Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks

SW Vet ready for Grove

Mark Hamill, aka Luke Skywalker in the first trio of STAR WARS movies, will star opposite Golden Girls veteran Rue McClanahan in the Coconut Grove Playhouse production Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.

Hamill, whose Broadway credits include replacing the leads in The Elephant Man and Amadeus, plays a dance instructor who bickers with and then befriends a lonely widow. It will run March 18 - April 13 on the main stage.

Arnold Mittelman, the Grove's producing artistic director, has also made a switch in the theater's next Encore Room show, dropping Yasmina Reza's The Unexpected Man for Steven Fales' one-person show X'd: Confessions of a Mormon Boy.

That show, which runs in the 135-seat theater from March 4 to May 11, is a recounting of Fales' own experience of being excommunicated from the Mormon church after becoming a husband and father, and finally coming to terms with his gay sexuality.

It will be directed by Jack Hofsiss, who won a Tony Award for staging Broadway's The Elephant Man.

"It's a very poignant piece that will go to New York," Mittelman says. 'I decided to do it after I overheard a woman in a Key Biscayne coffee shop saying, 'This is the darkest day in Key Biscayne history. Our island paradise will soon become a gay paradise.' I thought this stuff is still so out there, as a thing like race that won't let go.

The Miami Herald :: January 22, 2003