Nilo Cruz left behind his homeland at nine years old when he boarded a Freedom Flight from Cuba to Miami in 1970. But the island would stay with him as he developed into a playwright. His play Anna in the Tropics was commissioned by the now-defunct New Theatre in Coral Gables. He was the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2003 for the play, but Cruz never forgot where he got his start. For the 20th anniversary of the play last year, Cruz chose to direct the show for the first time himself at Miami New Drama. In March 2024, only a month after he wrote Sed en la Calle del Agua, he and Arca Images staged its premiere at Miami Dade County Auditorium. Talk about commitment! He was also just named by the president of the Carbonell Awards as the 2024 recipient of the prestigious George Abbott Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. Cruz is a national treasure, but lucky for local theater lovers, his roots remain in Miami.

Audiences got up close and personal with famed collectors Don and Mera Rubell's art when Miami New Drama artistic director Michel Hausmann launched his take of a night at the museum with The Museum Plays. He orchestrated six original ten-minute plays by six different playwrights. Each was tied to art in different rooms at the Rubell Museum in Allapattah. Ingenious and inventive, Hausmann had success with an unconventional venue in the past, albeit born out of necessity during the pandemic. He delivered Seven Deadly Sins, short plays by seven writers, in storefronts on Lincoln Road to keep audiences socially distanced. That endeavor made national news. The Museum Plays followed the same format, shuffling five different groups of 30 people throughout the museum at the same time. It was theater worthy of a museum.

GableStage's producing artistic director Bari Newport was hell-bent on bringing The Lehman Trilogy to South Florida for the theater's 2024 season. She wanted it here so badly that she sent a giant cookie to the rights-holders of the play to give them a nudge to accommodate her request. Maybe it was the cookie or her persistence, but it would be only the fifth time that the play — with just three actors telling the story of the Lehman Brothers bankers — would get a staging in the country. It was no small feat. The actors play between 50 and 75 roles in a show clocking in at three hours with two intermissions. Newport still has enormous shoes to fill after taking over GableStage in 2021, following the death of legendary founder and artistic director Joe Adler in 2020. But she's not one to shy away from a challenge. She found a way to create big theater in the company's small home, the historic horse stables of the Biltmore Hotel. While the show may have been about the fall of a dynasty, Newport proved she's queen of the castle.

There's nothing ostentatious about this South Beach music hall, despite the fact that world-famous architect Frank Gehry designed it. Inside is a comfortable 756-seat, in-the-round auditorium. Above the stage are five huge sails that help render pitch-perfect acoustics and allow for dreamy video projections. Comfort rules here — flip-flops and tank tops after the beach won't fly, but the dress code is definitely not opera gowns and tiaras. If you'd rather keep the beachwear, sprawl on a blanket outside for a free broadcast of the live concerts going on inside this classical music landmark.

They keep trying to take the Fillmore away from us. First, COVID-19 robbed us of a year and a half of shows. Then, from mid-2022 to the end of December 2023, the Fillmore was shut down for loading-dock renovations. It reopened in January with killer Elvis Costello and Mitski concerts, only for the Miami Beach City Commission to come and threaten to tear it down! When you walk into the lobby, you get goosebumps. You can just feel its rich and rewarding history. It would be a crime to raze the art deco theater that hosted everyone from Jackie Gleason to Madonna to Slayer. With Sting, Air, and Nicki Nicole on its fall calendar, make sure you enter its vaunted halls at least one more time before deep-pocketed developers actually take the Fillmore down.

In the heart of South Beach, long-running Kill Your Idol offers music fans just enough room to shake their asses while really taking in live acts. The place couldn't be more of a departure from the puddle-deep sensibilities of the touristy environs right outside the club's door. You'll be in fine company at KYI, with life-size statues of Bruce Lee and an astronaut hanging overhead, as well as a crowd that actually cares about the music. Depending on the night, you might hear balls-to-the-wall rock, avant-garde punk, drag-themed karaoke, or heavy, driving bass music. Run by Subculture Group (think Lost Weekend, DADA Delray, and Subculture Coffee), the venue is tight on space, but there's enough energy and devotion in it to fill a club five times its size.

If you've heard it once, you've heard it a million times: the local music scene suffers because local venues can't stay open long enough. But since 2017, this nautical-themed bar on Calle Ocho with specialty craft cocktails has provided local troubadours a soft place to land. Offering a range of live entertainment seven nights a week, you can expect to catch anything from punk to folk to world music. Regardless of the genre, there's something for everyone, like the monthly Stories in Song when local songwriters perform and discuss their craft or that time when Bar Nancy really embraced that upper-class nautical theme with a yacht-rock night.

Medium Cool is a sleek and sexy basement club housed in the Gale South Beach hotel. Every Wednesday through Sunday evening between 7 and 10 p.m., you can find a lively rotation of our city's finest jazz instrumentalists and crooners captivating crowds in this swanky hotspot. The atmosphere, along with the variety of virtuosic talent and diverse programming, make it the best jazz night in town despite some stiff competition. What helps up its cool factor from medium to high is that Medium Cool was recently nominated as one of the top ten best new bars in the country by the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation. So, with a cocktail in hand, under the sparkle of the overhead disco ball, there'll be no question in your mind that heading to Medium Cool was the right call for the night.

There are definitely more upscale options for karaoke in Miami than SevenSeas, but you're unlikely to find a space with more quirk to belt out your favorite '90s alt-rock classics, Spanish ballads, or pop favorites than this dingy dive in the ass-end of La Saguesera. It's loud, and the kitschy, nautical-themed bar has seen better days — but the drinks are cheap and it's one of the few remaining spots in Miami with the kind of neighborhood "regulars" that become bar legends. You can leave for 20 years and come back to hear some of the same crooners, and it's that kind of consistency that makes SevenSeas' karaoke the real deal. Stop in every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 10 p.m., and bring cash.

Founder and chief experience officer of the Miami-based event agency Social Xchange, Alexis Brown is a "curator of cool." After realizing there was a lack of entertainment events in Miami that cater to Black and brown millennial professionals, she launched her company with a monthly happy hour series in Wynwood. She soon expanded with a lineup of parties and activations at locations like Red Rooster and the Urban in Overtown. From Instagram-viral fetes at the Easton Rooftop Pool and Lounge in Fort Lauderdale to her music and mixology Art of Cocktail event, she's elevating the going-out experience. Brown also challenged the status quo during Miami Art Week with her Basel Bae experience dedicated to promoting and lifting up Black art and bucking stereotypes about Black cuisine with the Black Pepper Festival. Brown will continue to pave the way for party innovation and inclusivity.