John Thomason

Celebrated playwright Lynn Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner is set in a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania—one of the poorest cities in America at the time Nottage researched her play—where a group of factory workers, facing the Rust Belt’s exodus of heavy industry, face layoffs and in-fighting. Labor, race and politics coalesce in Nottage’s sweeping work, set over an eight-year period.

The envelope-pushing regional dance collective will present two provocative and imaginative works in its third program of the season. Original choreographer Gerald Arpino’s boundary-breaking 1974 ballet “The Relativity of Icarus,” which presents the Daedalus and Icarus myths in the context of a homoerotic pas de deux, will be produced alongside an original premiere from Dance Now!: “Gli Altri/The Others,” a symbolically rich and confessional ballet inspired by the fantastical cinematic imagery of Federico Fellini.

This acclaimed comedy by Karen Zacarías explores issues of race, class and privilege through the relatable prism of a neighborly dispute. When recent community arrivals Pablo and his pregnant wife Tania plan to host a barbecue abutting the home—and immaculately manicured garden—of their long-established Washington, D.C. neighbors, a genial border dispute simmers into a feud of clashing cultures and buried prejudices.

The 2004 cult comedy, about a naïve, African-raised teenager who moves to Chicago and clashes with her new school’s reign of “Plastics,” receives its musical-theatre reboot courtesy of Broadway Across America. Eighteen songs transform a 97-minute film into a two-and-a-half-hour stage spectacle, but the film’s story, and its charms, remain intact, with Tina Fey herself penning its punchy and much-praised dialogue. 

Zoetic Stage closes its season at the Arsht Center with this world-premiere play by Vanessa Garcia. Two best friends/lovers, Catherine and Lewis, embark on a corporate-sponsored road trip across the United States to discover the “real America,” and their encounters—with everyone from a grieving nun to a queer homeschooled teenager—suggest a fraying American dream that prompts the travelers to question their own identities.

A mission statement as much as a play title, this world premiere from Tony-winning dramatist Lileana Blain-Cruz is inspired by Haitian Miamian Edwidge Danticat’s essay collection of the same name. With action spanning from the mountains of Haiti to the streets of New York to the beaches of Miami, Blain-Cruz meditates on the trials, tribulations and joys of being an immigrant artist in a world of personal and political turmoil.

This ecstatic jukebox musical, closing out the Arsht Center’s 2022/2023 Broadway in Miami touring series, chronicles the magical sonic kismet that brought Otis Williams, Paul Williams, Melvin Franklin, Eddie Kendricks and Elbridge “Al” Bryant together as the archetypal Motown quintet. With more than 30 songs, it charts their journey from the streets of Detroit to rock ‘n’ roll royalty.

Playwright David Auburn’s stimulating modern classic follows Catherine, daughter and caretaker of Robert, a recently deceased mathematical genius who struggled with mental illness. While questioning a potential inheritance of her father’s madness and genius, Catherine meets a graduate student who has discovered a paradigm-shifting mathematics proof among her father’s scribbled notebooks. This moving and cerebral play won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

This fact-based, Tony-winning David-and-Goliath musical centers on a clutch of wiseacre newsboys from hard-knock lives who stage a strike against plutocratic publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst—all of it set to acrobatic choreography and tuneful melodies.

Lynn Nottage’s shattering 10-character play, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is set in a tin mining town during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A female business owner runs a thriving bar and poolroom that acts as a neutral gathering place—a cultural equator for soldiers and miners of various factions. But the pointless bloodshed of war is less Nottage’s focus than the routine rape and sexual abuse suffered by the bar’s servers. African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, 6161 NW 22nd Ave; $30–$35

Playwright and Opa-Locka native Aurin Squire’s latest play explores a coming-of-age story of sexual discovery set in his own hardscrabble Miami neighborhood circa 1984. The play is about an age of innocence, or perhaps innocence lost: The title subject reigns over popular culture, and he may as well be a deity to a group of young Opa-Locka locals aspiring to be the “gloved one.” But it’s also a time of incipient gentrification and drug trafficking, and Squire’s play captures a moment in history that continues to resonate. $46.50–$76.50

Perennially relevant and deeply moving, Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s Tony-winning rock musical centers on a suburban mother with bipolar disorder who, unable to process an unimaginable grief, all but loses her identity in a cocktail of pills. As her situation worsens, the effects ripple across her family members, each of whom finds their own ways to cope.  $60–$65

Robert Battle remembers growing up in Miami’s Liberty City and taking the bus to the Jackie Gleason Theater for a children’s matinee performance of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. “And look where I am now,” he says. For the past seven years, Battle has been artistic director of that very institution. “People should take that as a guide—that it’s important young people especially see the company, because it can be a transforming experience.” This year celebrates two major anniversaries for the modern-dance company, renowned for its ability to communicate African-American experiences to a global audience through movement. March 30 commemorates 60 years since the theater’s inaugural performance in New York, while 2018 marks a decade of Alvin Ailey at the Adrienne Arsht Center, where its annual program is a cultural staple. And every Miami tour is a homecoming for Battle, whose mother still lives in his childhood home. “Having grown up in Miami, [I think] it’s important that we see a company where the majority of the dancers are dancers of color, that we see images of people that are successful in the field, and that dance can serve as a uniter,” says Battle. “I know Miami. I was there for some of the not-so-good times, the riots. I know how important it is for a company like Alvin Ailey to come and deliver a message of hope.” That theme will no doubt resonate during the theater’s 2018 Arsht program, which features Battle’s Mass, a rapid-fire work for 18 dancers; and Aile

For theatergoers, one of the pleasures of a Miami summer—which begins in April and runs approximately through October (if we’re lucky)—is the air-conditioned escapism of Summer Shorts. Hosted at the Adrienne Arsht Center and produced by City Theatre for the past 22 years, the program’s formula is as familiar and dependable as an IHOP breakfast: eight shorts culled from hundreds of entries, each running no more than 10 minutes, with a bias toward the outrageous. There’s no reason this eccentric assortment couldn’t also work in the wintertime—in City Theatre’s verbiage, “for those nights when South Florida temperatures plunge below 70.” Hence the resurrection of Winter Shorts, Summer Shorts’ chilly companion, which City Theatre last produced in 2001. Its winter revival is part of the company’s fullest season yet, an initiative by recently appointed artistic director Margaret Ledford to expand City Theatre’s footprint. “I am coming on as a full-time, full-fledged artistic director, and trying to grow City,” says Ledford, who has directed for many of South Florida’s most esteemed companies. “We decided Winter Shorts would be a perfect thing to add to this season. We’d love to make it an anchor to the Summer Shorts program in the winter.” The relaunched presentation will have a more consistent thematic focus than its sister show, with all of the plays addressing the holidays. Although some of the shorts are still in negotiation, Ledford is excited to include Oy Vey Maria, Mark Har

In November 2015, the preeminent power couple of the Miami music scene added another accomplishment to an already long list that includes Grammy-winning albums, books, films and more. That’s when Gloria and Emilio Estefan became Broadway impresarios, spearheading a musical based on their inspirational, tumultuous lives. Two years after its Broadway debut, On Your Feet! makes its national touring debut in Miami. Emilio Estefan would have it no other way. “Miami is going to be crazy, because most of the people have been with us since we played bar mitzvahs and weddings,” he says. “Miami has always been special to us. It’s a place where we always felt thankful for the good times, and even when we had the accident [that critically injured Gloria, in 1990], everyone was praying for us. It’s going to be amazing going to a theater and seeing the amount of faces we’ll know.” A splashy jukebox musical that earns its exclamation point, On Your Feet! weaves the Estefans’ crossover singles, from their Miami Sound Machine days and Gloria’s solo career, into a narrative about pursuing the American Dream on one’s own terms. The book, scripted by Birdman’s Oscar-winning cowriter Alexander Dinelaris, charts Gloria’s musically precocious childhood in Cuba through her immigration to Miami, her on- and offstage relationship with Emilio and that harrowing bus crash. Along the way, it addresses themes of racism and perseverance, as the Latin pop innovators spar with shortsighted record executives

When GableStage’s Artistic Director Joseph Adler produced Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe in 2000, he wasn’t just testing the waters of onstage depravity and violence. He was ready to jump headfirst into a pool of controversy.  The notorious 1993 play—a white-trash, black-as-death comedy rife with vulgarity, bloodshed and sexual humiliation—puts even the strongest constitutions to the test. A more prudent director might have eased into such a production, carefully cementing a reputation before attempting a work this polarizing. But Adler staged Killer Joe as GableStage’s sixth show, on the heels of safe, established works by David Hare, John Steinbeck and John Patrick Shanley. “When I did Killer Joe, the then executive director asked, ‘You’re going to do this, with nudity and violence? At the Biltmore? In Coral Gables?’ I said, ‘Yes, and it’s going to be the biggest success we’ve had this year,’ ” recalls Adler. “She said, ‘Put it in writing.’ And I did. And it was!” Adler, who became GableStage’s artistic director in 1998, is quick to point out that the theater produces far more than just confrontational shockers. He stages historical dramas and political comedies and erudite monologues and chamber musicals. But his reputation for shows that illuminate the dark corners of the human condition was solidified early, in part because nobody else in the region was doing them at the time: 2004’s Bug, with its unsettling dental surgery, disembowelment and full-nude self-immolation; 2010’s