This play is a charmer. I didn‘t expect to say that. I thought a story about the passengers who force-landed in Gander, Newfoundland, because airspace in the U.S. was closed on 9/11 and who were welcomed by the locals, would be hokey and sentimental. It is not.
Though most of your Key West time will be outside, here are two museums you should visit even when it‘s typically delicious outside. And certainly if it‘s cool or rainy, as alas, it has been known to be.
The Butterfly Conservancy is almost hidden away in a white conch style building near the southernmost point of the island (and of the U.S.!) It‘s like being inside an enclosed glass case (except it‘s not), as the butterflies fly freely around you.
The best food in Key West is at the Latitudes restaurant on Sunset Key. There is a magical feel to this exceptional place which is on a small island you reach via a 6-minute launch ride from a pier at the north of Key West. It is the showpiece of Sunset Key, a resort with bungalows, pool, tennis courts and quiet inviting beach.
Sunset cruises are special at Key West. Among all the fun things you do, you will remember them most. I generally like the catamarans, as you can walk about them steadily. No lurching from side to side. More about that later.
At this New York French bistro, game ” often venison and quail ” comes from Texas all through the year, but there‘s an annual festival featuring game till mid-March. I went to a press dinner featuring some of those specialties.
Glenn Close is masterful in Norma Desmond‘s final mad scene. Suddenly camp becomes real drama, tragedy of the Shakespearean sort. Till then the has-been silent film star, the grande dame who flounces around in glittery gold and silver sweeping gowns and capes, is hard to take too seriously. The camp is exaggerated by butler/major-domo Max (Fred Johanson), whose dark mood and piercing eyes could have come out of a Mel Brooks Frankenstein spoof. “Goulish” is a word to describe them both, and the haunted house they live in.
Macabre and whimsical, dark and comic at the same time, a clever satiric pen pointed at self-absorbed aristocrats of the early 1900s, Katherine Rundell‘s “Life According to Saki” is a delicious evening of theater.
You can feel the humanity pulsating and striving through the drab surroundings of the car service office in “Jitney” by the great American playwright August Wilson, who died in 2005. The protagonists, moving in an orbit around the solid Becker (a resolute, moving John Douglas Thompson), who set up the cooperative 18 years ago, are working class guys with jobs, if you want to include the numbers guy, Shealy (Harvy Blanks).
