FT. LAUDERDALE, FL – Thinking Cap Theater in association with Empire Stage present the world premiere of “Death for Sidney Black” by Leah Nanako Winkler. “Death for Sidney Black” is a dark, comedic response to cult films such as “Heathers” and “Mean Girls.” Come out for an evening of girls, guns, gore, and more–appropriate for mature audiences only.

Running now through November 27 (Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m.). No performances on November 24 and 25. Tickets: $30, student discounts available.

For reservations and general information, call 954-678-1496 or visit thinkingcaptheatre.com. Tickets may also be purchased at the door for cash only. Empire Stage is located at 1140 N Flagler Drive in Fort Lauderdale.

HARTFORD, CT – A Connecticut high school musical caused a public walkout after two male students in the cast kissed during the performance. The kiss took place during the Hartford Public High School’s production of the musical, “Zanna Don’t!”

According to WTIC-TV, “Zanna Don’t!” depicts life at the fictitious Heartsville High, where students with academically-charged interests sit atop the popularity echelon while football players are the outcasts and heterosexuals must conceal their sexual preference to avoid public scrutiny. During the show, two men in the c ast sh

are a brief kiss.

The school reported that a number of male students, apparently the football team because of the uniforms they were wearing according to the school, got up and walked out of the play when the kiss took place. The school also said that it received a great number of phone calls and was even paid a visit by a Bible-thumping parent who spoke about homosexuals in an unflattering manner.

BOCA RATON, FL – Relive the most infamous radio broadcast in radio history live on stage at the Caldwell Theatre. Seventy-two years ago, audiences were thrilled and horrified by a radio broadcast that took place Halloween night. Aliens were invading!

No one was safe! Only a select few knew it was all a creation of the brilliant Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater.  H.G. Welles’ “War of the Worlds” went down as the most infamous radio drama in history.

South Florida audiences have the opportunity to relive this amazing broadcast — live on stage at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton. “War of the Worlds” will be presented at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. on October 31 on the Caldwell Theatre’s main stage.  Local favorite Gordon McConnell will direct a cast including Avi Hoffman, Dan Leonard and Laura Turnbull that will not only enact multiple roles, but also recreate the amazing sound effects utilizing authentic devices used in radio drama in the 1930’s. Another aspect of the production is that all the locations will be transferred from New Jersey to Palm Beach County. Thrill to aliens landing in a Delray Beach pineapple grove. Listen in horror as the invasion marches down Clematis Street. It’s the perfect entertainment for Halloween and, best of all, the audience gets to be part of the action with the actors and stage manager cueing you to provide the additional sound effects.

“War of the Worlds” is a presentation of AirPlayz, a company dedicated to the art of radio drama, produced by 2Watts Productions. Admission is $10, and reservations can be made by calling 561-632-0517 or send an email to airplayzartsradio@gmail.com.

By Warren Day

The class shows in the challenging plays they perform, and not the endlessly-repeated comedies and classics that compose the repertory of many a theater company. The class shows in the sets, which are not only beautifully designed, but also add meaning to the characters and the story. It also shows in the theater building itself, the Count de Hoernle Theatre, one of the most effective and pleasant performing spaces in all of Florida. And usually, the class shows in the high-quality of the acting, with their casts filled with professional talent who’ve earned their Actors Equity union cards. Under the creative leadership of Clive Cholerton, it’s simply one of the best theatre companies in the Sout

Their premiere production for the 2011- 2012 season, “After the Revolution” by Amy Herzog, hits the mark on most of its high standards and speaks well for the season ahead.

First of all, the play was picked by the New York Times as one of the ten best of 2010. It deals with a situation and a theme that has an importance and an appeal outside of its own historical context. What do you do when you discover that the pride of your family, someone who you’ve emulated in your personal and professional life, turns out to have a secret that reveals a much darker side to his character? To some degree, we all need heroes in our lives, but it can be quite dicey to have a family member as one, because if anything should go wrong, the fallout can extend into so many relationships.

In “After the Revolution,” the pride of the family is the grandfather, a kind of Alger Hiss character who achieved fame in the 1950s by not naming names at the McCarthy hearings and for being a spokesperson against the witch hunts of the times that treated every person on the far left as a traitor. The play takes place in 1999, 18 months after the grandfather has died. His granddaughter Emma has just graduated from law school and started a legal defense fund to promote his ideals. Her dreams, values, and career are tied up with the heroic image of her grandfather, and then she learns he wasn’t who he seemed to be.

It’s a dilemma that’s been faced by other families, such as the televangelist who’s caught paying for the services of a male prostitute, the politician who highly embellishes his military service or family background, or the father who everyone thought was a genius businessman but instead has been running a ponzi scheme, and, of course, the lesser and more common experience of finding out at sixteen that your parents simply aren’t as perfect as you once thought they were at six.

The drama and the comedy of “After the Revolution” is in how Emma reacts to learning about her grandfather’s unsavory past, a past about to be revealed to the world in a new book. And it’s also where the play (and casting) runs into some trouble. Emma is not a sympathetic character because she suffers from the same fault of almost everyone on the far left or far right – she’s filled with self-righteousness. The fault is partly in how she’s written, and even more so in how she’s played by Jackie Rivera, who goes more for the anger than the hurt, more for the petulance than the vulnerability. You begin to feel sorrier for her family and boyfriend than you do for her. The rest of the cast find more shadings and nuance in their performances, such as Gordon McConnell as her father, Nancy Barnett as her stepmother, and particularly Howard Elfman as a kindly and wise benefactor who learned long ago that the bigger the man, the more likely, the bigger the fault.

Whether it’s on Broadway or at a local community theater, putting on a successful play is a crapshoot. In Douglas Carter Beane’s comedy “As Bees in Honey Drown,” the Rising Action Theater in Fort Lauderdale has produced one of their best productions and given us one of the best reasons to see current live theater in south Florida. For that to happen, many different variables have to come together in just the right way.

First of all is the play itself. You want it to be a really good play, but not one that has been widely available to local theater- goers before or made into a film that can be easily seen on cable or DVD. The Obie winning “As Bees in Honey Drown” certainly fits the bill, providing a sparkling evening of laughs, wise observations, and fascinating characters, a frothy mixture about the dangers of frothy mixtures. It is that rare play where the second act is stronger than the first.

Secondly, you want the production to enhance the script, not encumber it. The director Avi Hoffman has an impressive list of credits, giving the play a professional pace and polish, and makes the best utilization of the theater’s space at Sunshine Cathedral that I’ve seen. The set is also imaginative, with a clever use of ever-changing panels that resemble a honeycomb.

Finally, the overall acting is quite good. Four of the six actors play various denizens of Manhattan, and seldom has a local ensemble added so much to the final result. The most effective acting from the beginning to the end belongs to Andrew Wind who plays the young naïve gay writer with a well-received first novel, but who hasn’t set the world on fire, something he desperately wants to do. It’s what he does in small moments that make his acting so memorable, such as the scene where he’s trying on his first expensive suit at Saks. When he stares out into the audience, but is supposed to be gazing into a mirror, you genuinely believe he’s seeing his reflective image.

The central character around which the whole story revolves is a daunting figure with the daunting name of Alexa Vere de Vere, a life-force of a woman who’s one part Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” one part Liza Minnelli in “Cabaret,” and a big hunk of Rosalind Russell in “Auntie Mame.” She’s a glittering con-artist who has the uncanny ability to tell you the very things about yourself that you so desperately want to believe. She perfectly understands that so many of us have become fame whores, either in seeking it for ourselves or by being fascinated by those who have it.

Some of the wittiest lines in the play belong to Alexa: “Art is eternal, but eternal isn’t as long as it used to be.” “In England everyone is gay, so when you say ‘Queen’ you have to specify.” And what is almost the mantra of the play: “You’re not the person you were born. Who wonderful is? You’re the person you were meant to be.”

This Queen Bee is played by Actor’s Equity member Amy McKenna, who often approaches this larger-than-life role with an over-the- top consonance that lacks the nuance and variety

to carry the evening. We reviewers usually see a play in its first or second public performance, so the highly-experienced Ms. McKenna will probably settle into the proper zone for Alexa by the time you see it.

It’s part of the richness of Mr. Beane’s delightful comedy that he takes a somewhat familiar character, the Auntie- Mame type, and shows how destructive such divas can be. From afar, they can be quite entertaining, just the answer to a bland life. But up close they can mess you up in ways that last a long time.

And the gullible gay writer is ripe for such manipulation, because he buys into our celebrity-mad culture, and nothing is as vain as the love of fame.

It used to be that fame was the indirect result of doing something exceptionally well. But now, it’s often the means and the end, becoming so fashionable that there are those who eagerly buy it even when it’s a rip-off of the real thing, thus confusing being widely-known with being wildly-successful. Kim Kardasian is one. Meryl Streep is the other.

And in this play, the playwright suggests that when fame becomes the wherewithal of our existence (or culture), we can be destroyed by the very thing we have made… or to put it another way, as bees in honey drown.

Plays through October 9, Fri. and Sat. at
8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m. Tickets are $35
at www.risingactiontheatre.tix.com
or call 1-800-595-4849. Rising Action
Theatre is located at Sunshine
Cathedral, 1840 SW 9th Ave, Fort
Lauderdale 33313.

Send any comments or questions you have to AgendaReviews@aol.com.

Some play titles are more like definitions than labels, such as Tony Kushner’s new one, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (wow, try getting that on the typical marquee), and that’s also true of another play being performed now at Rising Action Theatre in Fort Lauderdale.

Entitled Two Boys in Bed on a Cold Winter’s Night, you can’t say you don’t know the premise before “you pays your money.”
Written by James Edwin Parker, the play happens in real time, meaning there’re no jumps in the timeline and no intermission to break up the flow. It takes place early on a January morning in 1987 in a walk-up apartment in NYC’s Greenwich Village, for which Christopher Michaels has designed a very effective set.

Those two boys in the title (they’re 38, so they’re really not boys) meet for the first time the night before at The Ninth Circle gay bar and, by both their accounts, had some great sex; but now it’s the hour preceding dawn and one of them wants to talk and bare his soul. The other doesn’t. One confuses a great hook-up with a promissory note for the future, while the other just wants to have some more sex and be gone.

They went home together, but not with the same purpose.

The strength of that dramatic situation is also its weakness. It’s all so familiar, or as Yogi Berra said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” That familiarity, the chance to see a portion of your life on the stage, will be enough for many people, but for others they may wish the playwright had delved deeper with some fresh and unexpected insights, or at least found more humor in such a fretful encounter. Like most one-night stands, it isn’t as satisfying afterwards as it may have appeared at the moment.

The director, Jerry Jensen, keeps the two actors moving and varies the composition within a small space and a tight timeframe, and both Angel Perez and Nigel Revenge seem to understand and fit their parts, although for 1987 the tattoos of one actor are probably more appropriate for the skin of the other character. The play does contain full frontal nudity.

What you have are two strangers – one who appears rather content with himself and is perpetually horny, while the other is filled with unrelenting loneliness and unfulfilled connections, the neediness of that character overwhelming the other. In the movie Broadcast News, Albert Brooks says, “wouldn’t this be a great world if desperation made us more attractive.”  But alas, it never does.

Performances at 8pm Fridays, 7:30 and 10pm Saturdays, and 7pm on Sundays until June 12. Rising Action Theatre at Sunshine Cathedral, 1480 SW 9th Ave, Ft. Lauderdale. Tickets are $35 and can be purchased at risingactiontheatre.com or call 800-595-4849 or 954-561-2225

If you see only one gay play this year, you should make it “The First Step: Dairy of a Sex Addict,” now playing at the Empire Stage Theater in Fort Lauderdale through April 24.  Regardless of subject matter or the sexual orientation of its characters, this is one of the better local productions I’ve seen in recent years.

First billed as the southeastern premiere of a play originally produced in New York, it has been substantially reshaped to where it could be considered a world premiere. And those changes appear to have turned a favorably received play into an even stronger one.

While the main character is addicted to “quickies” (at least one a day with different people), that won’t keep other gays and straights from relating to elements of his story. Like all good plays, it’s about more than just its plot, so even if you haven’t had sex in a public restroom or an adult video store, you can still recognize something of yourself in Joe’s struggle to define what role sex (and intimacy) will play in his life.

The author is listed as Henry Covery, but seemingly that’s a pseudonym (in-ry-covery?), due to this work being based on real, and possibly litigious, experiences. And as this playful play unfolds, it feels like something that really happened.

“The First Step” is very funny, as well as inventive, gutsy and smart.  I would recommend you get your tickets right away, because as the word spreads that this comedy/drama is something special, it may not be so easy to obtain a seat in this intimate theater.

Under the superb direction of Michael Leeds, it moves at a brisk 80 minutes with no intermission.

His experience doing musicals on Broadway as well as regional theaters, including one Tony nominated show, can be clearly seen in such moments as when the cast performs a rap song on the fanciful screen names people use in online chat rooms, or in a sexual addiction therapy group where the participants break into slightly altered Broadway songs to tell their stories of ho and woe.

The polished company of players delivers spot-on timing for the comedy and wounded vulnerability for the dramatic moments, giving either sparkle or subtle nuance wherever it’s appropriate. Larry Buzzeo plays Joe, who must merit both sympathy and empathy in his reckless search for self-understanding.  The rest of the cast – Katherine Amadeo, Matthew William Chizever, Joe Harter and Zach Schwartz – play his family members, tricks, partner and fellow sexual addicts on that spiraling journey. The actors seem to be having a hell-of-a-good time and that becomes contagious for the audience.

So do yourself a favor, do your friends a favor, and take “The First Step.”

The First Step plays Thursdays through Saturdays 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m. at the Empire Stage Theater, 1140 N. Flagler Drive, Fort Lauderdale 33304, off of Sunrise Boulevard. Tickets are $30 and can be purchased online at www.empirestage.com, or at the door.

This year we broke down the awards into four categories: people, restaurants, nightlife and “shop, fit and play.” In each category, there were approximately 20 awards and, in many cases, there is more than one winner per category representing the various large and diverse areas of the state we serve.

So sit back, relax and enjoy this year’s 2010 Florida Agenda’s Best of Florida and if you don’t agree with some of the results of

the vote, look for it again next year and make sure to vote participate.

Best Of Florida – PEOPLE

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE WINNERS – PEOPLE

1. Best Local Hero
2. Best Local LGBT Sports Team
3. Best Female Impersonator
4. Best Celebrity Meltdown of 2010
5. Best Tattoo on a LGBT person
6. Sexiest Online Profile of Local LGBT person
7. Best Facebook Qoute
8. Least Favorite Right-Wing Celebrity

Best Of Florida – EATS

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE WINNERS – EATS

1. Best Gourmet Market
2. Best Coffee Shop
3. Best Place for Dinner
4. Best Place for Sunday Brunch
5. Best Place for Lunch
6. Best World-Famous Eats
7. Best Local Diner
8. Best Late-Night Dining
9. Best Breakfast
10. Best Place to Watch a Drag Show while Dining
11. Best Dessert
12. Best Romantic Restaurant
13. Best Celebrity Chef

Best Of Florida – NIGHTLIFE

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE WINNERS – NIGHTLIFE

1. Sexiest Lounge
2. Networking Event with Most Intelligent People
3. Best Place to Get Your Drink On
4. Best LGBT Place to Bring Your Straight Friends
5. Best Drag Show
6. Best Place to Hook Up
7. Best Music
8. Club You’re Most Likely to Run into a Celebrity
9. Best Dance Club
10. Best VIP Area
11. Most Entertaining Happy Hour
12. Best Theme Party
13. Sexiest Servers
14. Hottest Bartender
15. Best DJ
16. Best Charitable Event
17. Best Sports Bar
18. Best Late Night Gay Venue
19. Best Stripper Bar
20. Best New Bar or Club

Best Of Florida – SHOP, FIT, & PLAY

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE WINNERS – SHOP, FIT, & PLAY

1. Best Day Spa
2. Favorite Clothing Designer
3. Sexiest Underwear Brand
4. Best LGBT Boutique
5. Best LGBT Guest House
6. Best Abs
7. Best Gay Vacation Spot for Floridian’s Staycations
8. Florida’s Most Entertaining Pride Festival
9. Best Gym