Mosaic Theatre

HopStop

View on Large Map
Get Directions

1 person has posted a review, snapped a photo, checked in, or tipped this place. Use your voice!

+ Add Photos

00000 - 00000 of 00000

+ Add A Photo

00,000 of 00,000

12200 W. Broward Blvd. Plantation, FL 33325

954-577-8243

Website

1 User review Write A Review

Best Theater Season
Award Winner 2011

Description

Despite a less-than-ideal location inside a Plantation high school, Mosaic Theatre has celebrated more than ten years of exquisitely produced, thought-provoking fare. Executive artistic director Richard Jay Simon is, by his own admission, "not a song-and-dance guy," focusing instead on witty, observant, bare-knuckle comedies and dramas from such titans as David Mamet, Neil LaBute, Tom Stoppard, and Stephen Belber. Simon has an uncanny eye for material and casting, and he has the budget to bring his ambitious choices to vivid fruition. The plays he picks may be alienating to some audiences, but nearly every production is a bona fide awards contender.

2011 | Best Theater Season

The Mosaic Theatre turned 10 this past season, and what a birthday celebration it's been. In early 2010, the theater suffered a rare misfire in the form of the musical Make Me a Song: The Music of William Finn. Since then, it has been one winner after another, like Dying City, the South African diamond-diving drama Groundswell, the energetic and absurdist hilarity of Completely Hollywood, the witty and moving award contender Collected Stories, and the uproarious ensemble piece The Irish... More »
2011 | Best Theatrical Production

When Christopher Shinn's Dying City -- a difficult and sobering triangle among the widow of an Iraq War veteran, the dead soldier himself, and the soldier's identical twin brother -- debuted at Mosaic Theatre last spring, audiences and critics were divided over the source material. It wasn't exactly a fun, joyous night at the theater, and some found the material heavy-handed. But there was something of a consensus when it came to the production itself, which artistic director... More »
2011 | Best Set Design

Here was a set that said a lot by saying very little. Mosaic is best-known for its sprawling set designs, like the ones for Dead Man's Cell Phone and Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. These are tours de force of horizontal continuity that stretch across multiple locations. In its compact confinement, Collected Stories couldn't be more opposite. The majority of the work takes place in a cramped Greenwich Village apartment beginning in the 1980s. Douglas Grinn evokes this... More »
2011 | Best Actor

Like our Best Actress choice, Ricky Waugh took on the challenge of more than one character in Mosaic's difficult antiwar drama; like Bridge and Tunnel, it's a clear showcase role. Waugh made a seamless transition between two characters -- a jocular gay actor and his estranged twin brother, an Iraq War soldier with a demeanor as serious as an IED. Each character has the complexity of multiple people, and Waugh's transformation from one to the other and back again was miraculous in its... More »
2011 | Best Director

Richard Jay Simon directs most plays at Mosaic, but this stellar work about two ambitious, jealous, female frenemies required the directorial hand of the fairer sex. So Simon called upon Margaret Ledford, resident director at Davie's Promethean Theatre, to helm this stunner, heralded by most area critics as one of the best productions of the year. Barbara Bradshaw, as the play's aging author and literature professor whose young protégé covertly mines her life for material,... More »
2010 | Best Supporting Actress

Adolescents aren't what they show you in the movies. They aren't trendy girls full of self-confidence or dour baby-faced sages, scuffing their feet and dispensing unspoilt Rousseauist wisdom. Actually, they are painfully dishonest, profoundly uncomfortable little weasels completely preoccupied with proving to the rest of us that they're more worldly than they are. Wiener's performance captured this completely. Playing a 16-year-old girl who was in the process of being seduced by a much older... More »
2010 | Best Supporting Actor

There's an anger shared among old Communists -- over their own blindness, over the hideous betrayals of Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot -- that Gordon McConnell, as an aging and embittered English Marxist, captured perfectly. McConnell's rage seemed queerly particular: More in the way he glanced around the room than in anything he said. He seemed most of all angered that history has reached a moment when nothing much needs overthrowing. His was the anger of a brilliant and vibrant old... More »
2010 | Best Theatrical Production

Rock 'n' Roll was the most complex play of the season -- a serious meditation on the intersection of politics, ideology, music, and freedom at the end of the Soviet era. Basically: Velvet Underground, meet Velvet Revolution. Set in both crumbling Soviet Czechoslovakia and the home of a jaded English Marxist, Rock 'n' Roll followed numerous people through 30 years of upheaval and argument and in some moments seemed as big and full of mystery as the era it documented. A hyperwordy play,... More »
2009 | Best Director

No doubt about it: The Seafarer was a great production. It was a fantastic script paired with an almost perfect set and interpreted by maybe the best cast Mosaic Theatre has assembled since Glengarry Glen Ross in 2007. But it was a delicate job. Really, The Seafarer is nothing but the Christmas Eve banter of a bunch of severely impaired drunkards, and it worked only because the rhythms of the drunkards' banter were so natural and fun. Now, "nature" and "fun" are not automatic bedfellows... More »
2009 | Best Theatrical Production

The Seafarer is a big play set in a little room. Comprising nothing more than the banter of old friends (and one diabolical houseguest) in an Irish basement on Christmas Eve, it warmly and humanely paints its characters' portraits as completely as any play can: their histories, flaws, world views, and most private pains. Its playwright's eternal muses are grief, guilt, and redemption, but The Seafarer goes much further. In a sustained moment of uncharacteristic kindness, McPherson wrote his... More »
2009 | Best Supporting Actor

All actors in The Seafarer were excellent, but Dennis Creaghan was un-fucking-believable. A recently blinded alcoholic Irishman -- with a big, affable spirit and a bounty of deep, personal pain -- he captured your heart and imagination within the play's first five minutes and never relinquished them. His performance was largely a collection of tics and habits: a stutter as he groped to find the proper profanity with which to respond to a given affront to his dignity; the way he... More »
2009 | Best Actor

Wrecks was last season's hardest-to-watch play, dealing with weakness, loneliness, desperation, and dysfunction in such a personal way that audiences actually left embarrassed -- like they'd unwittingly paid to be peeping Toms for a night. With Wrecks gone from our stages and unlikely to reappear any time soon, it's probably safe to explain that its central conceit is the interior monologue of a widower at his wife's funeral. As the widower and play's sole actor, Gordon McConnell... More »
2008 | Best Actor

Todd Allen Durkin is one crazy motherfucker, or at least he plays one on stage. He'll play anything but sane, a quirk that has rarely served him as well as it did in Will Eno's Thom Paine. Thom Paine is a one-man show in which the protagonist makes no sense whatsoever: he begins stories without finishing them, tells jokes without punchlines, and seems at all times ready to explode from ghastly internal pressure. The man wants to explain himself, to somehow rationalize his existence and... More »
2008 | Best Actress

If New Times has talked too much about Pilar Uribe's year-old performance in Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire, that's only because we haven't yet found anything better to talk about. The past year has seen the woman take on a more diverse and challenging array of roles than anybody in the state: she's been a neurotic talent agent, a stately professor who has both wronged her husband and been wronged by her paramour, a mother whose children were burned alive, an old beggar woman, a young... More »

"A Measure of Cruelty" at Mosaic: A Local Tragedy Has Global Reach in a World-Premiere Masterpiece

By John Thomason | Thu, May 03, 2012

You couldn't live in or around Deerfield Beach in the fall of 2009 without hearing about the horrific attack on 15-year-old Michael Brewer. The middle-school student was allegedly doused in rubbing alcohol and set ablaze by four of his classmates,... More »
"Death and the Maiden" at Mosaic Theater: Mysteries Shroud This Prescient Study of Torture, Tyranny, and Democracy

By John Thomason | Thu, March 22, 2012

With The Pillowman, The Unseen, and now Death and the Maiden, the Broward County theaterscape has been populated of late by dramas with one theme in common: totalitarian governments and the havoc they wreck on innocent, or possibly innocent, lives... More »
"Lombardi" at Mosaic Theatre: A "Sopranos" Star Revives a Paragon of Pigskin

By John Thomason | Thu, November 17, 2011

The miniature locker room off to one side of Mosaic Theatre's stage looks every bit like a museum piece, festooned with Super Bowl pennants, Green Bay nameplates and scuffed cleats, and preserved for transfer to the NFL Hall of Fame, where waxen P... More »
Football and Footlights

By Brandon K. Thorp | Thu, November 10, 2011

"Confidence is contagious," goes one of Vince Lombardi's many famous quotes. "So is lack of confidence." The legendary football coach and creepily obsessive Catholic really believed that, which may be why, even today, the name Lombardi is synonymo... More »
"Side Effects" at Mosaic: When a Diseased Marriage Goes Unmedicated

By John Thomason | Thu, September 29, 2011

Before the play even begins, the first thing you notice are the lights. They're everywhere: chicly mounted in foyer walls, hung from the ceiling, and positioned in wall sconces, table lamps, and floor lamps, all of them poised to illuminate the im... More »
Loading More Critics Reviews

Like (0) Dislike (0)

bpbnewtimesbestof | Palm Beach, FL | 139 Reviews

| Wed, May 6, 2009

Todd Allen Durkin is one crazy motherfucker, or at least he plays one on stage. He'll play anything but sane, a quirk that has rarely served him as well as it did in Will Eno's Thom Paine. Thom Paine is a one-man show in which the protagonist makes no sense whatsoever: he begins stories without finishing them, tells jokes without punchlines, and seems at all times ready to explode from ghastly internal pressure. The man wants to explain himself, to somehow rationalize his existence and explain away his foibles and let us know that he's really an OK guy. But in Durkin's hands, Thom didn't seem quite certain that the audience was willing to hear what he had to say; even his most lighthearted moments were shot through with intimations of impending doom, collapse, and failure. Thom could make us laugh, but he never laughed himself � his whole incoherent spiel was a tortured scream against alienation, and alienation isn't that funny. It's also seldom so painfully articulated in theater, and seldom so keenly felt by audiences at the moment of performance (so much so that several shows drew hecklers and sparked walkouts � some planted, many not). It was all so intense that you wondered, however briefly, if the event you were witnessing might transcend the stage and somehow magically cure the very malaise the playwright meant to address. It didn't, of course � the people departing Mosaic Theatre on those nights last summer were probably just as alienated and forlorn as the ones who'd arrived two hours earlier � but that wasn't Thom's failure, or Todd's. It was our own. We should just be glad they helped us realize it.

Looking for another city?

Mosaic Theatre

12200 W. Broward Blvd. Plantation, FL 33325

954-577-8243

Description

2011 | Best Theater Season

2011 | Best Theatrical Production

2011 | Best Set Design

2011 | Best Actor

2011 | Best Director

2010 | Best Supporting Actress

2010 | Best Supporting Actor

2010 | Best Theatrical Production

2009 | Best Director

2009 | Best Theatrical Production

2009 | Best Supporting Actor

2009 | Best Actor

2008 | Best Actor

2008 | Best Actress

By John Thomason | Thu, May 03, 2012

By John Thomason | Thu, March 22, 2012

By John Thomason | Thu, November 17, 2011

By Brandon K. Thorp | Thu, November 10, 2011

By John Thomason | Thu, September 29, 2011

bpbnewtimesbestof | Palm Beach, FL | 139 Reviews