Two years ago, Palm Beach County was under dire drought conditions, with a water supply estimated to last only 21 days. It was a desperate situation, but how do you create a play about it without it seeming like a, pardon the expression, dry discourse?

That is the challenge that Florida Stage has taken on with Cane, the opening play of its 24^th season, a world premiere that is the first subscription show in its new home at the Kravis Center and, perhaps most significantly, the first play in the company’s ambitious Florida Cycle.

The brainchild of producing artistic director Lou Tyrrell, the cycle will be an effort to attract playwrights to write stories about the Sunshine State.

“Florida is so interesting in its eccentricities and its extremes,” says Tyrrell. “Here is a company whose name represents the state, making a cultural contribution to the state, and from the state to the country. Wouldn’t it be fun if years later we had 12 or 15 or 20 plays that told various Florida stories?”

He expects to commission scripts from major writers across the state, but for the inaugural play, Tyrrell turned to his staff playwright-in-residence, 29-year-old Andrew Rosendorf. Like the party guest in The Graduate who says to Benjamin Braddock, “Plastics,” Tyrrell gave Rosendorf the leadoff slot in the Florida Cycle with one word -- “water.”

Rosendorf, who was born and raised in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., not only began knowing little about water management, he had slim knowledge of Florida’s past.

“I didn’t know what story I wanted to tell and I didn’t know anything about South Florida history. Oh, my god, I had so much to learn,” says Rosendorf. “It was overwhelming and exhilarating at the same time.”

He began by reading everything he could get his hands on and interviewing water conservation experts. “I became a sponge, learning about the Everglades and about South Florida, its whole history and politics,” says Rosendorf. Gradually, he began focusing on the era of the deadly 1928 hurricane and the present day, a time when much of the region was swampland -- that is, there was too much water -- and 80 years later, when water was in short supply.

But Rosendorf knew he had to invent a human saga to attract and retain audience attention, rather than an issue play. So he created characters based on his reading, devising a story about a Belle Glade farmer worried about how to tame his land and survive a brutal hurricane. Then in the second act, Cane jumps ahead to current-day Florida and to the farmer’s descendants, who are battling the lack of water.

As Rosendorf puts it, Cane is “a tale of betrayal and bloodshed, water and wind, family and fortune.” The title Cane has multiple meanings. “One is hurricane, also sugar cane, and then there’s the biblical implications of Cain and Abel,” says Rosendorf.

When he began writing Cane eighteen months ago, Florida Stage was in its former cramped quarters in Manalapan, which would have meant a lot of compromises with the production.

“Certainly our switch to the Kravis was very freeing,” he concedes. “The set that Richard Crowell is building is massive and gorgeous. When Lou read the script, he quickly had the idea that maybe the dike had some height, when my initial thought to make sure it would be producible, was that the dike could well be the front of the stage.

“I’m very drawn to theatricality and there’s theatricality in this play, but I also had in mind that Florida Stage was asking me to write this, so I knew I had to keep a certain producibility aspect in mind as I was doing it.”

Not that he makes it easy, writing in a scene in which the 1928 hurricane blows through Belle Glade. How do you put a hurricane onstage?

“We’re going to have, as I understand it, some giant fans,” Rosendorf reports. “We had explored water as a possibility, but because of the short turnover time when the show is over, we ultimately went to lighting and sound effects. But certainly our actors will be muddied up and wet.”

The theatergoers at least will not have to worry about being caught in a deluge. “I think the idea is make sure that the audience feels that they are a little bit outside of it. They will not have to come with raincoats.”

As with any play it premieres, Florida Stage’s primary audience is at its theater, but it also hopes that the script will be produced elsewhere, to become part of theatrical literature. Does Cane have the universality to interest audiences beyond this state?

“I feel that if I’ve done my job right, I think it’s a very universal story of what was going on 80 years ago,” responds Rosendorf. “As I learned from my research, water shortage is a huge issue, not just in Florida, but around the country, especially with the Great Lakes and Lake Michigan. Experts believe that the next world war won’t be fought over oil but will be fought over water.

“We like to call Florida ‘the canary in the mineshaft.’ What happens here is a microcosm of what is happening elsewhere.”

CANE, Florida Stage at the Kravis Center, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Opens Friday, Oct. 29, and runs through Sunday, Nov. 28. Tickets: $47-$50. Call: (561) 585-3433 or (800) 514-3837.

Candida

Palm Beach Dramaworks, which recently announced plans to move into the vacant Cuillo Centre space a block away from its Banyan Blvd. playhouse, continues to take the high road of offering up the towering writers for the stage that other South Florida troupe shy away from.

Think O’Neill, Ibsen and now George Bernard Shaw, whose early work Candida is the young socialist playwright’s winking look at the institution of marriage and the gulf between genders, with the Irish Nobel laureate-to-be coming down decidedly on his feminist side.

This Shavian romantic comedy pits a verbose parson against a puppyish young poet, both vying for the affections of alluring Candida, who just happens to be the parson’s wife of many years. Still, when socially awkward Eugene Marchbanks arrives and announces his intentions to steal Candida away with him, he and the Rev. James Morell pigheadedly demand that she choose between them, underestimating her response.

John Leonard Thompson, back at Dramaworks after a stunning turn as Teach in last season’s American Buffalo, gives a terrific, wholly different performance as another misguidedly self-assured character. Kim Cozort easily makes the case for why men seem to fall instantly in love with Candida and, as Marchbanks, Will Connolly walks the tricky tightrope, rendering him inept, but not inane.

CANDIDA, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 322 Banyan Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Nov. 21. Tickets: $47. Call: (561) 514-4042.

The Color of Desire

It is a coup whenever a South Florida theater snags the world premiere of a play by Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz (Anna in the Tropics), even if that script seems not yet to have reached its final form. That is the case with The Color of Desire, a murky game of role-playing set against the early days after the Cuban Revolution.

The script has plenty of Cruz’s signature verbal virtuosity and is certainly authentic in its depiction of 1960 Havana, but it receives a too literal production under David Arisco’s direction at Actors’ Playhouse, where more ambiguity seems called for. An unsettling shift between reality and fantasy is what I recall from my first exposure to the play at Florida Stage’s 1st Stage Festival two years ago, but rewrites and seeing it fully produced has made that mood of mystery evaporate.

Still, it is a new work by Cruz, a master storyteller who spins evocative images that stick in the brain. At its center is an American businessman (Jim Ballard), worried about having his operation nationalized, but not so preoccupied that he does not woo and hire a local actress (Hannia Guillen) to play the part of former lover of his, offstage and in the bedroom. Filling out the cast well are Barbara Sloan and Michael Serratore as carefree American unable to say goodbye to Cuba, and two extraneous, but amusing costume shop workers (Isabel Moreno, Teresa Maria Rojas).

Chances are The Color of Desire will one day be the compelling portrait of Cruz’s homeland in upheaval, but it is not there yet.

THE COLOR OF DESIRE, Actor’s Playhouse, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables. Through Nov. 7. Tickets: $40-$48. Call: (305) 444-9293.

Bridge and Tunnel

When I whine about the limitations of one-person shows, what I really mean are one-person, one-character shows, those wooden biographical evenings that are as dramatic as recitations from an encyclopedia. On the other hand, such actresses as Lily Tomlin (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe) and Anna Deavere Smith (Fires in the Mirror) have generated some entertaining and thought-provoking theater by crowding the stage with their multiple personalities.

Add to that list Karen Stephens, a rubber-faced master of dialects who populates and tames the problematic storefront space of The Women’s Theatre Project with Sarah Jones’ Tony-winning performance piece, Bridge and Tunnel. If America is a melting pot, the crucible is a tiny stage in South Queens, where a multicultural parade of vivid characters pour out their hearts at an amateur poetry competition. That is premise enough for Stephens to show off her acting versatility as she inhabits some 14 souls of varying personalities, genders, ages and temperaments.

Emceeing the evening is a Pakistani smoothie named Mohammed Ali -- no jokes, please, he’s heard them all already -- who shuttles on and off, as do immigrants from Jamaica, Vietnam, Mexico and China, each grappling with the American experience in free, or at least somewhat liberated, verse. If after a while, we are more engaged by Stephens’ chameleon act than the content of Jones’ script, that does not make Bridge and Tunnel any less entertaining.

BRIDGE AND TUNNEL, Women’s Theatre Project, Sixth St. Studio, 505 N.W. 1st Ave., Fort Lauderdale. Through Nov. 7. Tickets: $25. Call: (866) 811-4111.

Cabaret

The good thing about presenting Cabaret, the second production from Entr’Acte Theatrix, the professional offshoot of Palm Beach Principal Players, is that the performers at the Kit Kat Club are really not supposed to be very talented. Director-choreographer Kimberly Dawn Smith may have taken that notion to the extreme, though, or perhaps she truly does have a talent-challenged cast.

That is how it seems at the Caldwell Theatre, where Smith is closely adhering to the staging of the 1998 revival of the John Kander-Fred Ebb musical set in pre-Nazi Berlin. As the Emcee, Shane Blanford has an apt edge of smarmy menace, but every exaggerated line delivery is a blatant copy of Alan Cumming’s Tony-winning performance. At least he manages a good fascimile, whereas Leah Sessa’s Sally Bowles is simply shrill and screechy, and she apparently has no clue about the subtext of the title number.

Better is Ryan Michael Owens, whose instinct is to underplay as Cliff Bradshaw, the American would-be novelist who has his eyes opened by the increasingly evident signs of the coming world war. The very capable band elevated above the stage accompanies a mix of songs from the various stage productions and the Bob Fosse film, but this Cabaret lacks the impact of the group’s earlier Hair. Sometimes, to answer the question in the title song, it is better to sit alone in your room.

CABARET, Entr’Acte Theatrix at the Caldwell Theatre, 7901 N. Federal Hwy., Boca Raton. Through Oct. 24. Tickets: $25-$30. Call: (561) 241-7432.

The Rocky Horror Show

Boca Raton’s Slow Burn Theatre Company, now beginning its second season, prides itself on producing musicals with a dark edginess. But that is exactly the quality that is missing from its take on The Rocky Horror Show.

Rocky is, of course, the spoof of B-level horror films mixed with an allegory of sexual liberation, but ever since the show gained cult status -- and audience interaction -- from its 1975 movie version, it has been hard to wrest it from its parody mode.

Still, the production begins very promisingly with the opening number, Science Fiction Double Feature, sung with gusto by Renata Eastlick, who later returns as castle minion Magenta and steals most of the scenes she is in. We should, however, care more than we do about fish-out-of-water fiancees Brad and Janet, who have their values and more manipulated by Dr. Frank ‘N’ Furter. Noah Levine and Alexa Capiello are fine in the early going, but we need to see more of a transition eventually beyond Rick Pena’s nicely abbreviated costumes.

Larry Buzzeo (Frank) fills out a bustier and fishnet stockings well enough, but misses much of the character’s menace. Director Patrick Fitzwater was clearly trying to get beyond the image of the movie’s Tim Curry, which is commendable, but trading him in for a Charles Busch-type doesn’t really cut it.

Slow Burn encourages Rocky Horror groupies and their audience shout-outs, but by opening night, the cast seemed a bit unnerved by the interruptions. Still, if you go, check out the midnight show on Saturday night.

THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW, Slow Burn Theatre Co., at West Boca Community High School, 12811 West Glades Road, Boca Raton. Through Saturday, Oct. 30. Tickets: $30. Call: (866) 811-4111.

Zero Hour

If you had a hit show running off-Broadway, how would you spend your two-week vacation? If you are actor-writer Jim Brochu, who has toiled for decades and suddenly become hailed as an overnight success for his one-man show Zero Hour, you fly to Florida and perform the show some more.

This is the second time around for this very entertaining biographical sketch of actor-comedian-painter-blacklist victim Zero Mostel. Brochu brought the show to the Broward Stage Door in 2008 as he inched his way to New York, winning a Carbonell Award for his uncanny, high-energy performance. Zero Hour has the usual artificiality of solo shows, but Brochu more than compensates with his larger-than-life, force-of-nature presence.

The premise for this walk through Mostel’s life and career is that a naïve, unseen New York Times reporter has come to Mostel’s modest art studio -- his refuge from the world -- to interview him. Mostel obliges in his fashion, alternately pouring on the charm to the young man and making him the target of his volcanic anger.

Along the way, we hear some of Mostel’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, his feud and eventual détente with director-choreographer Jerome Robbins and the crippling collision with a city bus that almost led to the amputation of Mostel’s leg. But even as he relates these dark events, Mostel cannot restrain himself from tossing in quips and mugging to his one-man audience. Fortunately, he lets the rest of us eavesdrop.

ZERO HOUR, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Through Oct. 24. Tickets: $23 (subscribers), $29 (non-subscribers). Call: (561) 575-2223. – H. Erstein

Opportunity rarely knocks twice, but here it is rapping, offering another chance to see the remarkable Jim Brochu as actor-comedian-blacklist-victim Zero Mostel in the one-man show Zero Hour, opening tonight at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre through Oct. 24.

Brochu first brought the show to the area in 2008, at the Broward Stage Door in Coral Springs, prior to his triumphant opening last year off-Broadway. This return engagement, while the show takes a two-week hiatus in New York, can be directly traced to the Jupiter playhouse’s namesake and board chairman, Milton Maltz.

“Two years ago, I did a cruise to Antarctica on the Crystal Symphony, where I did one performance of ‘Zero Hour,’ kind of a tab version of it,” explains Brochu. “The day after I got back, the phone rang, and it was (artistic director) Andrew Kato, asking me to bring the show to the Maltz Jupiter Theatre. And I asked, ‘Well, how did you hear about the show?’ He said, ‘Milton Maltz just came back from his cruise to Antarctica.’

“It’s unbelievable, who thought doing a show in Antarctica would lead me to Jupiter, Florida? So I’m bringing a couple of penguins with me.”

In the show, thanks in part to a crafty makeup job, Brochu bears an uncanny resemblance to the burly, larger-than-life Mostel. But then for a long time people had been noting how much he brings the late actor to mind.

“I recently found my yearbook from 1964 and next to my picture, someone wrote, ‘Jim Brochu, also known as the Zero Mostel of LaSalle (Military Academy)’,” he says. “And then on my New York debut in 1970, in a show called ‘Unfair to Goliath,’ Jelly Talmer in the New York Post said, ‘If they ever do the Zero Mostel story, Jim Brochu is my choice for the lead.’

“So 40 years ago, I was being compared to Mostel.”

Yet it was not until 2005 that it occurred to Brochu that he should create a stage show to capitalize on the physical resemblance. ‘I was cleaning out my apartment and here was a Theater Arts magazine with Zero’s picture on the cover. As soon as I saw that picture on the cover, I thought, ‘This is what I should be doing next’,” he recalls.

“I think I must have thought it was inevitable, but it seemed like this was the right moment because I was approaching Zero’s age. He died at 62, now I’m 64. So I thought, ‘If I’m going to do it, now is the time to do it.’ ”

Although he knew Mostel first-hand, Brochu began writing Zero Hour by hitting the books. “What I did was I read everything I could get my hands on. And you know, the Internet makes research awfully easy. All of Zero’s testimony in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee is online, a lot of his letters between himself and (his wife) Kate, so many articles, interviews,” says Brochu,. “So I just devoured it, and I kind of let it spin around in my head for about two months. And then I sat down to write the play and the play literally wrote itself.”

From his research, Brochu learned how important painting was to Mostel. “I think he loved being on a stage, but even more he loved being in his studio. That was the life he preferred. He was a very quiet man when he was painting, very introspective. But as soon as somebody else was in the room, he became Zero,” he explains. From that notion, Brochu imagined Mostel holding court in his art studio, suffering the company of a New York Times reporter, to whom he chooses to pour out his life story in 1977, not realizing that he was less than a month away from his death.

Of course the show covers his career highlights, from such memorable stage work as Ulysses in Nighttown to Fiddler on the Roof and films from The Producers to The Front. “Had that great unknown quality, whatever you call it. Charisma, brilliance, genius, whatever it was,” explains Brochu. “He was so mercurial onstage. He was riveting. When he was onstage, you just couldn’t take your eyes off him.”

Although Zero Hour has been a hit with audiences and critics since it premiered in Los Angeles -- winning an Ovation Award there for best new play -- Brochu kept tinkering with the script. “Oh, it keeps evolving. I was making changes up to last week, putting in a new line here or there,” he says. “So it always evolves, y’know? As somebody said, ‘Art is never finished, it’s just abandoned.’ ”

To direct the show, he enlisted a friend, film actress Piper Laurie, known for a range of movies from Francis Goes to the Races to The Hustler to Carrie. “I mentioned to her that I’d written this play about Zero and she said, ‘Oh, I used to see Zero at the Tick Tock Inn. We’d sit and have coffee and he’d butter his arm.’ ”

Huh? “He’d take the butter from the table and start buttering his arm, all the way up to the elbow, and then call the waiter over and say, ‘Waiter, we’re out of butter.’ ”

Laurie attended an early reading of Zero Hour, had some good suggestions and Brochu asked her to take on the directing chores. “And she said, ‘I haven’t directed a play since high school.’ I said, ‘But you know what you’re doing, you have great instincts and we work very well together.’

“She gave me some wonderful acting tips about letting the sadness of Zero shine through, the crustiness,” says Brochu. “Very subtle things that made their way into this show.”

The play came to South Florida, earning Brochu a Carbonell Award for his performance. Still, there is nothing like success in New York, which soon followed.

“Oh, no, this has been off the charts. We came up here expecting to have a 12-week run, and that would be it,” he says. “Then the reviews started coming in and it was like people were trying to top each other in saying positive things.”

He added the Drama Desk Award to his trophy shelf and suddenly is in demand for a variety of projects. “It’s made me a very, very happy man,” Brochu concedes. “After 42 years in the business, I’m an overnight sensation. It’s funny, somebody said, ‘You’re the best known unknown actor in the world.’ OK, I’ll take it.”

ZERO HOUR, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter, Thursdays through Sundays, tonight (Oct. 14) through Oct. 24. Tickets: $23 (subscribers), $29 (non-subscribers). Call: (561) 575-2223.

After a successful summer debut at the Kravis Center, Florida Stage unveils its first subscription season in the Rinker Playhouse, including several world premieres. Meanwhile, there is a new Miami company with its own troupe of actors, the Caldwell continues to dig out of its money woes with a second look at a Carbonell-winning show it is developing, the Maltz Jupiter cracks into the premiere business with a new musical fresh from South Korea, and even Palm Beach Dramaworks features a new play, which debuted this summer off-Broadway, after readings at the intimate West Palm studio space.

Florida Stage utilizes its new height limit on its opener, Andrew Rosendorf’s historical epic Cane (Oct. 27-Nov. 28), the first in an ambitious 10-play Florida Cycle. Straight from its 1st Stage reading series comes Goldie, Max & Milk by Karen Hartman (Dec. 15-Jan. 16). Maybe “straight” is not the right word for this comedy about a single lesbian who gives birth, but is clueless about motherhood. Also on tap are two plays by Florida Stage favorites, Michael Hollinger’s Ghost-Writer (March 2-April 3) and Carter W. Lewis’s The Cha-Cha of a Camel Spider (May 4-June 5).

The other big story of theater season is the birth of a brand-new company, Zoetic Stage, to be run by former City Theatre artistic director Stuart Meltzer, with the support of two skilled playwrights, the mega-prolific Michael McKeever and lawyer-turned-writer Christopher Demos-Brown. To populate their plays and others, the company has gathered a repertory company of some of the region’s best performers, such as Carbonell Award winners Irene Adjan, John Felix, Laura Turnbull and Tom Wahl.

Specific dates and venues are still to be determined, but it looks like the group’s debut, a new comedy by McKeever, South Beach Babylon, will be mounted at Miami’s Arsht Center in December. It’s about the personal sacrifices of making art, as seen in the weeks leading up to the Art Basel exhibition. Also on Zoetic’s schedule is Stunning by David Adjmi, a clash of cultures between a Syrian Jewish couple in Brooklyn and their African-American maid (winter 2011). Brown unveils his newest script in the spring, Wrongful Death, about a female personal injury lawyer trying to land the case of her career.

With two Carbonells in its hip pocket, Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre Company brings back the sensuous dance musical Vices: A Love Story (Nov. 7-Dec. 12), somewhat reworked and restaged, for those still kicking themselves about missing it a summer ago. The new year leads off with Law & Order writer Gina Gionfriddo’s psychological comedy, Becky Shaw (Jan. 2-Feb. 6). But before the Caldwell season starts, artistic director Clive Cholerton returns to the brilliant trunk of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim for another concert musical, the nostalgic, but staunchly unsentimental Follies (Oct. 7-10).

While sticking to its strength of musicals, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre kicks off its season with a special two-week engagement by Jim Brochu, with his acclaimed one-man show Zero Hour, on the life and hard times of Zero Mostel (Oct. 14-24). The regular season opens with the classic jury room drama, 12 Angry Men (Nov. 2-14), before premiering an original coming-of-age musical called Academy, which had a way-out-of-town tryout at a musical theater festival in South Korea (Dec. 7-19).

Also on the Maltz schedule are more conventional choices, like The Sound of Music (Jan. 11-30), a bio-show called Jolson at the Winter Garden (Fen. 22-March 13) and the reconstructed Gershwins musical, Crazy for You (March 29-April 17).

Speaking of musicals, the west Boca troupe Slow Burn Theatre begins its second season here with its brand of explosive cult shows, leading off with The Rocky Horror Show (Oct. 14-30). The group follows that with Kander and Ebb’s Tony winner, Kiss of the Spider Woman (Jan. 27-Feb. 6) and Blood Brothers (April 21-May 1).

West Palm’s Palm Beach Dramaworks will be moving to the Cuillo Centre next year, but meanwhile it continues dusting off the classics for its cerebral audience in its current 85-seat digs. The company opens with George Bernard Shaw’s romantic-triangle comedy Candida (Oct. 8-Nov. 21), and later tackles Dinner With Friends (Feb. 25-April 17), Donald Margulies’ dissection of a broken marriage and its aftermath, and Martin McDonagh’s grisly Irish tale, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (May 6-June 19). It diverges a bit from its usual menu, with a fictional encounter between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, a new play called Freud’s Last Session (Dec. 17-Feb. 6), fresh from off-Broadway.

The Kravis Center, of course, has its own Broadway series of national tours, headed by a new production of the soul-rock hit Dreamgirls (Nov. 23-28), a redesigned Beauty and the Beast, Disney’s first show on Broadway (Jan. 4-9), and Mel Brooks’ screen-to-stage transfer, Young Frankenstein (Feb. 1-6). Also on the series are the landmark West Side Story in the current multi-lingual revival (March 8-13) and The Color Purple (May 10-15).

Also on the Kravis schedule are a couple of one-night bookings -- Monty Python’s Spamalot (Dec. 26) and Spring Awakening (March 2). Long popular with Kravis audiences is the Aquila Theatre, which again brings its fresh take on two stage stalwarts, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (Jan. 20-21) and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Jan. 22-23), both in the Rinker Playhouse.

The other two road show complexes, Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Center and Miami’s Arsht Center, offer their own Broadway series. Broward has several overlapping shows with the Kravis, plus Rock of Ages (Dec. 28 - Jan. 9), Les Miserables (Jan. 18-30) and Hair (June 7-19). The Arsht has the season’s exclusive on Jersey Boys (March 2-20) and another Tony-winning best musical, In the Heights (March 29-April 3).

Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre has another adventurous slate of plays for its 10^th anniversary, including Collected Stories, Donald Margulies’ tug-of-war between a celebrated author and her protégé (Nov. 11-Dec. 5); The Irish Curse, a new comedy about male body image and the anguish of not measuring up (Feb. 10-March 6); and Stephen Belber’s Dusk Rings a Bell (March 31-April 24), the tale of two people who meet again after 25 years and a distant adolescent fling.

Broward Stage Door Theatre in Coral Springs has just completed a run of the seldom-seen Jerry Herman musical Mack & Mabel and has a couple of other offbeat choices ahead. Next up is On the Town (Oct. 20-Dec. 5), the Broadway debut of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green in a show about a 24-hour shore leave in New York City, and next spring the theater tackles Light in the Piazza (Feb. 25-June 19), the story of a slow-witted American girl’s romance while on tour through Italy, with a challenging score by Adam Guettel.

Coral Gables’ New Theatre still has some holes in its schedule, but what is set sounds promising. For it’s 25^th season, it offers Fizz by Rogelio Martinez (Nov. 19-Dec. 12), a history of New Coke, one of the biggest product debut flops in corporate America, and The Radiant by Shirley Lauro (March 25-April 7), about the life and career of Marie Curie, the pioneering female scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner.

Actors Playhouse in Coral Gables is branching out from its usual diet of mainstream musicals, opening with a world premiere by Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuban-American Nilo Cruz, The Color of Desire, a lyrical love story set against the intrigue and tumult of 1960 Havana (Oct. 6-Nov. 7). In the spring (March 9-April 10), it produces the Florida premiere of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, an epic comic drama of a family approaching total meltdown.

Lovers of musicals need not be worried they are being abandoned, though. They will be able to catch Oliver! (Nov. 17-Dec. 26), The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Jan 19-Feb. 13), and Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (May 11-June 5), a comic send-up of the classic film, with a soundtrack that mimics the great Bernard Hermann.

Flexing its muscles, the perennial Carbonell Award-contending GableStage of Coral Gables has announced a strong season ahead, full of acclaimed plays fresh from New York. Its season begins with the latest from Irish dark humorist Martin McDonagh, A Behanding in Spokane (Oct. 23 - Nov. 21), a twisted tale of a man on a quest for his severed hand and the two two-bit con artists eager to sell him what he is after, whether they have it or not.

Also among the company’s highlights are Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts (Feb. 26 - March 27), a slice of Chicago life from the author of Bug and Pulitzer winner August: Osage County, and Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) (April 30 - May 29), a look back at the barbaric treatment of 19^th-century women who were diagnosed as “hysterical.”

For the third time in a year, the Caldwell Theatre has put the words and music of Stephen Sondheim onstage, emphasizing his intricate way with a song and his emotionally complex storytelling in its musical concert series.

If the Boca Raton company’s current offering, 1971’s Follies, is not quite up to the delirious level of its Sunday in the Park With George or Into the Woods, perhaps that is because the surprise factor that its performers can learn, stage, rehearse and present these demanding shows in less than a week is starting to wear off.

Or maybe it is the nature of Follies itself. More concept musical than traditional book musical, less than a third of its numbers move the skeletal story along, which may not lend itself as well to the concert format. The score is full of memorable showstoppers, but they are mostly presentational specialty numbers, faux-vintage songs like Broadway Baby, Ah, Paris! or that ultimate torch song, Losing My Mind.

Sondheim-philes would probably go anywhere to hear these tunes sung as well as they are at the Caldwell this weekend, and on that level, you have to deem artistic director Clive Cholerton’s production a success. But the pared-down staging and lack of scenic touches leads to narrative confusion. It is hard to imagine that someone who had not seen Follies previously would be able to follow the show’s shifts between the present and the past, between reality and fantasy.

The show won seven Tony Awards, but was inexplicably edged out for best musical by Galt MacDermot’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. It focuses on two former chorus girls of the famed, fictional Weismann Follies, both caught in unsatisfying, empty marriages. Phyllis (Laura Hodos) is married to foundation head Ben (Stephen G. Anthony), both bored by their New York social obligations. In contrast, Sally (Melissa Minyard) and Buddy (Wayne LeGette) live a simple life in Phoenix, with him often unfaithful on the road as a traveling salesman.

They are reunited, along with many featured performers from Follies past, at the theater where these extravagant revues once played, now crumbling and destined to be razed for a parking lot. In the course of one night, the four main characters acknowledge earlier infatuations, express current unhappiness and interact with the ghosts of their younger selves. This view of idealistic youth and the compromises made over time would be addressed again by Sondheim a decade later in Merrily We Roll Along, which also was a financial flop.

LeGette and Minyard have been paired and prominent in all three Caldwell concerts and they are again the standouts in the cast. You would not have to have seen the now-legendary 1985 Follies concert at Lincoln Center to hear echoes of Mandy Patinkin’s Buddy in LeGette’s vocal approach to the character, but that intensity is very welcome, particularly on the burlesque-like Buddy’s Blues. Minyard is handed some of the score’s most haunting songs (In Buddy’s Eyes, Too Many Mornings, Losing My Mind) and she delivers them flawlessly.

Hodos is not as icy cool as ennui-fueled Phyllis is usually portrayed, but she is on-target with her laser-sharp solo, Could I Leave You? And Anthony takes a while to get going as standoffish Ben, but eventually comes on strong on Live, Laugh, Love, an 11 o’clock mental breakdown number, something of a Sondheim specialty.

Cholerton has found some terrific new talent -- Joey Zangardi, John Debkowski, Melanie Leibner and Nicole Niefeld -- for the foursome’s younger selves. As part of his informal musical rep company, they definitely widen his future possibilities.

Follies is one of the few Sondheim shows where dance is an integral part of the show, and the Caldwell has lagged -- understandably perhaps -- on including much choreography in its concerts. As a result, numbers like Who’s That Woman? And The Story of Lucy and Jessie fall short in their impact.

This concert series has grown incrementally in its use of projections as a visual backdrop. The opening shots of vintage portraits that morph into each other is striking, as are the photos of dilapidated theater palaces and a brief film clip of period dance. But something more is needed -- either a lighting change or a scenic suggestion -- to convey that the show has gone into fantasy mode in the climactic Loveland sequence.

Overall, this Follies concert is another gift from the Caldwell to us Sondheim fanatics, surely more enjoyable to those already familiar with the show than newbies. It is good to hear that Cholerton is committed to continuing the series and, if the other performances are as packed as Friday night’s was, the theater might make a little money on the show,

Next, Clive, how about Sondheim’s latest, the saga of the Mizner Brothers called Road Show (a/k/a Bounce, a/k/a Wise Guys)? After all, some of it is set in Boca Raton.

Follies can be seen today at 8 p.m. and tomorrow at 2 p.m. at the Caldwell Theatre, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Tickets: $30-$35. Call (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.