[Narrator] "Art Loft" is brought to you by.

[Announcer] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[Narrator] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.

"Art Loft," it's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as a taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, from classic movie house to thriving regional theater, we look at how the Actors' Playhouse has become an institution in The Gables.

We head to a summit celebrating Black art in Miami.

And the Kravis Center gets playful, inspiring the next generation of performers and patrons with a day of hands-on fun.

The Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre was the proverbial inches away from demolition when Barbara Stein and her husband had an idea.

Since then, it's been a multidecade run of regional and national theatrical productions that includes its recent production of the Richard Blanco, Vanessa Garcia play "Sweet Goats & Blueberry Senoritas."

It's a Miami-centric story about finding home where you are.

Pepperoni pizza.

Ma'am?

Can you stop ringing the doorbell?

You're gonna wake up my Good.

Can we just go back to the bakery scene at the beginning?

[Richard] This play might help its audiences sort of reach some kind of different understanding about Miami, about where they live, about what they, where they'd like to live, what is home to them, about their own family and their past, 'cause this play also has a very human story about forgiveness and generational differences.

The heart of the main character belongs to Miami.

It was born here, it was created here and it was, you know, baked here.

It's too sweet.

I told you, .

What can I say?

Cubans love their sugar.

Good.

I'm Richard Blanco, also known as Ricardo de Jesus Blanco.

My name is Vanessa Garcia and I'm the cowriter with Richard Blanco And I'm cowriter with Vanessa, the wonderful Vanessa Garcia on "Sweet Goats & Blueberry Senoritas."

I mean, I think we were an amazing team, you know, on this and it was really, really fun to do.

It's a story that, of course, is very near and dear to her heart, as well as a Miamian, right.

We first took individual characters each I would write a scene and then she'd write the next scene.

And then, eventually, we were writing over each other.

And I'd bounce off of that and then she'd bounce off what I had.

So it became very much one piece.

So it didn't feel like he was writing one thing and I was writing another.

We were just writing one piece, which was really, really great.

It was inspired by questions of home, belonging and identity that have always been part of my work, of my poetry and my memoirs.

Having moved to Maine for 15 years and thinking about that landscape versus the Miami I grew up in, and really just thinking about how we negotiate home.

What did that mean for us?

But also in a sense, the families that we make and the communities that we make in unexpected places.

The play is about a Cuban American woman who has moved to Maine.

She has an estranged relationship with her mom and she's in this place of deciding whether she's gonna go back to Miami or not.

Involved in all of that, is a great big sort of need for forgiveness.

And so the play at the end of the day, is really about family and found family, and what all of that means.

The premiere, the original commission was from Portland Stage in Portland, Maine.

Getting a second production is so important and that Miami is doing that second production is so important.

So it gets to this sort of like come home before it goes out into the world and it's just this great thing 'cause it's sort of like all of us, you know.

It's definitely me and Richard.

I think for such a big immigrant population that we have here, but also myself.

I mean, even if you're a child of immigrants, we still struggle with so many different questions, and so many different joys as well of our cultures.

But there's always a journey involved of what does that mean.

And so to have this in Miami, it's really interesting because Miami is like reverse acclimation.

It actually gets more and more diverse and more and more complex, versus the whole idea of the melting pot where everybody settles into like, you know, a status quo.

Being part of this theater is very, very exciting.

It's a visual and sort of like heartfelt staple of our lives, you know.

I have very personal connections to the space.

I mean, I have so many stories in here from when it was a movie theater.

So I have memories of actually being a little kid here.

But the fact that there's this landmark place that still has that connection to home, right, to memory.

Memory is home, right.

And so to have the physical place there also is doubly special because you can actually just walk back into that memory.

I mean, one of the most exciting things is to have, you know, our play out there on the marquee, which is so beautiful and historic.

And I'm so, you know, it's like one of those things that thank God it still exists and it looks like that, you know.

And it's very much a part of our Miami history.

So it is very exciting to have it here.

People feel very special when they come here.

They have memories of coming here in their youth or bringing their children here.

And it's just something that's fun to hear people say, you know, I remember being here for, I remember being here for.

And now I'd hear them say, oh yeah, I've been here for three, four, five, six of your shows.

Professional regional theater is a theater where everyone on our stage is either aspiring to be a professional and or already are, whether they're union members or nonunion members, whether they're just outta college, whether they've been a veteran for years and years and years.

So you're putting a whole bunch of pros together.

It's also self-produced.

And it kind of speaks to the community that you live in, the town and the area that you live in, the types of shows you do.

I always like to say we're a regional professional theater in your community, instead of a community theater.

We're celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Miracle Theatre this year.

And that's another story unto its own because had we not created that partnership with the city of Coral Gables right after the hurricane, this building would've been sold to discount retail.

We came upon the Miracle Theatre in 1994.

And in 1995, we created a 45year lease.

And it was Actors' Playhouse obligation to build and restore the theater, which was an old movie palace in four stages.

And we had to demolition and rebuild it into the beautiful three stage auditorium it is right now.

When we came in here in 1995, this room that we're sitting in right now, this stage didn't exist.

The movie screen was actually further back.

Where we are right now was actually seats.

There were yellow and red burlap curtains on the side walls.

You didn't even see any of the plaster work.

That plaster work we discovered by finding the blueprints from the 1948 build.

We felt very strongly that as much as we could keep the historic elements of the original 1948 Miracle Theatre movie palace, even though we're turning it into a performing arts center, the better we were.

So the lobby and the sidewalls, the curves and the columns, and just the feel of the place, it was very exciting to restore.

I remember when I was first working on this, I felt like we were breathing new life back into the building.

Like recreating, but building anew also.

We do training all year-round for children from five years up to the golden years.

And all kinds of training, film and acting and musical theater.

All developmental and a lot of fun.

And then we have a conservatory.

And then seeing some of those kids go on to performing arts colleges.

And then seeing those kids go on to Broadway, and film, and television.

And if they go into other careers, they're just better at what they do from the experience in theater.

It's a great feeling to be able to make that difference in the community and people's lives.

We are dedicated to the honor of what has been given to us all these years, as a nonprofit, it's very important as a founder of this organization, as a donor, and a hard worker.

And that, you know, we see the success of this long range.

A jewel like this, you know, needs to be appreciated by the community and supported.

When you sit down and talk about it, that's the legacy.

Talk about the legacy that other people are going to have such wonderful full lives because they came and saw a play that meant something to them.

That's the legacy.

We're really proud that we're doing "Sweet Goats & Blueberry Senoritas."

We have two very talented authors and this is their hometown.

It's a beautiful story.

It has so many of the elements of great theater because it is funny, and it is dramatic, and it is heartfelt.

I don't want to call it a tearjerker, but there are those moments also.

But it's really just about so much discovery, you know.

Good, keep moving, keep moving, keep moving.

Everyone in this town knows someone who has gone through the kind of things that happen in this play.

So it can be that they're hearing something that happened to their neighbor or to a friend.

[David] Here comes bad.

Time of my life.

Wondering why things feel so good.

What is wrong with me?

For me it was so important to be able to play this Cuban character and to dip into my roots, which is so familiar to me, and open my heart and share it with the theater world.

And just knowing that we're all from everywhere now.

It's always an honor and a pleasure to tell the story of my roots and my culture.

It's a universal theme, separation of families and the pain that that causes.

In this case, we see it through the prism of the Cuban diaspora.

So it's particularly moving for me to help tell the story because I'm a Cuban American myself, and I'm an immigrant.

I came from Cuba, I was born in Cuba.

From the beginning of the play, our main characters sort of struggles with, you know, always there, is there, if only there were a place I could sort of be all of me, you know.

And she sort of finds this moment where in the baking of the sweet goat, it's sort of not a place, but this thing that she's making in reconnecting through the food with who she is.

It sort of all comes together in this wonderful way.

It's like, here we have who we are and who we really are, and we can just sort of be together.

And this brings me back to Miami because I feel like having been raised here, that's how I was raised.

You know, it feels very American to me in the best way possible.

So I feel like this play is an American play.

It's not a Cuban American play, it's an American play.

And that is very important to me because I feel that that's who we are.

And I think that when we can get there, that'll feel like success.

You know, if we're like, this is an American play, "Sweet Goats & Blueberry Senoritas" with senoritas in the title is an American play.

[Narrator] The Kravis Center has been a home for performance for over a quarter of a century.

But in a first, the Kravis recently opened its doors for a community block party, bringing together performing arts groups from across The Palm Beaches to inspire a love of arts in the next generation.

Here we go.

One, two, one, two, three, heh.

Yeah.

Music is all about communication.

And when you get to communicate with kids like that and break through on a very close, personal level, it's super cool to see that energy and be able to play with that.

It's always really rewarding and fun.

I've been teaching for well over 20 years now and that never gets old.

I love it every time.

This is our first ever inaugural community block party.

We've basically just thrown our doors open to the entire community with about 30 free events and some great food trucks.

We're very fortunate to have such a wonderful space and a great campus.

And so it just seemed like the right thing to do and to bring all of the other regional organizations, which is part of our mission and mandate, to bring them in here.

We have the symphony, we have the ballet, we have dance schools, we have dance classes.

And to be able to have all those people under one roof, creates a really nice atmosphere for the community.

We'll have outside performances, music from all over the world.

We want it to be a welcoming place.

We want everyone to feel like they belong here.

I've seen little ones who are barely walking and I've seen people who need walkers, and everybody seems to be having a great time.

[Brian] All right, if you want to, you can also Miamibloco is the samba percussion community.

We are a teaching ensemble.

We bring people together to learn how to play drums and become a community of neighbors and friends where they would be strangers otherwise.

The drums are just an excuse to come together with a purpose, to learn all the rhythms that are present in South Florida so that we are more connected to ourselves and to the different cultures that are present in our city that makes us the vibrant community that we are.

I think so often you kind of separate and divide based on, you know, audience and ages, da da da, but music should be for everybody.

We have our musical petting zoo.

We've got percussion instruments, we've got some keyboards and string instruments.

We've got a a half-size cello for little kids to try out.

We have two different sizes of violins for them to try.

We have percussion instruments.

We have percussion that's also like keyboards, so there's like a xylophone.

There's bells and tubular bells.

What's really interesting is that when an instrument gets in a person's hands, they start to understand what it takes to actually play an instrument.

And even adults are trying out the instruments.

So the goal is really, you know, for them to have fun, really, and experiment.

Experimenting is something that we don't always have the time to do.

So this is their chance to experiment.

Young and old, you know.

Palm Beach Opera offers its main stage productions here at the Kravis Center.

We saw kids who are excited about the singing part.

We have also seen kids who are very excited about helping us out with costume design.

It's one of the exciting things about opera, is that there's something for everybody.

♪ To believe they never would ♪ Today, Young Singers is doing a community singalong.

We usually do a big choral concert, but today, we invited the community to come along.

We're joined by Holy Trinity Episcopal Church and the United Methodist Church of the Palm Beaches, along with our high school ensemble of singers.

♪ Living just to find emotion ♪ We're now in our 21st year.

Started with 75 kids, we now have 350 in our core program, which actually meets here at the Kravis.

And then we have a south county choir and then we have two choirs out in Belle Glade as well.

And we have afterschool choirs that serve about 2000 kids a year.

♪ We will rock you ♪ We believe everybody can sing.

And so, today, is the time to come together and just have a good time and as a community, plus the parents get to sing with the kids.

♪ Nana, hey Jude ♪ Kravis Center Block Party, how you feeling today?

My name is Lula Rios and I'm with Elastic Bond.

I'm a vocalist songwriter.

Our music is like a fusion of various styles.

Like we blend our Latin roots with a lot of influences we have of like soul and funk and hip hop.

You know, we get people to dance a little bit and also like, you know, tell a message with our song.

So we love to share that with all kinds of people.

Always shine your light, you know, whatever it is that you are, wherever it is that you come from.

My name is Mickerson Desir and today, I was doing the beatbox class.

Mostly percussion and teaching children how to take certain syllables phrases and turn 'em into sounds.

The part of the show is literally the kids and their involvement.

I can't do what I do without them being who they are.

Let's go.

So even if it's a short little five seconds that they have of percussion that they learned from the class, that's perfect.

That's all that I need, 'cause I will take off with that and I'll feed off of it and we will make a beautiful sound together.

To see the joy on somebody's face when they're like, yes, I can do something, and you know that you taught it to them, it makes you feel great and whole as a person because you're like, yeah, same spark that I have inside of me, you have inside of you now.

So now let's share it with everybody else and let's, you know, try to bring in the entire crowd.

That was nice.

It's encouraged that parents get on and actually like, you know, try to participate because it literally brought more children into the circle and said, hey, if that person's mom can do it, then that means my mom can do it too, and that means I can do it too.

And that encourages them to participate even more.

Yeah, you guys are a lot more talented and a lot more credible than you guys think.

Like, that was awesome.

My name is Paige Hernandez and I consider myself a multidisciplinary artist, which means that I do a little playwriting, choreographing, directing and performing.

This one's for you, abuelita.

As a part of the block party, I am doing one of my solo shows, which is called "Havana Hop!," which is a children's story that's based in confidence and culture and how you find those things by finding out more about yourself and your family's roots.

Show me how you .

"Havana Hop!"

is extremely interactive, so it's a dance party from the beginning of the show.

There's also bilingual with Spanish and English.

There's also lots of talk about biology, specifically with the identity of a flower.

So there's artful learning and engagement kind of all wrapped in to one.

And it's a solo show, so I represent three different women in my family.

You've activated your superpower.

There's a lot of intentionality in this show just about keeping everybody moving to just keep the audience active and to experience a story in a different way.

I'm just elated and thrilled to be a part of the block party in particular, which really is about bringing the community out, especially for free performances that have fantastic representation, that are mindful of culture, and that really just allow for a party to happen in a performing arts space like this.

It's really exciting.

[Narrator] Learn more about the Kravis online at Kravis.org.

Our partners at Commissioner, the local group dedicated to bringing new eyes to art collecting, joined with the University of Miami Center for Global Black Studies to host a gathering called Still Here: Generations of Black Miami Artmaking.

Here, some thoughts on that gathering and a performance piece from that weekend.

[Attendee] You know, like what we are bringing, in terms of our creativity, in terms of our observations of life, and then how we bring it back to life in other ways, like protecting that, making sure that we are given the platforms that we should be given in the way we should be given them.

It exists to the level that we protect it together.

I always say that I'm moving off of a feeling and you know, I don't know what the feeling is, but maybe the feeling is like a spirit, you know.

And I think sometimes, like, that's what's gripping, like, at my heart strings or at my stomach, of how I respond to whatever is destroying me or giving me life at the same time.

And I think it'll be untruthful to dismiss those feelings, like, in that moment.

[Narrator] Follow Commissioner on Instagram at @cmxnr, and artist GeoVanna Gonzalez at @Vanna_Juanita.

And finally, we meet a mover and shaker sharing what's happening on the South Florida art scene.

My name is Dainy Tapia.

I'm the founder and curator for ArtSeen365.

ArtSeen365 is basically an, I like to think of it as a online platform, but it's an initiative that I have for going exploring the arts, the visual arts in Miami and South Florida.

Basically, there are exhibitions, shows, talks, workshops happening year-round in Miami and in South Florida.

But especially in Miami, we can have, in any given week, up 'til 10 shows opening in one week.

So in reality, I think Miami is really gearing up to be out there with other big capitals in the arts.

Art Scene 365, we publish on a daily basis the openings or the activities that are happening on the visual arts, trying to help people plan and really know what's going on and then be part of it.

[Narrator] Art Loft is on Instagram at @ArtLoftsfl.

Tag us on your art adventures.

Find full episodes, segments and more at artloftsfl.org and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.

"Art Loft" is brought to you by.

[Announcer] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[Narrator] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.