As with its production of August: Osage County earlier this year, Coral Gables’ Actors’ Playhouse has attracted some of the best talent in South Florida for its lavish, giggle-inducing production of Hairspray, the Tony Award-winning musical based on John Waters’ slyly subversive 1988 movie about self-esteem in racially segregated Kennedy-era Baltimore.

When David Arisco began assembling the show, one casting choice must have been obvious. The hulking, doughy artistic director chose himself to play poor, put-upon housewife and mother Edna Turnblad, the gender-bent role originated by Harvey Fierstein on Broadway and John Travolta on film. Arisco is the least of the company, tossing away some of script’s best punch lines and singing in a marginally musical style, but the visual of him in housedress drag looming over the rest of the cast still sells it.

He seems to cede the production to chubby dynamo Joline Mujica as Edna’s daughter Tracy. Determined to break into television on the local Corny Collins dance show, as soon as succeeds at the goal Tracy starts breaking down the program’s race policy so that “every day is Negro day.” There are messages about acceptance and tolerance in Hairspray, but they never seem to dampen the fun of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s period pitch-perfect score or Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan’s laugh-out-loud script.

Among the standouts in the sizeable cast are Avi Hoffman as Edna’s joy-buzzer hubby Wilbur, Julie Kleiner as Tracy’s dithery sidekick, who makes a great duckling-to-swan transition, and dancing whiz Ronald Duncan as her taboo beau. Big-voiced Avery Sommers scores as aptly named Motormouth Maybelle with her 11 o’clock gospel number and Kim Cozort amuses as the TV show’s prejudiced producer.

Barbara Flaten’s ‘60s-knockoff choreography keeps the show in constant motion, and Sean McClelland’s sets and Ellis Tillman’s costumes are great eye candy. David Nagy’s band assures us that -- as the finale puts it -- You Can’t Stop the Beat, and at Actors’ Playhouse, it would be foolhardy to try.

HAIRSPRAY, Actors’ Playhouse, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables. Through Sunday, Nov. 13. Tickets: $15-$50. Call: (305) 444-9293.

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The dark days of the House Un-American Activities Committee hover over Amy Herzog’s involving After the Revolution, but that 1950s Communist witch hunt is only the jumping-off point for this family drama of loyalty and legacy.

The question of “naming names” has been explored is such diverse works as Arthur Miller’s After the Fall and the 1976 film drama, The Front. Instead, Herzog asks us to consider the consequences when an avowed Marxist, martyred by the committee and now dead, turns out not to be what his admiring granddaughter thought he was.

That is the dilemma facing recent law school graduate Emma Joseph, who runs a foundation named in her grandfather’s honor, dedicated to defending the unjustly accused or merely the politically unpopular. As played by accomplished young Jackie Rivera, Emma is assured and strong-headed, signs that her moorings will soon be knocked out from under her.

Sure enough, it soon surfaces in a new book about to be published that Gramps was not only a Communist, but he supplied government secrets to the Russians in the 1940s. This news not only puts Emma’s foundation in jeopardy, but threatens her relationship with her unapologetically Marxist teacher father, who knew his father dabbled in spying, but kept that little tidbit from his daughter.

After the Revolution certainly has history and politics on the brain, but Herzog is smart enough to keep the focus on family rather than polemics. And at the Caldwell Theatre, where the play is receiving one of its first post-New York productions, director Margaret M. Ledford has the nimble touch and the cast to deliver on the script’s potential.

Rivera holds her own against veteran actor Gordon McConnell, who plays Ben, her bombastic, but ruffled father, and shares a terrific second act confrontation scene with her. Harriet Oser steals a few scenes as hard-of-hearing, but sharp-as-a-tack Grandma Vera and Nancy Barnett, former managing director of Florida Stage, returns to acting after many years with an impressive performance as Ben’s apolitical, earthy second wife.

The second act could stand some trimming and the play ends more with a whimper than a bang, but you will care about these characters and empathize with the crises they face.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION. Caldwell Theatre Co., 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, Nov. 20. Tickets: $38-$50. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.

On Nov. 11, when Palm Beach Dramaworks cuts the ribbon on the Don & Ann Brown Theatre -- the former Cuillo Centre for the Arts, the 12-year-old stage company’s new home -- it will be the culmination of three years of purchase negotiations and a $2 million renovation project.

All for a performance space that producing artistic director Bill Hayes actively disliked in its former configuration.

“I didn’t find any redeeming qualities about the space. It was not comfortable for a patron and it was very limiting for an artist,” he says. “That horrible thrust stage, the stadium seating, the uncomfortable chairs. I needed to bring it down to the dirt and start over again.”

Hayes gave Gino deSantis of Zeidler Architects a daunting assignment: to retain the intimacy of the organization’s former 84-seat home on Banyan Boulevard, while more than doubling the seating capacity and increasing the stage area sixfold. The new configuration has 218 seats, which is a big increase, but in its former life the Cuillo Centre sat 375.

“We were trying to, as much as possible, recreate the magic of Dramaworks, which has a lot to do with intimacy,” says managing director Sue Ellen Beryl, Hayes’s wife. “It is still an intimate theater by national standards, just not compared to our previous theater,” notes Hayes.

Soon after moving into the Banyan theater eight years ago, Hayes, Beryl and their board of directors all recognized that they would quickly outgrow that space. So the company launched a series of “almosts.” They almost moved near the Kravis Center in a multi-use high-rise project called Opera Place, which was scuttled by the bad economy. They almost moved to a vacant building north of Dreyfoos School of the Arts and they almost relocated to Palm Beach Gardens.

But West Palm Beach’s then-Mayor Lois Frankel was determined to keep the Carbonell Award-winning company in town. “The bottom line is we had an administration here in the city that was willing to invest in the arts,” says Hayes. “And it recognized the economic impact that a good cultural organization could have on downtown.”

Frankel put the Downtown Development Authority on the case, and it arranged a meeting between Dramaworks and car dealer-turned-theater-owner Bob Cuillo, as early as 2007. It was not until 2010, however, after Hayes and Beryl had thrown up their hands in frustration and left the negotiations to the city, that a purchase deal was struck.

West Palm Beach bought the theater for $2.85 million, and will be renting it to Dramaworks for the next five years at a mere $60,000 annual rent -- the same rent the group was paying on Banyan Boulevard -- with the expectation that Dramaworks will buy the building during that five-year period.

So far, Dramaworks has raised $4.2 million, including a $2 million gift from the Browns, a philanthropic couple from Palm Beach Gardens and Washington, D.C. Two million dollars is also the cost of the theater renovations, so the group still needs some $650,000 to be able to buy the building outright. But as Beryl emphasizes, the fundraising effort has barely begun.

“We have not yet launched our capital campaign,” she says, adding that it will begin with the grand opening on 11-11-11. “We have raised this $4.2 million from 40 people in our very, very inner circle of friends: Our board members, our advisory board members and our highest level donors.

“To the rest of our constituents, hold on to your wallets, the request is coming. We’re going to go out first to them, and then to the community at large.”

In addition to the tiny seating capacity on Banyan Boulevard, Dramaworks had to make do with cramped quarters onstage and off. The move to its new theater allows Hayes to produce plays he could never have fit on his stage before, such as All My Sons, the 1947 Arthur Miller play that will inaugurate the Brown Theatre.

“Ten actors, an exterior, the effective representation of a home,” Hayes said of the play’s requirements. “There are plays that I think need breathing room that couldn’t be done in the old space.”

For the opening show, Hayes encouraged resident scenic designer Michael Amico to think big, to create not just a room, but a world, an entire environment.

“This will be the first time people will be walking in here,” says Hayes. “I want the space to wow them, I want the set to wow them.”

To staff up for its new theater, Dramaworks has increased its payroll from eight full-time employees to 20. The majority of the added workers come from the defunct Florida Stage.

On the back of Hayes and Beryl’s minds has to be that troupe’s recent closing, largely attributed to subscriber rebellion over a move from Manalapan to the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach.

Hayes minimizes the similarities. “We moved over one street, just around the corner,” he says. “We’re very well-connected to our patrons and talk to our patrons constantly. We want to find out what’s important to them and address those issues.”

So far, the signs are good. As of the beginning of October, subscriptions reached 3,300 -- a 20 percent increase over last season and a record level for Dramaworks.

With its new location and a promotional boost by the city, the organization should gain awareness from a whole new audience. Mayor Jeri Muoio has declared Nov. 7-13 to the Palm Beach Dramaworks Week. Each night will introduce a different constituency -- actors and artists, the business community, city workers and students -- to the new redesigned theater in town. And on Saturday, Nov. 12, All My Sons has its official opening.

“With the first show, we want to demonstrate what we can do now,” beams Hayes. “You’re going to be wowed.”

ALL MY SONS. Palm Beach Dramaworks at the Don & Ann Brown Theatre, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach; Nov. 12-Dec. 11. Call: (561) 514-4042, ext. 2.

Looking at the upcoming theater season in South Florida, you would never know that we were in the midst of a sluggish economy.

Palm Beach Dramaworks is pouring millions into the renovation and purchase of its new performance space which will nearly triple the group’s seating capacity, and recently received a $2 million donation for the project. A completely new company, Parade Productions, will be kicking off in Boca Raton in January. And Boca’s Caldwell Theatre is inaugurating a second stage program with three full productions beginning in December.

Of course, the theater community is still reeling and shaking its collective heads over the abrupt closing and bankruptcy filing of 25-year-old Florida Stage, just before its announced summer show this year. That leaves a significant hole in the cultural scene, yet there is plenty left to look forward to seeing.

Among the highlights is one mini-theme of plays about the value of art. At both the north and south extremes of the region, Coral Gables’ Gable Stage (Nov. 5-Dec. 4) and the Maltz Jupiter Theatre (Feb. 14-26) will each be producing John Logan’s 2010 Tony Award-winning play Red, about abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, caught in the act of creation. West Palm’s Palm Beach Dramaworks is giddy over its coup of snagging the rights to Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters (Feb. 17-March 11), the true story of British miners who take up painting and become sensations of the art world. At New Theatre, also in Coral Gables, the world premiere of Twain and Shaw Do Lunch (Dec. 2-18), by Chambers Stevens, eavesdrops on the clash of egos and attitudes towards their art as two of the early 20^th century’s greatest writers meet, eat and expound.

Dramaworks moves into the drastically reconfigured former Cuillo Centre on Nov. 11 -- yes, numerology fans, that’s 11-11-11 -- with Arthur Miller’s World War II morality drama, All My Sons (through Dec. 11). The group’s season also includes two Pulitzer Prize winners, Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Jan. 6-29) and David Auburn’s Proof (May 25-Jun 17), as well as one of South African Athol Fugard’s best apartheid parables, Master Harold … and the boys (April 6-29).

Artistic director Clive Cholerton continues to shake up the Caldwell Theatre with new works and his first fully produced musical. He opens his season with Amy Herzog’s heady After the Revolution (Oct. 16-Nov. 20), about a family’s suffering under the cloud of the McCarthy hearings of the ’50s. Miami attorney-turned-playwright Christopher Demos Brown is showcased with the world premiere of Our Lady of Allapatta (April 15-May 20), about a police investigation of a mysterious religious image on the side of a Miami strip mall. In between, the company tackles the Cy Coleman-Larry Gelbart pulp fiction musical City of Angels (Feb. 26-April 1), about a crime novelist and his detective alter ego.

Bullish on the future, the Caldwell has taken dates in the Mizner Park Cultural Center for three additional productions this season. Dubbed Caldwell 2, it kicks off in December with a holiday comedy. In the same space, acting teacher-director Kim St. Leon is inaugurating Parade Productions with Donald Margulies’ semi-autobiographical Brooklyn Boy (Jan. 26-Feb. 12), featuring South Florida favorite Avi Hoffman. If all goes well, the company will expand its operations in future seasons.

The Maltz Jupiter Theatre opens its season with the manic comic take on Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (Nov. 1-13), before concentrating on its strong suit -- musical theater. Its line-up includes Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (Nov. 29-Dec. 18), Cabaret (Jan. 10-29) and Hello, Dolly! (March 13-April 1).

Actors’ Playhouse of Coral Gables, which also chiefly produces musicals, must have been cribbing from the Maltz Jupiter’s schedule, or vice versa. It mounted The 39 Steps this past season and will be presenting its own take on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat this season (March 7-April 8). It opens this fall with Hairspray (Oct. 12-Nov. 13), with artistic director David Arisco as Edna Turnblad. The company’s holiday show is Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol (Dec. 7-Jan. 1), the classic Dickens tale told from the viewpoint of Ebenezer Scrooge’s dead partner, followed by the bi-polar musical, Next to Normal (Jan. 18-Feb. 12) and a new Steven Dietz comedy, Becky’s New Car (May 9-June 3).

Sticking with a good thing, or at least a popular one, West Boca’s Slow Burn Theatre Company brings back its Halloween hit, The Rocky Horror Show (Oct. 21-29). Next up is Urinetown, The Musical, the story of a greedy toilet monopoly (Jan. 20-29), then Stephen Sondheim’s twist on fairy tales, Into the Woods (April 13-22).

One of the theaters taking up the slack from Florida Stage is Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre with several world and Southeastern premieres, including the recent New York hit about the famed Green Bay Packers football coach, Lombardi (Nov. 10-Dec. 4). Also on Mosaic’s play list is The Birds (March 8-April 1), Conor McPherson’s stage adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier yarn that Hitchcock turned into an iconic suspense film. So new it does not have a final title is a fact-based play by Joe Calarco (April 19-May 13), about a 15-year-old boy who was doused with rubbing alcohol and set on fire by five teenagers.

GableStage has had its eye on Broadway lately, and Joe Adler has put together a season of recent New York plays. In addition to Red, he will offer the area premieres of The Motherf**ker with the Hat (Jan. 7-Feb. 5), Stephen Adly Guirgis’ poetic tale of drug-dependent low-lifes, and A Steady Rain (March 3-April 1) by Keith Huff, a series of monologues delivered by two Chicago cops. Also direct from Broadway comes Margulies’ Time Stands Still (May 5-June 3), an uneasy romance between a photojournalist and a foreign correspondent, trying to make peace away from the war zone.

As befits its name, New Theatre of Coral Gables has a slate of world premiere plays ahead. Its first production this fall is Edith Can Shoot Things (Oct. 14-30) by A. Rey Pamatmat, a stark look at two abandoned teens. Later in the season, the company unveils Winter (Jan. 27-Feb. 12), Robert Caisley’s squabble over the arrangements for a deceased mother, and Property Line (March 23-April 8) by Juan C. Sanchez, a comic battle between neighbors over real estate ownership.

Miami’s Zoetic Stage fills at least one of the gaps left by Florida Stage’s demise, opening its season at the Arsht Center with Christopher Demos-Brown’s Captiva (Nov. 3-20), a family reunion comedy that had been announced for the defunct West Palm Beach company’s schedule. Zoetic follows it with David Sedaris’s Santaland Diaries (Dec. 8-23), featuring Michael McKeever in elf mode, and ends its season with the world premiere of McKeever’s Moscow (March 29-April 15), a comic look at the tumultuous early ’60s Cold War era in Miami.

The anarchic Mad Cat Theatre Co. has only one future production set, Angela Berliner’s Macbeth and the Monster (Dec. 16-Jan. 7), a tale of the Scottish king-to-be as a youngster, playing at the troupe’s new home at Miami’s Goldman Warehouse.

For many audience members, theatergoing means attending the various Broadway series at the three performing arts centers in South Florida. West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center leads off its season with the somewhat revised touring version of The Addams Family (Nov. 8-13), then the Tony-winning revival of Hair (Jan. 10-15), the similarly acclaimed new production of La Cage aux Folles (Feb. 14-19), featuring Palm Beacher George Hamilton. Kravis on Broadway concludes with the collaboration of choreographer Twyla Tharp and the late Frank Sinatra, Come Fly Away (March 13-18) and Les Miserables (May 16-26), reconceived for its 25^th anniversary.

In Fort Lauderdale, the Broward Center calls its series Broadway Across America and it has the area exclusive of the acclaimed Billy Elliot (Feb. 29-March 11), the emotional tale of the miner’s son who prefers dance to boxing. The season starts with the Beatles tribute band Rain (Oct. 4-16), then the non-union Beauty and the Beast (Nov. 15-27) and the always welcome Jersey Boys (Jan. 11-29). The expansive revival of South Pacific arrives in the spring (April 10-22), followed by La Cage (June 12-24).

At Miami’s Arsht Center, The Addams Family shows up (Oct. 25-30), followed by another cartoon-inspired musical, Shrek (Dec. 6-11). The musical recreation of a recording session of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, called Million Dollar Quartet (Dec. 27-Jan. 1), plays the coveted Christmas week, prior to Come Fly Away (March 20-25) and the return of Disney’s The Lion King (May 15-June 10).

The estimable Michael Weller, who began his career with sprawling, large-cast dramas (Moonchildren, The Ballad of Soapy Smith), has lately taken to writing two-character plays that put disintegrating marriages under the microscope.

His Side Effects, which opened this spring in New York and now has its South Florida premiere at Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre, is linked to his earlier, better work, 50 Words, seen locally last season at GableStage. Both plays take us inside precarious relationships, beyond the public images to the searing reality of couples stressed to the breaking point. But 50 Words felt authentic and organic, while Side Effects feels layered with needless artificial soap opera trappings.

It is the story of Hugh Metz (Jim Ballard), operator of a family-owned Midwest bicycle factory with aspirations of political office. His chief impediment to that goal is his wife Lindy (Deborah L. Sherman), whose bipolar condition makes her an unpredictable liability, particularly when she refuses to take her meds.

The challenges faced by a political family mid-campaign, needing to project an image of surface normalcy, is enough to hang a play upon. But Weller tosses is dueling extramarital affairs for the Metzes, as well as a melodramatic life-threatening car crash involving their sons. That’s enough for any one family to deal with, even if the wife were not bonkers.

Sherman attacks the role of Lindy with relish, accentuating every tic and compulsive mannerism. It is an exceedingly self-conscious manic-depressive performance, way too showy for my taste. Ballard, like his character Hugh, has difficulty reacting to Lindy, but he does an admirable job vacillating between anger at his wife and animal attraction to her.

Douglass Grinn provides a richly textured, monochromatic gray living room set. In a play like Side Effects, though, one look at the scenic design and you know it is just a matter of time before it will be trashed.

SIDE EFFECTS, Mosaic Theatre, 12200 W. Broward Blvd., Plantation. Through Sunday, Oct. 9. Tickets: $15-$39.50. Call: (954) 577-8243.

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Many young writers, even the truly talented ones, seem content to choose a playwright they admire and spin knockoffs of their work. But Tarell Alvin McCraney, a product of the Miami-Dade public schools who has been acclaimed in New York, London and beyond, is a genuine original.

South Florida theaters have been relatively slow in bring McCraney’s output to their audiences, but Coral Gables’ GableStage has stepped up and given him an exemplary show with his The Brothers Size, a spare but lyrical dance-drama in a production that the author directs.

It is a simple, but iconic tale of two siblings who have taken different paths in life. Ogun Size industriously runs an auto repair shop, while his younger brother Oshoosi is footloose and rudderless, having just done time in prison. Those differences are played out on a vast empty stage, but with a poetry and an exoticism that gives their story epic resonances.

If Ogun struggles to put his brother on a path towards an honest, productive life, that struggle becomes a tug-of-war with the introduction of ex-con Elegba, who served time with Oshoosi. It becomes a battle of words, movement and occasionally song, with nothing less than Oshoosi’s soul at stake.

Although the story is set in the Louisiana bayou country, McCraney lets the play float free with references and rituals of the African tradition. The evening begins with a ceremonial procession of the actors, accompanied by drums and stylized recitations. This should be enough to turn an audience apprehensive, but relax, open your ears and your heart to a production that becomes increasingly engrossing and accessible.

All three cast members -- Sheaun McKinney (Ogun), Ryan George (Oshoosi), Teo Castellanos (Elegba) -- are athletic and dancer-like, yet are able to carry the play’s text-heavy monologues. McKinney and George quickly and easily establish a brotherly rapport, which is to say an instinctual closeness and a natural antagonism. If Castellanos manages to steal our attention in his scenes, that is because he has the compelling serpentine role.

McCraney’s voice may not appeal to those who need linear storytelling or naturalistic theatrics. But the way he tells his saga is unmistakably compelling and artful.

THE BROTHERS SIZE. GableStage at the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables. Through Sunday, Oct. 2. Tickets: $37.50-$47.50. Call: (305) 445-1119.

More than most other South Florida theater companies, Miami’s Mad Cat has been able to attract a young audience, pulling them away from pop culture and electronic media for a couple of hours.

How? With plays like artistic director Paul Tei’s So My Grandmother Died, Blah Blah Blah, a messy grab bag of pop culture and Internet references with only tangential interest in a narrative thread.

It is Tei’s contention, I suppose, that his target audience sees little value in linear structure or any of the other elements of what was quaintly once called “the well-made play.” Maybe he is right, for the assembled crowd with whom I saw Mad Cat’s latest opus certainly seemed engaged and entertained, even if they had little context for the scattershot mentions of Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen and other dead white dudes that are dropped into So My Grandmother Died like factoid bombs.

In fact, the play concerns the Chekhov family. No, not the Russian clan of the master playwright of the early 20^th century, but the Hollywood, Florida, Chekhovs, whose grandma -- as advertised -- has recently kicked the bucket. This brings home daughter Polly from that other Hollywood, where she has been trying with little success to forge a career as a comedy writer. Since she is the writer in the family, it falls to her to write Granny’s eulogy, a task which sends Polly into a massive writer’s block.

Polly (Melissa Almaguer) is one of three sisters, including unmarried new mother Monica (Erin Joy Schmidt), who has a knack for mind reading, and brooding modern dancer Annabella (Deborah L. Sherman). Let’s assume Tei is familiar with the cartoons of Jules Feiffer, from which Annabella seems to leap. He certainly knows Chekhov’s Three Sisters and his take on this trio of angst-ridden sibs who yearn to go to Miami is drily amusing.

Then there is Mom (Beverly Blanchette), a dim bulb straight out of early ’60s TV sitcoms, and Dad (George Schiavone), whose passion seems to be the Heat basketball team. It is one of those families where nobody knows best. Not related, but very much in evidence, is a three-member chorus -- Anne Chamberlain, Troy Davidson and Ricky Waugh -- inside Polly’s overactive head. They roam about the expansive playing area of Mad Cat’s new home base at the Goldman Warehouse tossing in non sequiturs, footnotes and Wikipedia definitions with fourth-wall-shattering glee.

There may be a link to the evening’s various references to Ezra Pound, Billy Joel, Willy Wonka, Inception and Long John Silver’s fast food or, more likely, it is Tei dumping out the detritus of his mind for whatever connections we may make of it.

Try to make sense of it all at your own peril. Instead, accept the moment-to-moment enjoyment, which is considerable. Any insistence that it all add up to more, while understandable, would surely mark you as an old-school fuddy-duddy.

SO MY GRANDMOTHER DIED, BLAH BLAH BLAH, Mad Cat Theatre Company, Goldman Warehouse, 404 NW 26th St., Miami. Through Sept. 10. Call (866) 811-4111 for tickets.