The Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts (@ArshtCenter) is proud to announce its lineup for the 2024-2025 Theater Up Close season, created in collaboration with local theater companies Zoetic Stage (@ZoeticStageMIA) and City Theatre (@CityTheatreMIA). This season’s Theater Up Close series returns to the Carnival Studio Theater with five extraordinary productions that put audiences in the middle of the action, including three regional premieres and a beloved Tony Award-winning musical.
The lineup for the 2024-2025 Theater Up Close series includes the following:
Zoetic Stage and Adrienne Arsht Center present
The Pillowman
October 24-November 10, 2024
After wildly successful productions of Frankenstein and Dracula, Zoetic Stage returns to the horror genre with The Pillowman, a haunting play by Martin McDonagh.
With echoes of Stoppard, Kafka and the Brothers Grimm, this modern classic centers on a writer in an unnamed totalitarian state who is being interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories and their similarities to a series of child murders. The result is an urgent work of theatrical bravura and an unflinching examination of the very nature and purpose of art. It’s a terrifyingly perfect way to celebrate the Halloween season.
City Theatre and Adrienne Arsht Center present
Black Santa – Southeastern Premiere!
December 5-22, 2024
Before Abbott Elementary, there was Patrice Patterson at Dartmouth Day School. Shortly before Christmas break, a third grader named Sharifa stands in front of her class and says, “Santa Claus is a Black man from Detroit,” sending the school into an uproar. To quell the storm, Patrice, the school’s only Black teacher, is asked to create an ad campaign within the school to make Santa white again. As events unfold, Sharifa’s enrollment is placed in jeopardy, and Patrice must decide how to protect Sharifa and ultimately herself. This absurdist comedy examines how race and racial bias can have a foothold on one of the most benign figures — Santa Claus.
Zoetic Stage and Adrienne Arsht Center present
POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive – Miami Premiere!
January 9-26, 2025
POTUS is a comedy about the women in charge of the man in charge of the free world! When the president unwittingly spins a PR nightmare into a global crisis, the seven brilliant and beleaguered women he relies upon most risk life, liberty and the pursuit of sanity to keep the commander in chief out of trouble. Selina Fillinger’s brilliant, all-female farce took Broadway by storm in a star-studded production that earned three 2022 Tony Award nominations. Its Miami premiere at Zoetic Stage will feature a cast of South Florida’s finest and funniest female actors
Zoetic Stage and Adrienne Arsht Center present
Fiddler on the Roof
March 13 – April 6, 2025
Artistic director Stuart Meltzer has a history of presenting fresh, bold interpretations of classics of the musical theater canon, focusing on the intimacy of performance and storytelling. In that tradition, Zoetic Stage will present Fiddler on the Roof, the brainchild of Broadway legends Jerome Robbins and Harold Prince, songwriters Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and book writer Joseph Stein.
Set in the village of Anatevka, the story centers on Tevye, a poor milkman, and his five daughters as he tries to protect them and instill them with traditional values in the face of changing social mores and the growing anti-Semitism of Czarist Russia. Fiddler on the Roof‘s universal theme of tradition cuts across barriers of race, class, nationality and religion. With iconic and beloved songs such as “Sunrise, Sunset,” “If I Were a Rich Man” and “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” Fiddler on the Roof is a story of humor, heart and honesty.
Zoetic Stage and Adrienne Arsht Center present
The Comeuppance – Florida Premiere!
May 8-25, 2025
In The Comeuppance, an off-Broadway hit by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (“one of this country’s most original and illuminating writers” according to The New York Times), a self proclaimed “Multi-Ethnic Reject Group” reconvenes for their 20th high school reunion. Over alcohol and other substances, they try to reconnect who they once were with whom they’ve become as they reminisce about their teenage selves and reveal how their lives have unfolded since graduation.
Brilliantly witty, theatrical and moving, The Comeuppance focuses on millennials and their reckoning with the world they will soon inherit. A New York Times Criticʼs Pick.
Content Courtesy of Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts
