2,661 stories by "Bill Hirschman"
The classic 1952 crime play Dial M For Murder is a brilliantly-designed timepiece of plotting and dramatic construction. Unfortunately, Broward Stage Door's barely serviceable production of …
What does a man profiteth if he gains technology and loses his artistic soul? And can romance survive ambition when the two collide? Those issues, along with scores of corollaries, swirl thr…
It's not a drag show. Broadway veteran Lee Roy Reams may become only the second man to play Dolly Levi in a sanctioned production of Hello, Dolly! when it bows this week at The Wick Theatre …
The Mousetrap at the Maltz is indeed a hoary old chestnut chock full of clichéswhich weren't even new when it bowed in 1952. But director Peter Amster and his cast wisely don't try to figh…
VERO BEACH -- Good songs tell compelling stories. And after seeing Riverside Theatre's stylish, smart and vivacious production of Swinging on a Star, you'll think no one did it better than J…
Publishing student reviews of high school theater is the cornerstone of a service from Florida Theater On Stage and the South Florida Critics and Awards Program, better known as The Cappies.
With this production of Big Fish, Slow Burn Theatre Company has proven itself with no asterisks to be the equal of any company producing musicals in the region, some with far more resources,…
After five years of staging its shows in a high school auditorium in West Boca, Slow Burn Theatre Company moves to the Broward Center for the Performing Arts with its season opener, the larg…
Twenty-seven theater artists and organizations will receive the eighth annual South Florida Silver Palm Theatre Awards honoring an outstanding or unique contribution," the group announced Mo…
Somewhere under the green slime encrusted set of The Toxic Avenger at Actors Playhouse, a nuclear plant must be melting down all China Syndrome like. That might explain the raw power emanati…
35MM and this production require some effort from the audience to meet it more than halfway. It is, as they say, not for everyone's taste. But it does represent an intriguing example of the …
By Bill Hirschman South Florida theaters still mount familiar warhorses, but the 2015-2016 season is proof that companies realize the future of theater is to attract pre-retirement audiences…
These are not at all necessarily what we predict will be the best shows this season (although they may be) or the best attended or the most popular or the most award-winning. We don't care. …
The writing seems a little sharper, the direction more incisive and the acting a bit more credible at Pigs Do Fly Productions' new Flying High. Some of the playlets still are a bit lamer tha…
With its novelistic heft, lumbering pace and large cast, the 1953 Picnic is a product of its time. But rather than reproduce a propulsive Picnic for impatient 21st century audiences, Palm Be…
The Wick Theatre's production of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum benefits from Stephen Sondheims's score and lyrics, but the cast and director need to inject more vaudevillian…
Awash in issues of Arab-American assimilation and Anglo antipathy, GableStage's Disgraced is the classic contemporary example of the topical, thought-provoking drama that forces you to reval…
Folksy, intimate, and warmly fulfilling, the national tour of the musical Once is as intoxicating as a shot of Irish whiskey. The buzz remains long after the hummable Falling Slowly reprise …
Dan Kelley, the tall rubber-faced actor-director who has been a fixture in South Florida musicals for nearly 30 years, has been named artistic director of Broward Stage Door.
If you like your theater schematic, clear-cut and requiring little cogitation, you will absolutely hate A Map of Virtue. But if you don't mind wrestling with a production while it's underway…
Broward Stage Door's earnest intriguing revival of Promises, Promises embraces its up-to-the-moment pop score for 1968, a witty and insightful script, frenetic choreography that caught the …
By Bill Hirschman It's Stephen Sondheim redux for veteran Broadway actor Ken Jennings, although a bit backwards. It might seem a long, long stretch for the man who created the mentally chall…
The surprisingly impressive bow of the new Marquee Theater Company with its production of the pop musical Aida is notable for, among other things, the professional debut of its star, Alexand…
Killer Joe, playwright Tracy Letts' 1993 debut writ large in feral violence and bottomless venality, is such a powerful brew of toxicity that the script carries along an uneven production at…
Not meaning disrespect to local producers, but the founders of the new Marquee Theater Company opening its second show this weekend in Boca Raton argue that there is no need to go to New Yor…
