit aimed at fostering cross-cultural understanding through the arts.
What audiences will witness is a play about a 1-percenter, Charles Hamilton Spencer (played by Tom Wahl), a Manhattan developer, philanthropist and champion of diverse artists; and Charlotte Cummings (played by Rita Cole through March 6, then by Lela Elam), a prize-winning photographer poised to enter the international art market.
Charles and his wife, Virginia Compton Spencer (Barbara Sloan), have invited Charlotte to their sleek all-white Tribeca loft at the behest of Eric Schmidt (Iain Batchelor), an art dealer who serves as a key adviser to the couple. Over a getting-to-know-you dinner, the idea of the Spencer Art Collection acquiring some of Charlotte’s work will be on the table – as will many, many more ideas, including those of the Spencers’ younger son, Alex (Joshua Hernandez), an outspoken Columbia University student and activist in the Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) movement.
The pieces on the couple’s walls were stipulated by the playwright and most are, with the notable exception of Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Painting,” art depicting violence against Black people. Robert Longo’s “Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014)” is there. So is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “The Death of Michael Stewart.”
“I wanted to have the art embody the arguments in the play,” Rankine said. “Violence is encoded in the pieces, but they’re pieces Virginia’s character could live with.”
Directing “The White Card” at GableStage is Lydia Fort. The in-demand regional theater director, and assistant professor at Atlanta’s Emory University, said researching each play she stages is part of what she loves about the job, but this one “was more like stepping into a history that is my own.”
In rehearsals, Fort focused on creating a safe space for her actors to explore and express their thoughts.
“Having one Black woman in a cast of white actors is always challenging. Then to have the play be about race puts pressure on the person of color,” she said. “Part of it is me being a teacher and wanting to have something for everyone to learn – what Claudia is asking the audience to do. Otherwise, people start putting up walls. They don’t want to be personally judged … And always, you want to make a great play.”
Rita Cole’s Charlotte surprises Tom Wahl’s Charles in “The White Card” at GableStage. (Photo/Magnus Stark)
Wahl and his fellow actors sing Fort’s praises.
“She is amazing in every way. So thoughtful, caring and considerate. We’re dealing with some deep stuff … and she didn’t want anyone to feel they have to apologize,” said Wahl, who in recent years has played some tough, manipulative men – most notably in another play about racism: GableStage’s 2018 production of Bruce Graham’s “White Guy on the Bus,” in which Wahl played the title role opposite Cole.
In taking on “The White Card” and working to make Charles a fully fleshed-out character rather than the unambiguous villain of the piece, Wahl said he has learned a lot about himself, white privilege and the sudden sting of microaggressions.
“One day, Lydia, Rita and I were walking into the Biltmore entrance, and an employee said, ‘Good morning, sir.’ He ignored Rita and Lydia. I pointed it out to them, and they both shrugged and said, ‘That happens to us all the time – there’s no closure to that,’” he recalled. “What bothers me is that I didn’t say anything when it happened.”
Because of the rescheduled “White Card” dates, two Carbonell Award-winning actors will take turns playing Charlotte.
Cole, who was already committed to Palm Beach Dramaworks’ March 30-April 17 production of Lynn Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel,” will portray Charlotte through March 6.
“Our American pastimes are sports and forgetting. But if you don’t forget, maybe you will work to make a change,” Cole said. “I’m glad audience members will have the chance for talkbacks and discussion vs. talking in the car on the way home. If you share your reaction in a public space, you can digest it. Talking is the first step that brings acknowledgement.”
In preparing to play Charlotte, the actor spoke with Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, a sorority sister of Cole’s mother, and tapped into the specifics of the art world via her own sister, a painter. As for being a Black artist in a society built around white dominance, she said, “I live in my skin every day.”
As a student at the University of Central Florida, she was cast as the lead in Bertolt Brecht’s “The Good Person of Szechwan,” a parable set in China. At one performance, she heard loud shouting from the audience. She learned afterward that an older white couple had stormed out of the theater, gone to the box office and canceled subscription seats they had held for almost three decades.
Elam, who will begin playing Charlotte on March 9, said the role is “one of the closest characters to myself that I’ve ever played.” The New World School of the Arts graduate remembers, as a child, getting lots of comments along the lines of, “Oh, you’re so well-spoken.”
“It was an insult meant as a compliment. I wanted to say, ‘Yeah, and I live in a house too,’” she said, of the microaggressions that are all too familiar to so many Black Americans. “I have a lot of experience with this. A lot of times, I’m the only Black girl in the room.”
Lela Elam is scheduled to take over the role of Charlotte starting with the March 9 production. (Screenshot of video by Magnus Stark)
Elam said she acknowledges the desire for societal change on the part of white people appalled by anti-Black racism. But the responsibility for that change, she believes, rests with them.
“I’m tired of having conversations with people who should know better. I’m not giving out any more passes or educating people. That’s not my job,” she said. “There are lots of books people can read. They can go to museums and libraries, if they really want to.”
“The White Card,” Sloan said, offers a fresh, beautifully written, nuanced way for Rankine to share her perspective on the intricate intertwining of white privilege and racism – an issue so urgent that the playwright used money from her MacArthur grant to establish The Racial Imaginary Institute, a think tank for artists and activists.
With the play, “she has decided to say: Come, get on this train with me and go where I go so you can see what I see,” Sloan said.
Batchelor, who grew up in Wales and began his acting career there, says that in playing the “White Card” art dealer, he is portraying “someone with a moral and social compass a world away from my own.”
That said, he admires Rankine’s finesse as a playwright.
“She makes very, very awkward and uncomfortable conversations very palatable. It goes down smoothly,” he observed. “Then she turns a switch, and you realize, ‘Oh my god. I’ve been complicit in all of this.’
“Her points are clear and incisive. I hope the audience will take them away too. [The play] asks you to check again what you think you know about racism and what you think you’re doing. The idea of a safe space to examine these things cannot be understated. The ability to hear someone out and not react in an impulsive way is nearly impossible.”
Along with her prize-winning career as a successful writer of prose, poetry, theater and multimedia works, Rankine remains a teacher, and the response to her work can be vast.
A 2019 New York Times magazine piece she wrote (“I Wanted To Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.”) has drawn more than 2,000 online comments and more than 200 letters sent directly to Rankine. Her most recent book, 2020’s “Just Us: An American Conversation,” continues her exploration of white privilege, as does her new commissioned play, “Help,” which is scheduled to premiere at The Shed in Manhattan on March 15.
“People [sometimes] say to me, ‘Why are you preaching to the converted?’ We want to think that liberal white America is different from, better than. But the commitment to white dominance wouldn’t have existed without a collusion across party lines,” she said. “When we started The Racial Imaginary Institute, people would say, ‘What are you talking about?’ Now, everyone understands.”
WHAT: “The White Card” by Claudia Rankine
WHEN: Preview 8 p.m. Feb. 25; regular performances 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 7 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays; through March 27
WHERE: GableStage in The Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables
COST: $40-$70 (processing fee additional; discounts available for students, groups, artists, military, veterans and Biltmore staff members)
SAFETY PROTOCOLS: Masks and proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test required; visit gablestage.org/healthsafety for more details
Review: ‘Dahomey Warriors’ has compelling story, highly theatrical moments – and a communication issue
Written By Christine Dolen February 16, 2022 at 9:37 PM
The characters played by Toddra Brunson and Aixa Kendrick are ready for battle in M Ensemble’s production of “The Dahomey Warriors.” (Photo/Christa Ingraham)
The works of Layon Gray have been an inspiring fit for Miami’s M Ensemble ever since the 50-year-old company inaugurated its new home at Liberty City’s Sandrell Rivers Theater with the playwright’s “Kings of Harlem” in 2017.
That production of the piece about members of the Harlem Renaissance Black pro basketball team circa 1939 won several key Carbonell Awards, and it led to the company staging Gray’s “Meet Me at the Oak” (a family-inspired play about racism set in the mid-1950s) in 2019 and “Cowboy” (about a Black 19th-century U.S. marshal) in 2021.
Gray has now returned to M Ensemble with a Black History Month production of his play “The Dahomey Warriors.” First staged in 2017 under the title “Black Sparta” in New York, the play was also done at 2017’s National Black Theatre Festival and at a Pittsburgh theater in 2018.
Rechristened “The Dahomey Warriors,” the play is, like so much of Gray’s work, steeped in history. It was inspired by a regiment of fierce women soldiers who fought in the West African kingdom of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) from the 17th century to the end of the 19th century.
(Video courtesy of McKinson Souverain)
Although they were called Amazons by invading Europeans, the women referred to themselves in the Fon language as “Mino,” which translates to “our mothers.” Motherly is not, however, a quality that comes to mind in relation to a group whose motto was “conquer or die,” whose activities included beheading and drinking the blood of their enemies and sending off some of their captives to be enslaved. The Dora Milaje women warriors in “Black Panther” were inspired in part by the female soldiers of Dahomey.
Gray, who directed and appears in the play at M Ensemble, sets his drama in 1892, when the French were expanding their colonization of Dahomey and some 25 years after the end of the barbaric transatlantic slave trade. Since an intimate theater space isn’t conducive to re-creating vast battles or delivering the kind of history lesson more suited to a classroom, Gray evokes the time, the place and, most significantly, the people with a smaller-scale story.
General Oni (Aixa Kendrick) has come to a place of beautiful solitude to train the king’s privileged daughter, Ebele (Asilia Neilly). It’s the last thing that Oni wants to do, but because the Mino leader unfailingly obeys the monarch, she complies – though not without giving her charge a hard time verbally and physically.
Asilia Neilly, Toddra Brunson and Aixa Kendrick play committed fighters. (Photo/Christa Ingraham)
The two are soon joined by Kunto (Toddra Brunson), a Mino who is hours or minutes away from giving birth to the king’s baby. Hovering nearby, howling and threatening and retreating, is a hyena named Arrali (Iman Clark), whose relationship with Oni is particularly intense. The three women speak of war, troop losses, the invading French. Though it is forbidden, they remember a time when people and animals lived together in peace underground. They talk of rival gods and cultures, of the fatal price paid for disobedience.
Eventually, two men show up: Abioye (Gray), Oni’s longlost brother; and Colonel Muller (Charles Reuben Kornegay), a mixed-race French officer ready to make Oni an offer he’s sure she won’t refuse. But he’s wrong.
That’s about all of the story that can be told to keep it spoiler-free for audiences who want to see it during its run through Feb. 27, 2022.
“The Dahomey Warriors” illuminates a significant piece of Black history during the month devoted to celebrating it. The story of valiant African warrior women from a nation overrun by French colonizers is universally compelling, and thus far the creative partnership between the thought-provoking actor-director-playwright and Miami’s oldest still-producing theater company has been impressive. But know this: “The Dahomey Warriors” is not nearly as accessible as Gray’s three previous works at M Ensemble.
Part of the problem is that if you don’t know much about the history of the women warriors, references to places, battles, practices and people mean little. The larger problem is that the dialogue blends heavily accented English (the lines are written to be spoken that way), broken Yoruba and French. This renders some segments of the play nearly incomprehensible, which can be frustrating for the audience and is unfair to the artists.
Toddra Brunson, Aixa Kendrick and Layon Gray evoke 19th-century Africa at Miami’s Sandrell Rivers Theater. (Photo/ Christa Ingraham)
In theater, communication is key. And though the athletic and commanding Kendrick has played Oni in every production of the play so far, though Neilly and Brunson believably inhabit their characters (Brunson’s Kunto with the disadvantage of having to give birth at record speed, then immediately dash off to war), finding a way to more deeply connect with the audience needs to be a priority.
As director, Gray pulls off some highly theatrical moments, none more chilling than his re-creation of a slave ship as Abioye is evoking his earlier fate. He is also an eminently engaging actor, but in truth he’s not the right age to play Abioye. Kornegay is properly the imperious bully as the colonel, though his tricorn hat distractingly keeps slip-sliding on his head.
Set, lighting and projection designer Mitchell Ost creates a multilevel playing area complete with a small waterfall, which mixes with music, the sound of crickets and the cries of animals. Costume designer Dunia Pacheco makes the women look ready for combat and the men appear ready to colonize (except for that hat). Fight choreographer Diego Villada keeps the actors safe as they battle with a slightly restrained ferocity.
Gray is, without a doubt, a playwright who is deft at blending history and his own imagination. This time, though, his quest for authenticity gets in his way.
WHAT: M Ensemble Co. presents “The Dahomey Warriors” by Layon Gray
WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays, through Feb. 27, 2022
Review: Both musically and theatrically, ‘On Your Feet!’ at The Miracle is spectacular
Written By Christine Dolen February 14, 2022 at 7:24 PM
With Jason Canela as Emilio Estefan and Claudia Yanez as Gloria Estefan front and center, the cast of “On Your Feet!” gets ready for their bows at Actors’ Playhouse. (Photo/Alberto Romeu)
Joy, loss and unflagging determination coalesce at the heart of “On Your Feet!,” the inspiration-filled show about Miami’s musical power couple, Gloria and Emilio Estefan.
Blending biography with the extensive catalog of Gloria Estefan/Miami Sound Machine pop hits, the jukebox musical played Broadway from 2015 to 2017, then toured the country (including a weeklong stop at Miami’s Arsht Center for the Performing Arts), with additional productions in the Netherlands and on London’s West End.
But now, complete with an electrifying opening night that included the Estefans and their extended family in the audience, “On Your Feet!” has come back to the place where the Cuban-American couple made their crossover dreams come true.
After a lengthy pandemic pause and a pair of smaller shows, Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables has come roaring back with its own sizzling, large-scale production of “On Your Feet!”
(Video/Diego Pocoví)
Staged with abundant insight and finesse by Miamian Andy Señor Jr., who served as associate director of the Broadway production, the show at The Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables pulls out all the stops in celebrating artists who forged their own path to stardom.
Alexander Dinelaris, the musical’s Academy Award-winning book writer, tracks the Estefans’ inspiring success story. But he also vividly illuminates the struggles faced by immigrants and exiles trying to build new lives in the United States.
Gloria Estefan’s mother, Gloria Fajardo, for example, earned a Ph.D. in Cuba but had to acquire a new set of education degrees in Miami to support her family: daughters Gloria and Rebecca, and husband José, a Cuban political prisoner who developed multiple sclerosis after serving in Vietnam. Before his elder daughter’s music career began to soar, he died at age 47.
Emilio Estefan fled Cuba as a teenager, first going to Spain where he and his father lived in poverty. They wound up in Miami where, as Emilio recalls in the show, signs posted at hotels and apartment buildings in the late 1960s read: “No Pets, No Cubans.”
Many more obstacles are highlighted in “On Your Feet!,” including Gloria Fajardo’s opposition to her multilingual daughter becoming Miami Sound Machine’s lead singer and marrying its ambitious keyboard player-producer; Emilio’s lengthy struggles to get American record companies to release songs the band recorded in English; a long estrangement from Gloria’s mother; and the horrible 1990 tour bus crash that fractured the singer’s spine.
And yet, “On Your Feet!” is a show filled with joy. Overriding everything is the couple’s enduring love story and the potent uplift of their music.
Claudia Yanez as Gloria Estefan welcomes Alma Cuervo as her grandmother, Consuelo, to the stage in “On Your Feet!” (Photo/Alberto Romeu)
As with any of the really good jukebox musicals – “Jersey Boys,” “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations” – “On Your Feet!” is a blend of musical theater and concert. Both musically and theatrically, the show at The Miracle is spectacular.
Consider its superb band, always visible upstage center. Six of the 10 musicians led by musical director and longtime Estefan collaborator Clay Ostwald have been members of Miami Sound Machine. To say they deliver the score flawlessly isn’t hyperbole.
Downstage is where the scenes play out, where the dazzling dancers led by choreographer Natalie Caruncho and dance captain Hector Maisonet do their thing, often at breathtaking speed.
The large cast is led by Claudia Yanez as singer-songwriter Gloria and, making his professional stage debut, Jason Canela as producer-songwriter Emilio. Both actors clearly convey the strength and determination of their Grammy Award-winning, real-life counterparts, and both dynamically interpret their songs.
Former Miamian Yanez blossoms from a teen crushing on Emilio (as the shorts-wearing founder of the Miami Latin Boys) into a wife and mother certain she knows what’s best for her family. Her voice isn’t terribly similar to Estefan’s warmer, slightly lower instrument. But vocally, she shines on a gloriously long list of hits, including “1-2-3,” “Conga,” “Get on Your Feet,” “Live for Loving You” and many more.
The Hialeah-raised Canela has so far built his career in film and television, yet despite his newcomer status, he seems equally at home onstage – commanding, even. He’s a fine dancer, an even better pop singer (crooning “I See Your Smile,” “Here We Are” and “Coming out of the Dark” with Yanez, a pained “Don’t Wanna Lose You” and, with Eileen Faxas as Gloria Fajardo, “If I Never Got to Tell You”) and an absolutely charismatic actor.
In addition to the leads, the talent in the Actors’ Playhouse company runs deep.
Alma Cuervo, who originated her role on Broadway and performed it on tour, is an absolute treasure as Gloria’s grandmother, Consuelo, a woman with abundant wisdom and a great sense of humor. Ex-Miamian Faxas combines tempered dominance and disappointed judgment in her portrayal of Gloria Fajardo opposite ensemble member Adriel Garcia as the singer’s father, José. She sparkles in the character’s might-have-been moment in the spotlight as she sings “Mi Tierra.”
Katerina Morin sings appealingly in Spanish as young Gloria, while flashy dancer Zachary Roy plays the young Emilio and the Estefans’ son, Nayib. Ensemble member Seth Trucks demonstrates his versatility in playing a stubbornly obstructionist record producer and a caring doctor. The always impressive Henry Gainza (who has already moved on to his next show, Billy Crystal’s upcoming “Mr. Saturday Night” on Broadway) added his gorgeous vocals to the mix through opening weekend.
Claudia Yanez and Jason Canela portray Gloria and Emilio Estefan taking a break from touring life. (Photo/Alberto Romeu)
The ensemble includes Alexander Blanco, Míchel Alejandro Castillo, Emma Sofia Caymares, Elvis Collado, Teresa Garcia, Lauren Horgan, Alessandro J. López, Amanda Lopez, Alejandra Matos, Claudia Mulet, Jeremey Adam Rey, Alexis Semevolos-Velazquez, plus swings Rebecca Kritzer and Henry Julián Gendron.
Wardrobe supervisor Ellis Tillman has adapted Emilio Sosa’s original costume designs and Chuck Lapointe’s wig designs for the large company, while technical director Gene Seyffer and set dresser Jodi Dellaventura have interpreted David Rockwell’s original larger-scale scenic designs for the smaller Miracle stage.
Designer Eric Nelson’s lighting palette is as colorful as the show’s music, and sound designer Shaun Mitchell delivers everything from tender ballads to explosive pop hits with clarity.
One quibble from opening night: The name-dropping list of ’80s radio stations and clubs didn’t land with quite the hometown bang that it should have because some got lost in the frenzy of actors frantically pitching Miami Sound Machine’s English-language “Dr. Beat” to DJs and club owners.
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients in 2015, the Estefans are continuing their multifaceted careers as artists and entrepreneurs. Gloria Estefan, who became the first Cuban-American Kennedy Center honoree in 2017, will next be seen onscreen in the remake of “Father of the Bride” opposite longtime friend Andy Garcia. Artistically, the couple has played a huge role in bringing Latin music into the mainstream. Philanthropically, the two have given back over decades to the community and country that became theirs.
Although they weren’t involved in this new production, in sharing this musical story, they’re giving back yet again.
At The Miracle, Miami-connected, Cuban-American artists have brought a resonant celebratory tale to life, sparking joy in themselves and their audiences. Coming out of the dark that was the pandemic, they’re also helping the team at Actors’ Playhouse get on their feet with the kind of large-scale show that built the company’s reputation. Qué maravilloso.
WHAT: “On Your Feet!”
WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturdays, and 3 p.m. Sundays, through March 6, 2022
WHERE: Actors’ Playhouse at The Miracle Theatre, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables.
COST: $55-$85 (seniors age 65 and older get 10 percent off weekdays only, students age 25 and younger with valid student ID pay $15 for a rush ticket available 15 minutes before a weekday performance)
SAFETY PROTOCOLS: Proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test or COVID-19 Antigen test required; masks required except when eating or drinking in designated areas. For details, visit actorsplayhouse.org/actors-playhouse-health-and-safety-policy.
‘Be More Chill’ brings Area Stage to the Arsht Center
Written By Christine Dolen February 8, 2022 at 4:51 PM
High school kids grapple with popularity, social anxiety and more in in Area Stage’s “Be More Chill” at the Arsht Center. (Photo/Frank J. Oliva)
Ah, the teen years. Navigating that fraught passage from childhood to adulthood has never been easy. For many kids, it’s a journey filled with emotional land mines: grappling with identity, popularity, intimacy and more.
That’s the thematic heart of “Be More Chill,” a musical getting its South Florida premiere in an Area Stage Co. production at the Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater.
Since its 1989 founding by John Rodaz and Maria Banda-Rodaz in a former Lincoln Road shoe store, the pioneering Area Stage has grown into a company that has educated and showcased aspiring young talents via its extensive conservatory programs while also producing professional adult theater. In June, an immersive and widely acclaimed “Annie” in the company’s space at The Shops at Sunset Place in South Miami set off a fresh buzz about Area Stage and its young associate artistic director, Giancarlo Rodaz, who reimagined and directed the show.
The younger Rodaz, John and Maria’s son, is again at the helm as Area Stage makes its Arsht Center debut with “Be More Chill,” through Feb. 27. Although becoming an arts partner at Miami’s major performing arts facility carries some financial risk for Area Stage, selectively producing key shows there can also bring a new and broader audience plus greater visibility for the company’s work. That’s exactly what “Be More Chill” is intended to do.
Though one could quibble with the choice of this particular show (more on that in a moment), director Rodaz, his Area Stage team and the cast do their usual fine job in bringing it to life and connecting with an enthusiastic audience – especially with coveted, sometimes hard-to-reach younger theatergoers. “Be More Chill” developed a massive social media fan base as it was progressing from its first regional production in 2015 to a Broadway run in 2019, so its Miami debut doubtless comes with an avid built-in-audience.
The cast of Area Stage’s “Be More Chill” sport a green Mountain Dew vibe in the Arsht Center production. (Photo/Kyla Stewart)
Based on a 2004 young adult novel by Ned Vizzini, “Be More Chill” is the work of two guys named Joe: composer-lyricist Joe Iconis and book writer Joe Tracz. It clocks in at a too-hefty 2½ hours, but it does have many moments that elicit pings of recognition in young or formerly young theatergoers. Truth be told, it simply isn’t in a league with deeper shows such as “Spring Awakening” and “Dear Evan Hansen” (which makes its Miami debut at the Arsht’s Ziff Ballet Opera House on Feb. 15-20) or fizzier fare like “The Prom” and “Mean Girls.”
Even so, there’s plenty to laugh at, cringe at or be moved by in Area Stage’s “Be More Chill,” thanks to Rodaz’s astute handling of meaningful moments and the work by the cast, a mixture of actors from South Florida and the New York area.
Blending teen angst with sci-fi that doesn’t seem all that improbable, “Be More Chill” follows the misadventures of Jeremy Heere (Teddy Calvin), a lanky high school junior with a mop of long hair and a curved posture that makes him look like he’s trying to fold himself in half.
Lonely since his mom left him and his dad (Michael Vadnal) behind, Jeremy is constantly embarrassed by his out-of-it father, whose favorite at-home look is an open robe, an undershirt and tighty whities. Playing video games with his best pal, Michael (Aaron Hagos), brings Jeremy his only real joy and escape from the nightmare that is the rest of his life.
At school, he’s bullied by over-the-top popular Rich Goranski (Luke Surretsky). He’s crushing on Christine Canigula (Rachel Barsness), a theater kid who has eyes for popular jock Jake Dillinger (Zachary Scott Prall) and nobody else. Other girls – Chloe Valentine (Katie Duerr), Jenna Rolan (Jennifer Molson) and Brooke Lohst (Harley Muir) – tease or torment him, though Brooke has a change of heart once Jeremy makes a life-altering decision.
At the suggestion of Rich, who turns out to have a secret behind his cool-kid status, Jeremy downs something called a SQUIP (Super Quantum Unit Intel Processor), a pill-sized computer that implants itself in his brain and advises him on every move that can change him from hopeless nerd to magnetic hottie.
Predictably, things go wrong, both hilariously and painfully. Yet impressively, Rodaz and company deliver the whole spectrum of emotional colors in a show that’s sometimes clever, sometimes just plain goofy.
With music director Rick Kaydas and the band delivering a score full of rock and show tunes, the actors shine vocally as a group and in key solos.
Luke Surretsky’s Rich (kneeling) and Teddy Calvin’s Jeremy clash at school in Area Stage’s “Be More Chill.” (Photo/Frank J. Oliva)
Barsness embodies the committed passion of every theater kid when she sings “I Love Play Rehearsal.” Calvin morphs from tormented misfit to a guy with a more powerful voice and an appealing confidence, though his “new” Jeremy never seems quite as much a mean boy as the show’s creators probably intended. Duerr has some masterful comedic moments when she sings “Do You Wanna Hang?” to Jeremy, then proceeds to come on to him while costumed as a baby for a Halloween party. Hagos delivers a wounded, moving “Michael in the Bathroom” after one too many hurtful encounters with his now-former best bud.
Surretsky gets to do a reverse Jeremy as Rich, rocking out on “The SQUIP Song,” then much later changing drastically into the very different guy he was before the SQUIP got into his head. Enzo Everett is a hoot as drama teacher Mr. Reyes, whose other job is at Hobby Lobby, and Frank Montoto has just the right amount of scary edginess as a SQUIP purveyor who sells his product out of the stock room at a Payless store (lots of store name dropping in this show). Vadnal is playing a depressed, stuck guy as Jeremy’s dad, and maybe he does too good a job – the effect is kind of meh.
Frank J. Oliva’s set is a flexible version of a high school classroom, complete with linoleum floor, easy-to-move desks (and walls, the better to allow the cast to dance to Irma Becker’s choreography) and a deliberately institutional look. The lighting by Cheyenne Sykes helps alter the environment so that “school” changes into a brightly colored party place, or so that it reflects the effect that green and red Mountain Dew is having on the students (see the show if you want to get that bit).
Costume designer Rebecca Levovitz supplies the school uniforms but gets creative with outfits for the school play and the fateful Halloween party. Director Rodaz also devised the sound and video design, balancing the floor-level musicians with the singing actors on the elevated stage, and creating videos with other-worldly sound and images to help the audience get inside Jeremy’s SQUIP-controlled brain.
Having Area Stage join Zoetic Stage and City Theatre as another South Florida theater company producing work at the Arsht is a welcome move. And if you see “Be More Chill,” you’ll grasp why Area Stage belongs there, whether or not this particular show is your kind of entertainment experience.
WHAT: Area Stage Co. presents “Be More Chill,” by Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, and 5 p.m. Sundays, through Feb. 27, 2022
WHERE: Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami
COST: $63
SAFETY PROTOCOLS: Masks and proof of a recent negative COVID-19 test or vaccination required.
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