Buy Tickets for Last Night in Ballyhoo Aventura Arts Center

Miamian Ana Villafane in the Broadway product of On Your Feet, the bio-musical of Gloria and Emilio Estefan coming to the Arts this fall

Past Neb Hirschman

If you know where to expect, certainly you lot can observe reliable warhorse titles in the upcoming theater season in South Florida, but it'south easier to find vibrant, gimmicky and challenging offerings.

In that location'south the kickoff (sort of) of the national tour of the Estefans' rousing Broadway bio-musical On Your Feet and GableStage's production of last flavor's acclaimed New York drama The Humans. Or acknowledge Zoetic Stage finally bringing Fun Abode to South Florida and Palm Embankment Dramaworks premiering non ane only two new plays

More proof? The fledgling Miami New Drama will present the venerable Thornton Wilder's Our Town in October near life in small boondocks New Hampshire effectually the turn of the century – except the families will speak English, Castilian and/or Creole. Actors' Playhouse volition open its flavor with a revival of Evita – presented in English the first four weeks and Spanish in the post-obit iii weeks.

And if y'all erroneously look only comfort food from the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1 offer is the scalding social commentary reboot of An Inspector Calls.

They are all role of a 2017-2018 season embodying the region's evolution. The emphasis on new work will continue to increment, small companies will go on pushing the boundaries of audience expectations and most bourgeois companies volition nudge at their audiences' comfort zones.

Just the scope is overwhelming: The region from Vero Beach to Primal Due west hosts well over 100 companies. It encompasses professional troupes with seven-digit budgets, customs theaters that date back more than than six decades and children'south theaters undertaking incomparably mature fare, daring collegiate offerings and surprisingly effective loftier school productions.

To continue rails, our agenda at Florida Theater On Stage (click here) lists every theater-related production in the coming 18 months that companies have appear. In our bulldoze to be consummate, authentic and upwards-to-date, we will update changes in dates, titles and extensions when nosotros are notified. Some companies are still solidifying titles and dates at printing time, but they volition added equally they become available.

It'southward impossible to spotlight even a tenth of what's available, but here'due south a subjective review of some of the well-nigh intriguing prospects.

When On Your Feet opened on Broadway in the autumn of 2015, we wrote, "Start the clock, Florida. Xviii months, mayhap two years. But the moment tickets proceed sale for the national bout of On Your Feet!, become on line… because if the exhilarating musical version of the lives of Emilio and Gloria Estefan is enchanting Broadway audiences, South Florida audiences will be enraptured."

That Broadway Across America bear witness opening at the Arsht Center in Miami Oct. 5 was a surprisingly conventional musical in every attribute, but the nuclear free energy, cultural pride, considerable polish and boundless joy that poured over the footlights in New York was irresistibly enthralling. Miami native Ana Villafane who gave a phenomenal performance as Gloria volition non be touring, merely New York ensemble fellow member Christie Prades has the show's full confidence. Veteran local musical director Manny Schvartzman, who aided the original production, volition be the tour's acquaintance music director. While publicity has implied that the Arsht'south x-solar day-run is the starting time of the tour, it really opens in that middle of Latin culture Buffalo, New York, on September 22. To read our review of the Broadway production, click hither.

Broadway production of Fun Home

Producers never brought the national tour of the acclaimed musical Fun Home to South Florida, but as they passed over the region for the bout of Next To Normal. Fortunately, local companies knew their audiences better; Later, Next To Normal had three successful local productions. Certain enough, Zoetic Stage will stage the Tony-winning Best Musical Fun Home at the Arsht in April. The moving show is based on Alison Bechdel's autobiographical graphic novel virtually growing upwardly with a closeted father and her discovery of her sexuality. It features an insightful book past Lisa Kron and a brilliant score by Jeanine Tesori. To read our review of the Broadway production, click here.

Terry Teachout

Palm Embankment Dramaworks forged its reputation with solid productions of existing idea-provoking and archetype titles from Albee to O'Neill. Simply information technology has been developing new works in its Dramaworkshop programme for iii years and this flavour is offering two world premieres in its usual v-play carte. First upward in December is Billy and Me, by Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout (who wrote last season'due south Satchmo At the Waldorf). It'southward a two-hander focused on playwrights Tennessee Williams and William Inge. The idea was conceived by Producing Artistic Director William Hayes while he was directing Inge'south play Picnic in 2015, especially how one career was on the rise as the other was on the refuse. Actors Nicholas Richberg and Tom Wahl have been working with Hayes and Teachout all year as the script has developed. Then in March, Dramaworks volition produce the first full product of Edgar & Emily, a comic fantasia in which emerging poet Emily Dickinson is unexpectedly visited by a desperate Edgar Allen Poe.

GableStage stays truthful to form with challenging plays fresh off New York stages, notably this October with Stephen Karam'southward Tony-winner The Humans, which dissects modern life through a holiday party drawing together a disparate family. To read our review of the New York product, click here. Too on tap on April is Gloria, past Pulitzer finalist Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, considered one of the most intellectually-challenging playwrights examining race. And for less weighty evenings, at that place will be Becoming Dr. Ruth by Mark St. Germain (Freud's Last Session) which was presented at the Parker Playhouse a few years agone.

Metropolis Theatre seems active most twelvemonth-circular now. Known for mounting short plays, City Theatre is offering in September its first full-length play in quite a while. It will nowadays Building The Wall by Robert Schenkkan who won the Pulitzer for The Kentucky Bicycle and more recently won praise for All The Way about LBJ. The production is office of the Rolling World Premiere program from the National New Play Network in which a play gets multiple premieres and so the author tin can develop the script from production to product. In this example, the script has already been published and is being produced effectually the country. Ready in a prison in the near future of the Trump assistants, a historian (Karen Stephens) interrogates a human who ran an American internment campsite (Gregg Weiner).

Wearisome Burn Theatre in Fort Lauderdale isn't doing a globe premiere but information technology's once more taking chances with material — Disney'south Tarzan in October requiring considerable "flying" past actors, Jason Robert Chocolate-brown's gorgeous musical version of The Bridges of Madison County that did not fare well in New York, Stone of Ages during the summer, and the love simply technically ambitious The Hole-and-corner Garden. Over again information technology will perform smaller shows Peter and the Starcatcher and the satirical Disaster! in the Broward Eye'due south Abdo New River Room besides as the Aventura Arts & Cultural Center and the Old School Square in Delray Embankment – making it the only company performing in all three counties.

The Maltz Jupiter Theatre is famous for productions of well-known popular titles pointedly given a fresh presentation. Certain plenty, this year offers South Pacific, Newsies and Hairspray, but also the socially conscious comedy Built-in Yesterday on Oct and, in its almanac take-a-chance slot in Feb, An Inspector Calls – a hoary 1945 British drawing room play transformed by a 1992 revival into a scorching commentary on the caste system and social responsibility.

Actors' Playhouse, which took a huge run a risk concluding season by running Million Dollar Quartet for 11 weeks, is doubling down on its bet by bringing the barnburner back for some other long run in the late spring. To read our review, click here.  But Actors is starting the flavour off with a revival of its own production of Evita in English and later in Spanish. Also echoing before Playhouse successes are Noises Off and The Big Bang, plus an original run at the romantic Irish gaelic musical One time.

Love Never Dies

Equally alluring are titles from the three major national tours seasons – not counting companies whose shows appear for a couple of days at smaller venues. Simply a sampling: At the Broward Center, Beloved Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber'due south sequel to his Phantom of the Opera; the dark farce A Admirer's Guide To Dearest and Murder, Schoolhouse of Rock and the tender Waitress. The Arsht will have Finding Neverland and The Book of Mormon. The Kravis brings in the most meta-musical comedy e'er to feature Shakespeare, Something Rotten. Both the Kravis and the Arsht volition bow The Bodyguard, a stage musical version of the 1992 Whitney Houston film that notably has yet to play in New York but which received a broad range of reviews in London.

The proudly mainstream Wick Theatre zeroes in on the musicals that Marilynn Wick believes her audition craves. This flavor includes the appreciating spoof The Drowsy Chaperone, She Loves Me, Singin' in the Rain, Jerry'southward Girls equally in Jerry Herman, and a rarely-performed show with one of the most beautiful scores in musical theater, Brigadoon in March. It's also hosting New Yr'due south Eve and Day with Hal Linden (a former Broadway star himself) and a fictional Evening with Edith Head, the legendary film costume designer, in conjunction with its new showroom in its adjacent Costume Museum.

Thinking Cap Theatre in Fort Lauderdale has a season that follows the agenda year. Already slated for afterward this yr are such works as Direct White Men past up and coming playwright Young Jean Lee plus the rock-infused Lizzie The Musical, equally in Lizzie Borden.

Theatre Lab based at FAU in Boca Raton has another flavour of new works, but likewise is instituting a season of play readings and master classes. The kick off with characteristic Pulitzer-winning Miami playwright Nilo Cruz with the reading of three Cruz scripts and master class from Oct. half dozen-8.

Fifty-fifty the region'south community theaters have intriguing seasons. Pembroke Pines Theatre of the Performing Arts is delivering the crowd-pleasing How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, but also the intense play Judgment At Nuremberg. The 65-year-quondam Lake Worth Playhouse is offering Oliver! but also Lerner & Loewe's rarely-seenPaint Your Wagon. And the 71-year-old Delray Beach Playhouse, which contrary to legend did not entertain Ponce de Leon, is doing both Annie Become Your Gun and Who'southward Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

You'd think that Chess and Ragtime would exist titles for big-budget Disinterestedness houses, only both will exist mounted by Florida Children's Theatre (formerly Fort Lauderdale Children's Theatre); and Surface area Stage Company's conservatory in Miami will do Winnie the Pooh, Cinderella – and Carrie.

Equally usual, the list of theater companies and venues ebbs and flows with each season, but observers are encouraged that young troupes ofttimes chosen scrappy and fledgling (terms that some encounter as condescending) are putting down roots.

—The new management at Arts Garage in Delray Beach is trying to decide how to proceed after deciding that the final series was logistically impossible to back up fiscally. But the old head of that program Keith Garsson has revived his dormant Primal Forces visitor, which produced several impressive low-budget intimate dramas a few seasons agone such equally Sunset Babe. In the coming year, it plans to work out of the tiny Andrews Living Arts venue in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Information technology opens October xiii with The Skillful Girl, a dystopian vision by Emilie Collyer about the owner of a brothel populated past robots.

—New City Players, now iii seasons onetime, just completed a three-play flavor at The Vanguard Sanctuary for the Arts in Fort Lauderdale and is currently solidifying its adjacent flavor.

—MNM Productions, based at the Kravis Centre's Rinker Playhouse, also just finished its second season of large-cast musicals such as Hair and Spamalot that accept engendered rousing audience reaction. It, also, is nailing down its season.

Some "new" players are actually old easily. After 42 years as a customs theater, Master Street Players in Miami Lakes has also merely completed its get-go professional season including two productions that needed no excuses, Marjorie Prime number and Bad Jews. Its next season ranges from Eurpides' Iphigneia at Aulis
to Tracy Letts' Superior Donuts to Michael McKeever's Clark Gable Slept Here.

J'due south Cultural Arts Theatre – a venerable community theater at the Michael-Ann Russell Jewish Community Center/Sanford Fifty. Ziff Campus in North Miami Beach – bowed this year equally professional person visitor with Ben Andron's Broken Snowfall starring Avi Hoffman. It plans to continue this season (possibly in a new edifice on campus) with Joseph and the Astonishing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Last Night Of Ballyhoo and Kindertransport, a play nigh the legacy of children who escaped the Holocaust.

Some companies are in new digs. Outré Theatre Company, which seems to take had a new venue each year, has settled in its sixth flavor at the spanking new Pompano Beach Cultural Center where it plans to deliver Green Twenty-four hours's American Idiot in November, an all-female version of Quentin Tarantino's film at present retitled Reservoir Dolls, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

After moving from venue to venue to venue, M Ensemble, the country'south oldest African-American theater continuously in performance, finally is firmly entrenched in the gorgeous new county-owned Sandrell Rivers Theater at the Audrey M. Edmonson Transit Village in Miami. Announcements about their new flavour are still to come.

Local audiences have proven their receptivity to new works, leading to an ever-increasing proliferation of earth premieres, southeast U.S. premieres and still-in-production events. It's difficult to find companies that aren't at least hosting staged readings. The cornucopia of new works includes Christopher Demos-Brownish's Wrongful Deaths and Other Circus Acts at Zoetic Stage, Andrew Bergh's The Radicalization of Rolfe (every bit in the "Xvi Going On Seventeen" Rolfe) at Island City Stage, Peter Sagal's Most Wanted at Theatre Lab in Boca Raton (plus state premieres for works by Lauren Gunderson and Deborah Zoe Laufer), and Mad Cat Theatre'southward Jessica Farr unveiling Wake Of The Flood.

Several presenting houses are also offer a wide assortment of Broadway-related revues and concerts with Broadway stars "at liberty" such as Audra McDonald at the Kravis in March, and arguably the nigh high profile consequence, Chita Rivera and Tommy Tune at the Parker Playhouse on January xix. Tune will appear solo at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre in November. The Crest Theatre in Delray Beach has Andrea McArdle and Donna McKechnie together in February, plus In The Heights' Mandy Gonzales, An American In Paris' Max Von Essen (also in Aventura, and Santino Fontana of Cinderella at the same venue). But at that place are many more across the region.

Like several venues, Delray Embankment Playhouse volition host lesser-known names in different shows spotlighting music associated with Bob Fosse, Kander & Ebb, Stephen Schwartz and Angela Lansbury.

For slightly higher brows, Florida Thou Opera is returning with Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, Strauss' Salome and Gluck'southward Orfea, both the Arsht and the Broward Center. Only in Miami, FGO will present Daniel Catán'due south Florencia en el Amazonas, described as "an opera star goes down the Amazon on a magical quest," a contemporary work inspired past the writings of Gabriel García Márquez. Palm Beach Opera volition do Tosca, La Nozze de Figaro and Leonard Bernstein's Candide.

So, bank check out our agenda and clear yours.

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Source: http://www.floridatheateronstage.com/news/curtain-up-on-the-2017-2018-south-florida-theater-season/