Meshaun Arnold Labrone
as Tupac Shakur |
Year-end "best of" lists are a fraud. No theater critic sees every production, least of all in South Florida with more than 60 companies. Instead, here's a subjective scrapbook of transient moments so memorable that you need no playbills to recall them.
Time evaporated and respiration stopped as Ken Clement's satanic poker player described a claustrophobic hell and a heaven denied in Mosaic's The Seafarer in December. He was surrounded by excellence: Richard Simon deftly directed a skilled ensemble in the play about redemption among Irish ne'er-do-wells on Christmas Eve.
Admit it, the blasted car flying across the Broward Center in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was inescapably enchanting in November. Ditto for the finale in Slava's Snowshow: A July blizzard engulfed the Arsht Center.
Everything about Promethean Theatre's Still The River Runs was superb, including Barton Bishop's script about feuding brothers burying their father in the Florida wilderness and Margaret Ledford's direction. There were also perfect seriocomic performances by Mark Duncan and Scott Genn. The miserable ticket sales in October said far more about audiences' timidity and laziness than it did about the quality of the show.
The Hate U Gave at Ground Up & Rising in Miami was a flawed work in July. But Meshaun Labrone Arnold's performance as doomed rapper Tupac Shakur was mesmerizingly profane and threatening, seductive and sophisticated. Arnold's bare-bones script was immeasurably elevated by Arturo Fernandez's imaginative staging: a fantasia of obscenity-laced raps and rants examining the good intentions, tragic results and destructive hypocrisy living at the intersection of race, art and pop culture.
The winner of the "something from nothing award" goes hands down to Katherine Amadeo and Paul Tei for their adaptation and execution of Sarah Kane's unintelligible fever dream of a script in 4.48 Psychosis at Naked Stage in April. This play about a woman whose sanity has disintegrated and who views suicide as a rational solution was a look inside a dark country most of us have never visited.
Arnold Mittleman staged a comeback in March at the Parker Playhouse, producing a revival of The Soul of Gershwin. It was arguably the best revue to play here in years. Gershwin's ghost took audiences on a examination of Jewish-American composers cross-pollinating klezmer, blues and gospel.
With a good director and script, Erin Joy Schmidt became a brand name for skilled character performances in about anything she did — especially the child on the playground with a gangsta attitude and the woman in lust with a ventriloquist's dummy in City Theatre's Undershorts.
Elizabeth Dimon's demented heiress who cannot sing a note but gives classical concerts was the hoot of the summer at Palm Beach Dramaworks' Souvenir. She was nearly overshadowed by Erin Amico's parade of increasingly baroque outfits, which became funnier sight gags as the play progressed.
Gordon McConnell gave a tour de force as the grieving husband with a jaw-dropping secret in Mosaic's Wrecks.
A critic's joy is a show that turns out better than expected. Solidly in that category was Jim Brochu's incarnation of the volcanic Zero Mostel at Broward Stage Door's Zero.
The year was also marked by off-stage tragedies and triumphs. The loss of Sun Sentinel arts writer Jack Zink and triple-threat Bruce Adler, among others, created vacuums that can never be filled. On the credit side, the theater community rallied in rare unanimity twice. First for the delightful insanity of The 24 Hour Theatre Project, then, led by the Theatre League of South Florida, with the saving of the 2009 Carbonells.
Finally, cheer 2008 for the slow but steady growth of ticket sales at a few small theaters specializing in thought-provoking works such as Dramaworks, Mosaic and Miami's Mad Cat Theatre that had standing-room-only houses. |
