As we creep into the summer arts-and-culture slowdown, this is a great time to assess what South Florida’s professional theaters are planning for their splashy 2023-2024 seasons. We explored the forthcoming slates at seven of our favorite producers in Palm Beach and Broward County and selected one show from each to spotlight. While not all companies are offering single tickets quite yet, most welcome your season subscriptions to see these productions and many others; visit their links to learn more.
Love! Valour! Compassion!, Oct. 12-Nov. 5 at Island City Stage
Humor, insight and pathos are central to this signature work by the legendary Florida-born playwright Terence McNally, who died from COVID-19 in 2020. It’s set in “Manderlay,” the lakeside vacation estate of Gregory Mitchell, a successful but creatively stymied Broadway choreographer. He’s gathered seven of his friends, lovers and their acquaintances for a summer escape from the bustle of New York City, among them his twentysomething partner and legal assistant; two of his business consultants; a costume designer and musical-theater fanatic; and a young man in the final throes of HIV/AIDS. Every character in “Love! Valour! Compassion!” is gay—not a common premise in the late ‘80s, even in cosmopolitan New York—and the play is as notable for its liberal attitudes toward nudity as its lengthy running time of three hours with two intermissions.
Into the Woods, Oct. 14-29 at Slow Burn Theatre
Netting three Tonys for its 1988 Broadway premiere, “Into the Woods” has become one of Stephen Sondheim’s signature works, a delightful and deadpan mash-up of the several Brothers Grimm fairy tales featuring some of the composer’s most persistent earworms and plenty of narrative surprises. Central to the story are a baker and his wife, and their quest to remove a witch’s curse that has left them childless. As the baker enters the woods to secure the ingredients needed to reverse the curse, his story collides with others who have ventured into the mystical space, among them Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Jack (of the Beanstalk fame).
Murder on the Orient Express, Oct. 29-Nov. 12 at Maltz Jupiter Theatre
The train has been delayed: A COVID postponement from 2020, “Murder on the Orient Express” finally rolls into Maltz Jupiter Theatre as its season opener. A delectable and sturdy whodunit conceived by the genre’s signature voice, “Murder” was the first of the prolific Agatha Christie’s three novels in 1934 alone. This stage adaptation presents a bevy of eccentric murder suspects, each with a rickety alibi, on a train barreling from the Middle East to London, with one impressively mustached detective tasked with solving the crime. If you’ve read the novel or seen the movie versions, the climax will be no surprise; the fun lies in the memorable characterizations, which will be brought to life by comic playwright Ken Ludwig.
Wait Until Dark, Nov. 30-Dec. 17 at Boca Stage
Suspense is often best experienced in the movies, where careful editing, cinematography and a tense score contribute to what we see and how we experience it. It’s perhaps a more challenging to master on a stage, where the performances and direction—with assists from key lighting and sound choices—must do all the heavy lifting. Let’s see if Boca Stage will be up to the challenge in its season opener, when the company takes on one of the great thrillers of the late 20th century. In “Wait Until Dark,” a blind housewife in Greenwich Village becomes the target of three sinister con men, some of whom pose as friends and police officers, who believe she is harboring a doll filled with expensive imported heroin. Its twists are likely to keep your glued to your seat—when you’re not spooked into jumping out of it.
Fiddler on the Roof, Jan. 11-Feb. 11 at the Wick
I’ve covered theatre in South Florida since 2006, yet I’ve never seen a production of “Fiddler on the Roof”—which says something about the actual scarcity, at least in the realm of professional regional theatre, of this seemingly ubiquitous show. The Wick will close that gap in the primo January slot of its 2023-2024 schedule. Not that it needs much introduction, but the Jerry Bock/Sheldon Harnick musical, based on Sholem Aleichem’s cherished Jewish folk tales, centers on Tevye, who toils as a milkman while raising three strong-willed daughters in a village in Imperial Russia circa 1905. Its themes, including the preservation of religious tradition amid accelerating cultural change, have transcended the musical itself, as much as its hummable classics, like “If I Were a Rich Man,” have become standards in the pop, jazz and classical songbooks.
Rooted, Jan. 31-Feb. 18 at Theatre Lab
Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer’s collaborative relationship with Theatre Lab, the resident professional theater of FAU, continues with the Florida premiere of her latest work, “Rooted,” arriving as a full production five years after Theatre Lab produced her hit “Be Here Now” in 2018. Its title cleverly encapsulating multiple meanings, “Rooted” follows two sisters, Emery and Hazel, who have spent their entire 60-plus years in the same small town in upstate New York, with Emery spending much of her time blogging about the consciousness of plants. But when her favorite subject—her beloved tree Mabel—begins to accrue a religious/mystical import, these unassuming sisters become an unexpected internet sensation. “Rooted” is the second in a planned trilogy of Laufer plays, following “Be Here Now,” that deal with metaphysical subjects in our grounded reality.
Death of a Salesman, March 29-April 14 at Palm Beach Dramaworks
Like “Fiddler on the Roof,” here’s another vital work from the history of 20th century theatre that I’ve never seen live. Never a company to shy away from herculean, canonical works—see “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” or its gripping take this season on “August: Osage County”—Dramaworks will mount the first professional production of “Death of a Salesman” in South Florida since God knows when. Arthur Miller’s seminal two-act tragedy plumbs the fractured consciousness of its traveling salesman Willy Loman, the ultimate unreliable narrator, who is increasingly unable to separate his illusions and memories with contemporaneous events. A blistering account of the withering American Dream, “Death of a Salesman” won a Tony and Putlizer, among a bucket of accolades, upon its 1949 premiere.
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