Staying home this weekend?
Summer Shorts Festival is your Hot Ticket
BY J.W. Arnold
Published: Jun 05, 2008
While many people will head north this weekend to Orlando for Gay Days or
south to Key West for the island’s Pride festival, the hottest tickets here
in South Florida are for City Theatre’s Summer Shorts Festival at the Arsht
Center for the Performing Arts in Miami.
The Carbonell Award-winning festival of new short, 10-minute plays has
become a nationally recognized event, and “partners with America’s most
prestigious theatre festival, the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, and in
residence at our region’s two premier performing arts centers,” said
Stephanie Norman, City Theatre Co-Founder and Executive Director. “With a
wealth of the nation’s best writers penning plays for our stages combined
with a successful Arsht Center debut last season, we felt that the time was
ripe to kick things up a notch. This year’s festival is our most ambitious
to date, packed with performances and programs sure to appeal to many
generations of theatergoers.”
Building on the success of 12 previous seasons, City Theatre is now offering
three distinct performance series under the Summer Shorts umbrella:
Signature Shorts, the signature series of Programs A & B that put City
Theatre’s “shorts” on the map; Shorts 4 Kids, a fast and furiously fun
festival of “short” plays designed expressly for families; and Undershorts,
a late-night series of provocative, political and hilarious plays that are
cutting edge and current. All three series will be presented through June 22
at Miami’s Arsht Center. Audiences in Broward will have the opportunity to
see Programs A&B and Family Shorts at the Broward Center, June 26-29.
“We have put together a dynamite team this year,” said first year Artistic
Director Stuart Meltzer. “We have two ensembles of the region’s best
performers tackling a myriad of roles, taking on the daunting task of
changing characters and costumes in the blink of an eye. This is
complemented by a creative production team that (has designed) a look, style
and sensibility specific to each performance series.“
