Young Talent Big Dreams drew hundreds of performers. Meet the 2025 winners
His vehicle to the top of the judges' sheets? 'Dancin' Fool,' an ebullient number from Barry Manilow's 'Copacabana: The Musical.'
An 11-year-old's original composition swept North Beach Elementary fifth-grader Soleil Nation to victory in an individual category.
One group vocal winner of kids ages 9 to 13 sang a song called 'Revolting Children.' The chuckle-inducing title proved anything but.
That tune, performed by children from Doral's SAH Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, comes from 'Matilda the Musical.' But the title of Soleil's winning composition, 'Stepping Stones,' proved a more fitting thematic description of what a cheering audience saw on the Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre stage: Young talented people's stepping stones to success in the arts.
Actors' Playhouse, together with presenting sponsor The Children's Trust, held the finals of the 15th annual Young Talent Big Dreams, a local, free youth talent competition that has scoured Miami-Dade County for young talent every year since 2010.
Young Talent Big Dreams invites students, ages 8 to 18, to compete in nine categories that tap their talents. The competition features six individual categories: pop/rock/rap vocals, Broadway/jazz/classical vocals, dance, musical instrument, original spoken word, and original vocal and/or instrumental composition. There are also three group categories for dance, musical instrument/bands, and vocal groups.
The competition proved that powering through disappointments with pluck, perseverance and poise can pay off.
Nina Marie, 16, has competed for nearly half of her life — seven years — at previous YTBD auditions. She finally seized the spotlight as a winner at the 15th finals showcase. She sparkled on Andra Day's aptly titled 'Rise Up' in the Individual Vocal Pop/Rock/Rap category.
After confetti exploded on stage after Tamerlan's win as the overall best of the night, YTBD's 2024 champ Gerry Ibarra, 17, bounded on stage to congratulate his successor.
A two-month marathon of preliminary and semifinal competitions began in March at the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables. Subsequent auditions were held at the Dennis C. Moss Cultural Arts Center in Cutler Bay, the City of Miami Little Haiti Cultural Complex and Miami Arts Studio 6-12 @ Zelda Glazer in West Miami-Dade.
The rounds drew hundreds of contestants. Prizes include cash awards, master classes with industry professionals, year-round performance opportunities and performing arts scholarships.
'Marking 15 incredible years of Young Talent Big Dreams is both a milestone and a celebration of the extraordinary young artists who have taken our stage,' Barbara Stein, executive producing director of Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre said in a statement. 'Watching these talented performers blossom year after year continues to be one of the most rewarding aspects of our work.'
The champions of the 2025 15th YTBD
▪ Individual Dance and Overall Grand Prize: Tamerlan Guliyev, 14, New World School of the Arts. He receives a $500 cash prize from Actors' Playhouse and four tickets to Universal/Islands of Adventure, courtesy of WSVN 7News.
▪ Original Composition: Soleil Nation, 11, North Beach Elementary School.
▪ Individual Vocal–Broadway/Jazz/Classical: Antonella Laferriere, 14, Divine Savior Academy.
▪ Individual Vocal–Pop/Rock/Rap: Nina Marie, 16, Miami Beach Senior High School.
▪ Individual Original Spoken Word: Nyshelle Burns, 18, Miami Norland Senior High School.
▪ Individual Musical Instrument: Benjamin Baralt, 11, Alexander Montessori School.
▪ Group Vocals: SAH Conservatory of Dramatic Arts. Emmanuel Arcilla, 13, of Downtown Doral Charter School; JJ Calvo, 13, of Doral International Academy of Math and Science; Paulina Gonzalez, 10, of Shelton Academy; Sophia Bovensiepen, 13, of Doral Academy Preparatory School; Ana Paula Mayor, 10, of Pinecrest North Preparatory; and Anna Hurtado, 9, of Academir Charter School East.
▪ Group Dance: Dancing Twins. Caitlynn and Camilah Diaz, both 9, of Caribbean K–8 Center.
▪ Group Musical Instrument/Bands: Sunset Elementary Band. Alexander Borja, 11; William Borja, 9; and Thomas Delecluse, 10, all from Sunset Elementary School; and Ricardo Cloppert, 12, of George Washington Carver Middle School.
Howard Cohen, a staff writer at the Miami Herald for 34 years, who also teaches at the University of Miami School of Communication, has volunteered as a judge for Young Talent Big Dreams at Actors' Playhouse since the competition's inception in 2010.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Robot Tries to Bust Dance Moves, Flames Out in Epic Disaster
Braving the dance floor in broad daylight — or even just when the overhead lights are on — frequently does not end well. Your clumsy moves, weird facial expressions, or catastrophic blunders will likely be captured by someone with their phone out, who will then quickly deliver the footage to potentially millions of eyeballs online. On that note, we now report that a robot has eaten dirt after trying to show off some of some dashing choreography — and seemingly had its soul sucked out of its corporeal form in sheer embarrassment. If androids dream of one day becoming Gene Kelly, this one just had those ambitions shattered. The dance floor tragedy was captured in a video that recently went viral on social media, though its original source is unclear. Thankfully, it's a robot, so we don't have to feel bad for laughing at it — because, reader, you will laugh. Note our doomed reveler's oversized clothes and its wide-brimmed hat. The hat was seemingly the robot's mojo; when it falls off, the robot suddenly stops dancing, takes a few hesitating steps like a dazed cartoon character that got walloped over the dome, and boom: ass meets floor. It can happen to anyone. But then the mechanical humanoid then goes completely haywire and starts flailing like a roach flopped on its belly that's also being electrocuted, freaking everyone out in the process. The onlookers gasp. One kid recoils in terror. And of course, laughter eventually emerges. This was one robot that couldn't take failure. "It's feeling real human pain. Unimaginable pain," wrote one commentator. "He'll have the rest of his life to grapple with this," replied another. "It's hell." The robot appears to be a G1 model built by the Chinese robotics company Unitree. They've become popular little companions, at least as far as $16,000 consumer robots go, and are the subject of a growing wave of humorous stunts filmed for social media. They charm with their diminutive, four-foot stature, and impressively human-like gait, and can be pre-programmed to perform whatever wacky stuff you imagine. Earlier this year, Unitree started playing up the G1's dancing prowess after releasing an update that improved their ability to keep moving — and keep their balance — even when interrupted. This was demonstrated in a video shared by the company in which a human rudely keeps whacking a G1 with a broomstick. Unitree also showed that the bot was capable of whipping out kung fu moves. They may be capably agile, a few momentary interruptions of balance notwithstanding; everyone fails. But clearly, the bots have a long way to go in the composure department: another video that recently went viral showed a Unitree G1 suddenly start thrashing so violently that it causes the crane that it's suspended from to crash to the floor. More on robots: Tesla's Optimus Robots Have Reportedly Run Into Severe Trouble Solve the daily Crossword
Miami Herald
5 days ago
- Miami Herald
Review: ‘Step By Step' at Actors' Playhouse climbs comedic emotional mountains
Three friends take off on a two-day mountain trek in a play that resembles a buddy road trip movie. The reason for their adventure? To travel the same path that their friend Rebeca, who passed away, loved so much. They are there in solidarity and as a tribute. But the climb up is not without its challenges. Not one of them is a seasoned hiker. Each one carries baggage – more emotional than what they have stuffed in their backpacks. In 90 minutes, Monica (Anna Lise Jensen), Sophie (Elizabeth Price) and Paula (Kareema Khouri), will reveal obsessions, fears, and neuroses, ponder the meaning of life and death, their jobs and marriage, and come clean about their feelings for one another. There are variations of Peter Quilter's play 'Step By Step,' now at Actors' Playhouse through Aug. 10, playing throughout the world in different languages. At the Coral Gables theater, this is the U.S. premiere of a version that had its world premiere in Barcelona as 'Paso a Paso' in 2022. It went on to be performed in Norway, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland and toured the Netherlands in 2024. If the U.K. playwright's name doesn't ring a bell, two of his more than a dozen plays will. The most acclaimed was 'End of the Rainbow' a musical drama about the final months of Judy Garland's life, which garnered Renee Zellweger the Oscar for the movie version in 2019. Then there was 'Glorious!' about the world's worst opera singer, Florence Foster Jenkins, which became the subject of a film starring Meryl Streep. Quilter's plays usually deal with women and grief, loss, growing older and have an arc that helps his characters gain a perspective that emboldens them to start anew. 'Step By Step' started as a man's journey called 'The Hill' where Sam, Daniel and Tony join for a climb in a memorial to their friend Gareth. It first opened in Prague in 2020. But during the pandemic, Quilter took 'The Hill' and turned it into a female three hander. Monica, while the daftest of the three, is the most well-rounded character in the comedy and the one that gets the most laughs. Her biggest concern is marrying Graham while her friends – she even does it a few times – keep referring to him as her former love Gary, who ran off with her cousin. Freudian slips abound. It's Monica's final week of freedom before her marriage, something she's hoping the clean mountain air will make her realize that she can 'settle down and stop the endless pursuit of sexual conquest.' She doesn't seem to believe it and she's hardly convincing. Jensen milks the comic lines for all they're worth and a scene where she collapses on a tent that is graffitied with all the men she's had liaisons with inside, like notches on a bedpost, is perfectly over-the-top dramatic. Sophie, the self-proclaimed White Lesbian in the group, can't get over a break-up with her ex. At the opening of the play, she's packed and repacked her backpack. She's neurotic and having what her friend Paula calls one of her 'spectrum' moments to which Sophie replies: 'Everybody's on the spectrum. I'm just on it a little bit extra.' Her neuroses rage in full force when, out of the blue, her fear of clowns haunts her in the middle of the night on the campsite. Price, who's a frequent fixture on South Florida stages, manages Sophie with just enough anxiety and compulsion to not have her become an overbearing neurotic caricature. Khouri, who was so enthralling in Actors' Playhouse's 'Caroline or Change' last season, stretches her comic chops here as Paula. When she realizes they've just hiked up one side of a mountain while a café and car on the other side could have produced the result just as easily, it's one of the most well-crafted comical deliveries in the show. Unfortunately, the author saddles the character with a joke about two prostitutes that seems left over from his man-comedy 'The Hill' but Khouri tackles the challenge with gusto and moves on. While the 90-minute, no intermission format is enough time for the actual journey, what it doesn't allow for is a backstory. It's unclear how the trio met although there is a brief mention of becoming friends in college, How their friendship has endured is never explored. The loss of Rebeca isn't written in depth enough to anchor the theme of the play. The author suggests music choices while Actors' Playhouse's production tosses in some of their own in between scenes– the requisite 'You've Got a Friend in Me' and 'Get By With A Little Help From My Friends,' and the addition of an arrangement of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah.' These breaks add to director David Arisco's smart pacing of the show along with his attention to the emotional rollercoaster he's made sure the ensemble conveys. The trio excels as an ensemble all the while defining their individual characters. Brandon M. Newton's set is serviceable with different ramps for the actors to ascend and descend depending on entrances and exits. But the unrealistic depiction of a mountain trail creates a dissonance for the suspension of disbelief that we are accompanying these characters on a real journey. The back screen provides more reality with projections of the sky and clouds and nighttime scenes. Also having scene changes by stagehands, which could have easily been performed by the actors, contributes to the interruption of a seamless flow of buying into the reality. Eric Nelson's lighting is bright in all the right places and dark in others and ensures the audience can see what's happening on stage. His use of warm lighting reflects the comfort and closeness of the characters and the reason for their journey. Where it could have helped, especially since the stage setting conflicts with the reality, was to be stronger in its indication of time of day – early sunrise, mid-afternoon, dusk. Reidar Sorensen's sound design produced the natural woodsy occurrences – birds and nature ambience. Sam Sigler was responsible for set dressing and props design, the graffitied tent and other camping utensils. Ellis Tillman's costumes helped define each character: Monica's Lulelemon-esque form-fitting ensemble, Sophie's sensible and meant-for-hiking boots, and Paula's heavy on comfort choices. Like s'mores at a campfire, 'Step By Step' is a satisfying treat with indulgent, messy characters and something a little sweet for the inevitable end to summer. If you go: WHAT: U.S. premiere of 'Step By Step' by Peter Quilter WHERE: Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday; Matinees, 2 p.m., Wednesday, 3 p.m. Sunday through Aug. 10. Check website for pre-show specials. COST: $50, $60, and $70, weekdays; $65, $75 and $85, weekends. INFORMATION: 305-444-9293 or is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don't miss a story at
Chicago Tribune
5 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Girls & Boys' by Griffin Theatre is a devastating solo memory play
As I walked out of Griffin Theatre's extraordinary production of 'Girls & Boys,' in that dazed state that sets in after a show really messes with your head, two thoughts immediately ran through my mind. First: Cynthia Marker just gave a hell of a solo performance — one of the best I've seen in a long time. Second: how on earth am I going to convey the impact of this play without spoiling too much of the plot? I'll give the latter my best attempt. In this one-woman play, British writer Dennis Kelly (a Tony Award winner for the book of 'Matilda the Musical') manages a tricky balancing act, tackling an extremely dark subject in almost surgical detail while softening its harshest blows for the audience and maintaining some sense of hope in humanity. Oh, and the show is also hilarious. Griffin's Midwest premiere of this 2018 play is directed by Robin Witt, who excels at the helm of intimate dramas, as recently demonstrated by the moving two-handers 'A Case for the Existence of God' and 'A Slow Air' at Steep Theatre. Her knack for shaping exquisitely paced, quietly devastating emotional arcs works equally well in 'Girls & Boys.' With a skilled writer and a sensitive director in her corner, Marker holds the audience in rapt attention for 100 minutes straight in the role of the unnamed narrator, a quick-witted, irreverent Londoner from a working-class background. She launches her opening monologue with a bit worthy of a stand-up comedy set, recalling how she first met her future husband while waiting to board a JetBlue flight in Naples, Italy. As he sarcastically dashes the hopes of two gorgeous models trying to flirt their way ahead in the tense queue, this previously unremarkable man starts looking like a Greek god to our narrator. The attraction proves to be mutual, and Marker's character rhapsodizes about their passionate physicality and seemingly perfect compatibility in the early stages of their relationship. Suddenly, a sound cue and a shift from white to blue lighting indicate a leap in time, and this woman begins to relive a mundane interaction with her two young children, Leanne and Danny, while speaking to thin air and miming her motherly motions. Although we don't initially understand the purpose of this disorienting scene, in which the narrator no longer addresses the audience but instead seems wrapped up in her own memories, it does begin to make sense of the striking scenic design by Sotirios Livaditis. The set's ground level consists of a simple couch, throw rug, end tables and lamps in grays and off-whites — an ensemble that is mirrored by blue furniture suspended from the ceiling and strewn with children's toys and two stuffed animals. The overhead set pieces light up during the blue-tinged memory sequences, with lighting designer Brandon Wardell and sound designer Thomas Dixon working in tandem with Livaditis to toggle back and forth in time as the play inches toward revealing how the narrator's own life was turned upside down. When the action flips back to the brightly lit, right-side-up look, Marker's character recounts how her husband, a successful entrepreneur, cheered her on as she pursued a new career in documentary filmmaking. In another comedic moment, she tells the story of her first job interview in the industry, which pitted her against a horde of posh young people who could afford to pad their resumes with unpaid work experience. But with a combination of grit and humor, she gets her foot in the door and works her way up. A happy marriage, a fulfilling job and soon, a growing family — her adult life seems off to a promising start. Of course, that's not where the story ends. I won't reveal more here, but the script drops enough hints of the horrors to come that when the crisis finally arrives, the narrator acknowledges that the audience probably knows where it's going. Then, she gives the gentlest, most generous trigger warning imaginable. When the story gets difficult, she tells us, remember two things: this did not happen to you, and it is not happening now. But in this fictional world, the unspeakable did happen to her, and the narrator's reflections on violence, grief and memory are both poignant and profound. Marker never succumbs to a full breakdown in the telling, and her character has had years to process the trauma, but her pain is no less palpable for this restraint. It's a performance that will haunt me for some time, I suspect. Don't miss 'Girls & Boys' (4 stars) When: Through Aug. 16 Where: Griffin Theatre at the Bramble Arts Loft, 5545 N. Clark St. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes Tickets: $30-$43 at
