The Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s artistic director, Andrew Kato, has had some major successes in his five years in the job, assembling impressive talent -- onstage and off -- for such well-received existing musicals as The Boy Friend, Barnum and Anything Goes.

But what he really wants to become known for is directing and producing new work.

“When I started here as artistic director, it was clear that the mission needed to be broad-based theater,” says Kato, who grew up in Jupiter and used to wait tables at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre, on the site of what turned into the Maltz. “My dream has been to have a regional theater that is introducing new work. But there was a bit of an unknown whether people wanted this.”

To test the waters, Kato created a program in 2008 of concert performances of new musicals in development. “And to our joy, people responded. I think people got excited by what producing new work meant for our community.”

One of those musicals, Academy, with music, lyrics and script by Kato’s childhood friend John Mercurio, now returns to the Maltz for its world premiere, opening Thursday evening.

The show, about a Faustian wager at a boy’s prep school, where two seniors make a casual bet on whether they can influence an unsuspecting freshman to break a few school rules in order to succeed.

Kato, who makes his mainstage subscription series directing debut at the Maltz with Academy, came up with the idea for the musical at, of all things, an a cappella workshop in New Jersey.

“I saw a group of boys perform Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’ ” he recalls. “What I was struck by was the camaraderie and the energy that they brought to it, as well as the a cappella sound. I remember telling John about it, saying, ‘I think there’s a prep school musical here somewhere.’ And this was way before ‘Spring Awakening.’ There is such great material in a coming-of-age story of boys of privilege, and even just all those universal things that go along with the high school years.”

It was easy to persuade Mercurio of the idea, for he could relate it to his days at Jupiter’s upscale private Benjamin School. “There was tremendous pressure there,” he remembers. “There were only 40 people in my graduating class. You knew everybody and what grades they got. Everyone knew your business. You felt this competition.

“I feel like everyone identifies, regardless of where you went, with those years and the pressure of trying to accomplish and to move on to higher education.”

The show was so well-received in concert two years ago that Mercurio submitted Academy to the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF), an influential annual event that helped spawn such musicals as Altar Boyz and Next to Normal. Of the hundreds of shows submitted, Academy became one of only 13 accepted for presentation.

There it not only received a very encouraging review from The New York Times, but festival awards for the show’s writing and ensemble performance. Most startling of all, it won the Daegu International Musical Festival Production Award, which included an all-expenses-paid trip to South Korea for the cast and creative team to present Academy over there.

Mercurio concedes that he had some doubt about how the show would be received in Korea. “Certainly a little bit, but it did feel at its core, the questions of achievement and academic excellence, things that an Asian culture could relate to,” he says. “The idea of competition and needing to be the best at something.” And Academy emerged from that festival named the best musical of 24 in competition.

Kato acknowledges that those awards have definitely helped persuade his board of directors to take a risk on a full production of Academy. Ticket buyers are still wary of an unknown show, but regardless of the box office totals, Kato already feels like a winner. “What it has done for the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, getting the name out not only nationally, but internationally, is a sense of tremendous pride, not only for the board, but even more so for the staff. Everyone’s excited.”

Ahead for the show is a production at the Aurora Theatre, just outside of Atlanta, arranged after that company saw Academy at NYMF. Beyond that, Mercurio is trying to be realistic about his expectations. “To me, success means having the opportunity to continue doing my work. In the last two years, that’s beginning to happen and it feels pretty great,” he says. “Having a Broadway hit is just not a realistic thing anymore, just because of the economics involved.”

Still, the good news keeps coming for Academy. The production here has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant of $34,000 -- roughly one-tenth of the budget -- a first for the Maltz.

And Kato is keeping his fingers crossed about more opportunities to do what he loves. “I think if things go well for ‘Academy,’ we can certainly look forward to more new work here. This has been such a good experience that I’d like to see that happen again,” he beams. “We are on a good trajectory right now and I’d like to see that continue.”

ACADEMY, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter; Dec. 9-19. Tickets: $43-$60. Call: (561) 575-2223.

Most productions of Donald Margulies’ wily, articulate drama Collected Stories portray the relationship between renowned short story writer Ruth Steiner and her persistent protégé Lisa Morrison as the literary equivalent of All About Eve.

For despite her seeming innocence and adoration of the older writer, the ambitious Lisa ultimately betrays her trust, making public a very personal reminiscence, using it as the basis for her first novel.

But in the hands of director Margaret Ledford, deftly drawing a pair of remarkable performances from Barbara Bradshaw (Ruth) and Kim Morgan Dean (Lisa), the play becomes something more balanced and nuanced, asking us to consider the artistic and personal ethics involved, leaving it up to the audience to decide how they feel about the ownership of the story.

You could call Collected Stories an issue play, if it were not brimming with such fascinating, fully dimensional characters. Ruth Steiner is a meticulous writer who spouts wisdom about the craft with curmudgeonly affection. Undoubtedly at a sacrifice of her own literary output, she has devoted years to mentoring young writers of promise through classes and tutorials at NYU.

As the play begins, an apparently intimidated Lisa enters Ruth’s Greenwich Village apartment for a coaching session with the legendary woman. All nervous flutter, Lisa speaks with the cadences of a Valley Girl, which make her all the more difficult to take seriously.

Yet she manages to worm her way into Ruth’s life, becoming her clerical aide, a job which comes with the perk of intimate attention and editing suggestions on her own writing. Gradually, Lisa begins speaking better and dressing with a new sophistication, as Ruth rubs off on her. Soon, she has a book of her short stories published and critically well received.

One day, Ruth confides in Lisa the details of a life-changing love affair she had years earlier with the tortured, alcoholic poet Delmore Schwartz. When Lisa uses the story, barely fictionalized, in her debut novel, Ruth feels understandably betrayed. But as Lisa explains, she was only being true to her artistic impulses, just as Ruth long taught her.

Dean, returning to South Florida for this production, reminds us why she quickly became one of the most accomplished young actresses in the region in the few short years she lived down here. In addition to the impressive transition she makes from naïve student to cunning professional writer, she retains a bit of the former in a tasty scene in which she reads and relishes her first New York Times review.

Bradshaw is such a wryly comic performer that she rarely gets a juicy dramatic role like Ruth, but she holds her own tutorial in how to mesmerize an audience when she does. Here she gives a very layered characterization, alternately steely and maternal, tough and gentle. The years are erased as she recalls her youth with her idol-lover, and she rises to the demands of the final payoff scene with consummate skill.

If the performance rings a bit false, it is because Ruth is frequently described as being Jewish and Bradshaw never convinces us of that ethnic background, no matter how many Yiddish phrases she drops into her conversation. A minor quibble.

Douglas Grinn contributes a wonderfully textured writer’s apartment, full of antiquated equipment -- a dial phone, an electric typewriter -- that silently tell us about Ruth. There are plenty of reasons to see this Mosaic production, and the play itself is high on the list. But at the top are surely the two memorable performances that breathe such vitality into Margulies’ words.

COLLECTED STORIES, Mosaic Theatre, American Heritage School, 12200 West Broward Blvd., through Sunday, Dec. 5. Tickets: $37. Call: (954) 577-8243.

Belying the proverb about opportunity only knocking once, here comes another chance to see the steamy, quirky, Carbonell-award-winning dance musical Vices: A Love Story, back at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton, where it had its world premiere in the summer of 2009.

Vices is a series of eclectic songs about obsessions and addictions, tied together by a pair of lithe, athletic dancers whose characters’ bad habits are illustrated by the musical numbers. In the opening sensuous pas de deux, they meet and hop into bed without knowing much more than their physical attraction to each other. The next day, they start to get acquainted, by opening up about their vices.

She smokes, is hooked on recreational shopping, loves chocolate to excess and is addicted to plastic surgery. He is a workaholic, craves working out at the gym and needs to play casino blackjack. With these personal confessions out on the table, they then have to figure out if they have any future together.

Vices: A Love Story, on the other hand, has a definite future.

“I think it deserves to have a big life. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen,” says Clive Cholerton, who gambled by making the show his introduction as the Caldwell’s new artistic director. “You’re at a high emotional level when the show begins and it only goes up from there.”

“I just think it’s so unique, innovative theater,” chimes in AC Cuilla, the show’s Tony Award-nominated (Footloose) choreographer. “I personally think this would be a great show to have running off-Broadway in New York. I think New York audiences would love this show and identify with it.”

Writers Mike Heitzman and Ilene Reid had sent Cholerton a CD of the score, just at the time that such TV dance competitions as Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance? were posting big ratings. They had been seeking a way to connect the dots of their songs, and Cholerton suggested a pair of dancers whose internal monologues were the musical vices.

After agreement on the concept, Cuilla flew down to Boca and began creating the show on the fly. In fact, he devised and rehearsed the dances before there was any dance music.

“I’ve never worked like that before and now I will always want to if you have a team who can work like that,” says Cuilla. “We’d just play with it, and I’d start to create a rhythm. Then Everett (Bradley, one of the co-composer) came in, got the feel for it and created music that fit that rhythm.”

Cholerton was pleased with the results of that first production, while recognizing its limitations. “It was very satisfying, but it felt like what it was -- not a finished show,” he concedes. “I loved the fact that it was something that no one had seen before. This time around, we want to take that same excitement, that same originality, but take away those moments where we simply ran out of time.”

Cholerton is gambling again by bringing the show back to the Caldwell so soon after the initial run. But since it played during the summer, he knew that a lot of his subscribers missed it.

“It, to me, is the statement of where we are headed, but so few people saw the statement.” So, he thought, “Let’s do it again and give ourselves the opportunity to work on it again.”

Rather than a total overhaul of the show, he sees this production as a “refinement, neither a re-mount nor a rework.” Vices still runs only 80 minutes, without an intermission, about which Cholerton says, “That’s how long it takes to tell the story.”

He and the writers mulled the notion of expanding the show by added a few vices, but ultimately decided against it. “You soon get to the point of thinking, ‘How messed up are these people?’ ”

VICES: A LOVE STORY, Caldwell Theatre Co., 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Friday, Nov. 12, through Sunday, Dec. 12. Tickets: $27-$50. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.

The “golden age of television” of the 1950s produced many classic dramas that went on to further acclaim in other media.

Think of Requiem for a Heavyweight, or Marty, or The Miracle Worker. Certainly earning a spot on that list is Reginald Rose’s dramatized civics lesson, Twelve Angry Men, which the Maltz Jupiter Theatre has dusted off and given a vigorous mounting that makes clear the script has lost none of its relevance in the past half a century.

Of course it helps to have the services of two-time Tony Award winner Frank Galati (The Grapes of Wrath, Ragtime) and his hand-picked male ensemble to breathe life into the script. Not that they try to update the play or give it any contemporary spin. They simply commit themselves to the story of a jury asked to deliberate over a first-degree murder case and bring out the inherent tension and suspense in such an assignment.

After instructions by an offstage judge, 12 white men of various walks of life are locked into a sweltering, claustrophobic anteroom, charged with deciding whether a ghetto teen murdered his own father. Initially, the vote is 11-to-1 for conviction. The lone holdout, a soft-spoken architect known only as Juror No. 8, argues that he has reasonable doubt about the boy’s guilt.

As he calls on his fellow jurors to reconsider the evidence and testimony, tempers flare, prejudices are exposed, and pressure applied as the rest of the jury slowly moves toward his viewpoint. Rose deftly fills us in on the specifics of the case -- without overloading us with exposition -- as he expertly turns these 12 strangers into vivid individuals.

As Juror No. 8, the role that Henry Fonda played in the 1957 film, Patrick Clear consciously underplays without ever giving up control of the ongoing debate. Those most adamant for conviction are dealt the showier roles. Douglas Jones impresses as the most overly prejudiced juror and James Clarke is riveting as a father who cannot separate his conflict with his son from that of the victim and his alleged killer.

Big, splashy musicals will probably always be the Maltz Jupiter’s stock in trade, but when it can produce a drama as involving as Twelve Angry Men, they deserve to always be a part of the menu here.

TWELVE ANGRY MEN, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Through Sunday. Tickets: $46-$53. Call: (561) 575-2223 or (800) 445-1666.

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You have to admire the ambition of a program of commissioned scripts at Florida Stage known as The Florida Cycle.

Over the next several seasons, the West Palm Beach company hopes to premiere a diverse series of scripts set in the Sunshine State. And if they are as well-crafted and theatrical as the first act of Andrew Rosendorf’s new historical melodrama Cane, it will be time and effort well-spent. The problem, though, is that Rosendorf does not have a sufficiently satisfying second act to match his first.

Rosendorf, Florida Stage’s playwright-in-residence, kicks off the program -- and the troupe’s first subscription season at the Kravis Center -- with an epic tale that spans over 80 years, contrasting the surfeit of water at the time of the deadly 1928 hurricane with the dearth of water today.

He succeeds at framing the conservation issue with a compelling flesh-and-blood story, about a farmer-merchant who tries to buy the land of a cash-strapped World War I veteran, optimistically believing the purchase will guarantee his route to wealth. But the situation soon turns violent when the ex-soldier reneges on the deal.

Once we become emotionally invested in these characters, however, they are gone. The second act is set in present day and we meet the descendants of the earlier folks, a lot less interesting bunch of people. The problem is compounded because Rosendorf has not come up with particularly interesting things for them to do.

In fact, the most compelling writing in the second act is an extended monologue that relates what happened to a character’s great-grandmother during that killer 1928 ’cane. But those events are told to us, instead of being actively depicted.

In the first act, director Louis Tyrrell makes good use of his company’s new expansive, high-ceilinged digs, thanks largely to the scenic design by Richard Crowell, a craggy, steeply raked earthen floor that rises at the back to simulate the precarious mud dike of Lake Okeechobee. And the lighting skill of Suzanne M. Jones and her fierce lightning and waterless rain effect are as close as you are likely to come to a hurricane indoors.

The production has a solid five-member cast, each of whom plays a pair of characters, one in each act. Gregg Weiner, for instance, shows his versatility as a kindly, but overly ambitious store owner and, later, his great-grandson Junior, a sugar cane magnate eager to change crops and use his land to raise houses.

David Nail (seen last season in Sins of the Mother) is a worthy adversary as the apprehensive landowner and then a modern day cop. Keep your eye on newcomer Trenell Mooring, who plays a taciturn pregnant teen in 1928 as well as her college-educated descendant, almost harnessing that unwieldy second-act monologue.

Rosendorf has a natural way with dialogue, giving his mostly uneducated characters a lyrical way of expressing himself. He seems like a playwright with a future, but with Cane he comes up short in the second act.

CANE, Florida Stage at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Nov. 28. Tickets: $47-$50. Call: (561) 585-3433 or (800) 514-3837.

As two-time Tony Award winner Frank Galati (The Grapes of Wrath, Ragtime) keeps in mind, “angry” is the 1954 Reginald Rose jury deliberation play’s middle name.

Twelve Angry Men, which opens this evening at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, is more than half a century old, but it is also extremely timely.

“Now everyone seems to feel that this is a climate of anger. That the entire country is angry, that the voters are angry. That parents are angry, school boards are angry, drivers are angry, shoppers are angry, everyone seems to be angry,” says mild-mannered Galati, who is directing this production.

“Every one of the 12 jurors has a hot button that gets pushed, each one of them in one way or another kind of blows up, loses their cool. So, for whatever it’s worth, there seems to be something in the weather that connects to the rage that is apparently percolating underneath the dialogue in this play.”

As a reflection of the times when the play was first produced, the jurors in Twelve Angry Men are all white males. Galati wondered whether that would be an impediment for the audience and contemplated -- briefly -- moving the production to a more contemporary time.

“I think when you confront the challenge of interpreting the play, naturally you think, ‘Should it be a more diverse cast? Is there a way of making the issue of racism or bigotry or class-ism, all of those strains of hostility that are operating in the play, to somehow make them more relevant?’ But in looking at the play carefully, I think you come to realize that if you keep it very specifically in its historical moment, it actually has more universal resonance.”

Keeping it in the past can be an asset? “Yes, I think it is,” notes Galati. “Because I think you find yourself saying, ‘Oh, my God, things have not changed.’ More than half a century later, we are still prejudiced.”

The play centers on the jury’s deliberations over a murder trial, a boy accused of killing his own father. But the audience knows none of the details of the case when the story begins. “One of the interesting things is the way exposition is delivered to the audience. The audience is not at the trial, so they have to find out the case from the discourse of the jurors,” says Galati. “It’s really pretty impressive, there’s a kind of artfulness that’s so skillfully in place that you don’t notice it.”

The dialogue seems to be hyper-realistic, but if you listen to it carefully, it has a musical quality. “I think it’s kind of like a great jazz ensemble,” Galati offers. Each of the jurors is, in effect, “a different instrument. One of the exciting aspects of working on it is to try to find the way in which in a great jazz band, let’s say, you’re creating harmony, but the individual voices are arguing. There’s dissonance, there’s discord and harmony at the same time.”

And while this seems to be a tense drama, even melodrama at times, Galati points out how much comedy is in Twelve Angry Men.

“Nobody dies, there’s no tragic conclusion and, in a certain way, the play celebrates the profound contract, the agreement, that is democracy,” says Galati. “So although there are guys in the play who suffer and who conceal their hurt and their pain, there is a kind of vitality in the characters, a kind of energy of living and a commitment to their responsibility as citizens.

“Some of the quirks of the characters, the tics, are funny. I mean, one guy is always thinking about when they’re going to eat. And one guy wants to get to the ballgame and all of his metaphors are from the ballpark.”

Ultimately, the play is a tribute to our precarious justice system.

“I don’t know, maybe the justice system isn’t working anymore, but I’d be very presumptuous to say so, I think,” says Galati. “Part of what’s skillful about the representation of a fictional jury and a fictional trial is that it has the kind of messiness and the uncertainty that I think really rings true.”

12 ANGRY MEN, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Thursday, Nov. 4, through Sunday, Nov. 14. Tickets: $46-$53. Call: (561) 575-2223 or (800) 445-1666.