Daily Loaf

Christopher Rutherford and Glenn Gover deserving a great audience

Why does one come to the theater if one does not want to watch the play? Case in point: The Woman in Black sold out performance last night. I directed the show and have been to just about every performance, so I tend to watch the audience as well as the play.  It is a thriller with many technical aspects that all need to be spot-on every night, so I watch how it is all played out and how it is all received by the audience.  So, Sunday night being a sold out show, I lingered on the sidelines so that those who paid for a ticket got a seat. I had the perfect view and it was the perfect audience. Almost.

Perhaps I should explain “perfect audience.”  Have you ever been an observer of art with a whole room full of strangers with whom you collectively took the journey with the artist — as one?  Ever been at a performance where you needed to see that exact thing at that exact time in your life?  Ever been inspired collectively with the person sitting next to you, without talking to each other?  It is not a type of audience, per se, but rather the right combination for the particular experience at hand.

Conversely, as a performer or fellow audience member sitting in your vicinity, if you’ve had a bad day at work and can’t shake it off, we feel it.  If you had too much to drink at happy hour before you got to the theater, we feel it.  If you are waiting for that voice mail or text message and want intermission to get here so you can check it, we feel it.  Or, in the case of last night’s performance, if you did not come to the theater to watch a play, we feel it.

Sunday’s play was 98 percent the perfect audience.  Read the rest of this entry »

Last December, just a few months into Jobsite’s 10th anniversary season, I wrote this blog for Creative Loafing about lessons learned trying to run a theater for an entire decade.

We’re now just a few days away from the end of this 10th season, and I’ve had time for further reflection.

Left to right: Amy Gray, Chris Perez, Ami Sallee Corley, Spencer Meyers, Katie Castonguay, Stephen Ray and Jason Vaughan Evans in "Pericles." Photo by Brian Smallheer.

We finish the final show of our season, a rousing and hilarious punk rock mob reimagining of the Pericles story, with a video tribute to 10 awesome years in Tampa Bay.  From the genesis of the company, represented by a photo of five awkward and rebellious 20-somethings on the loading dock of USF’s Theater I, cycling through all of our productions and major milestones, to a staged promotional shot of our dead-sexy board in one of the Carol Morsani Hall dressing rooms, photographed by Steve Widoff.

It moves me every night.  Oh, yeah, I’ve watched every single performance of Pericles — from lights up to lights down — something I’ve never done before. Read the rest of this entry »

As a freelance artist I find myself in a lull of productivity sometimes.  In the springtime I tend to do a lot of administrative work for the Access Arts Scholarship program for the Patel Conservatory, so my artistic side isn’t being shopped out to other companies as much (i.e. I don’t audition for shows during that time.)

In these times I always think I am going to dust off that script of the one-woman show I’ve always wanted to work on.  Problem is, when you do a one-person project it seems like you have to do all the work for yourself; be your own motivator, be responsible to only yourself.  It’s hard to pull through on the deliverables when it is only you that you have to answer to.

Well, local actor Curtis Belz found the gumption, self-motivation, and two friends (eventually more), to pull off Danny Hoch’s (pictured) Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop, a one-man show demanding that he play several personas, including Flip, a good ol’ boy from the Midwest who has come to identify with urban hip-hoppers; Bronx, a sidewalk vendor who gets pinched for selling without a license; and Sam, a prison guard with an anger management problem — evidenced by his beating a prisoner nearly to death. The show is playing tonight as Jobsite’s latest Job-side project. This is the second of two preview performances before its full incarnation in September at HCC Ybor. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Actor/director/teacher/playwright Ami Sallee Corley (right) continues her series of posts about the challenges of being a freelance artist in Tampa Bay. This week’s topic: Auditions.

One of the major factors in being a successful freelance actor is getting work, right?  Well ask any actor in the Bay area how to find out when auditions are happening and you’ll get as many answers as people you ask.

There is no one-stop shopping spot where people list auditions.  If there is, it has got to be Tampa’s best-kept secret.  Raise your hand if you knew that Jobsite just held their 2009-2010 season auditions last week and that American Stage held their auditions over a month ago?  Most other theaters are participating in the Tampa Area Unified Auditions next weekend, hosted by HCC Ybor. Read the rest of this entry »

Watch out everybody, Bridget’s unleashed for the summer!

Well, you know, that really is an overstatement ‘cos I’m not much of a late night gal, but the Gorilla Theatre is dark for the summer (which means we don’t have any shows going on and I’m working “normal” hours) so it’s time for me to get out more and …. to see theatre in other places.  This week I went to an All Out Rep show at the Ritz, I visited Arts on 9th, and went to the 5th Annual Night of Alternative Theatre at American Stage in St. Pete.

Oh, and I welcome all your comments on this blog (like “stop writing about yourself already” or “what’s with the strange European punctuation?”) so please chip in, loveys! Read the rest of this entry »

I had the pleasure of attending the “Theatre 620: Sweets and Shorts” fundraiser Monday night at the gorgeous new American Stage site on 3rd Ave. N. in St. Petersburg. Over 100 people showed up for this Studio@620 event, drank and ate to the accompaniment of Paul Wilborn on piano and Eugenie Bondurant on vocals. I had a good talk with actor Eric Davis about his search for a permanent space for the freeFall Theatre Company, and I was happy to chat with St. Pete poet laureate and CL columnist Peter Meinke and his artist wife Jeanne. Serving drinks was American Stage jack-of-all-trades Andy Orrell, and moving graciously from guest to guest was Studio artistic director and co-founder Bob Devin Jones. After a half hour, we all moved in to the theater proper, where 12 acts presented — among other things — excerpts from Lane DeGregory’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story “The Girl in the Window,” presented in Living Newspaper style, and scenes from Bill Maxwell and Beverly Coyle’s play Parallel Lives and Mark Medoff’s The Same Life Over. Artistic director Jones introduced the readings and dramatizations, and actors included Jones himself, Sharon Scott, Bonnie Agan, Robin O’Dell and Wilborn. Poet Enid Shomer read from her own work, and guitarist Nick White accompanied it all with lovely acoustic music. A quick overview of the audience reminded me of how much good Jones has brought to area arts with his Studio, and how willing the Bay area is to welcome new theaters. It was a delightful evening: and it suggests once again that Tampa/St.Pete has huge potential for growth in the arts.

Gorilla's Aubrey Hampton with four of this year's Young Dramatists.

The Tampa Bay area needs more playwrights. In the region of West Central Florida there are only 41 members of the Dramatists Guild — the national playwrights’ professional association — and of those 41, fewer than ten were sufficiently interested to come to Guild meetings in St. Pete last March, April and May. Where are the playwrights? Biding their time?

Maybe Gorilla Theatre can help. For the ninth year, this organization is hosting the Young Dramatists’ Project, a festival devoted to the best writing of local high school and middle school students. I attended last Sunday not to review the show, but to discover what our youngest playwrights might have to offer the area. Is there imaginative, innovative work coming from these teens? Might they eventually infuse the region with new talent?

Yes and yes. The first of the five plays that made it to the Gorilla stage this year uses instant messaging to tell us the story of a doomed love affair. Amanda Buck’s Sweet Nothings is about XXX2593 (Jamaica Reddick) and YYY4168 (Adom McRae), schoolmates who become sweethearts after she shows up as new girl at his high school. Buck has us watching on a large screen as the two lovers write each other over a period of months, and intersperses their writing with glimpses of their daily lives. Directed by David O’Hara, the play graphically demonstrates that even the most digital behavior can ingeniously be made theatrical. And even in the era of IM, love is still maddening.

Next on the lineup is Sam French’s This One Night in the Warehouse, a Pinteresque mindgame which sees two men (Chris Jackson and Curtis Belz) thrown into a locked room containing a gun with one bullet. Read the rest of this entry »

models wait to go onstage at IADT's annual fashion show

I hadn’t seen daylight since about 1 p.m., yesterday. From then on I was the backstage photographer for the International Academy of Design and Technology’s annual student fashion show.

This year’s fashion show was titled Imagine, at the A La Carte Pavilion in Tampa.  I hardly saw the runway, instead I was in the back hallway, lined with rows of costumes, ranging from sea creatures, to bikini brides, and goth couture.  At any moment, depending on which way I turned the atmosphere could be chill, frantic or anywhere in between.

See more photos after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Daisey (right) has struck a nerve in regional theaters across the country with his monologue How Theater Failed America, now playing at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan. Depending on your perspective, Failed is either: 1) a necessary corrective to an increasingly corporate theater system that fails to support individual artists; or 2) a self-centered diatribe that ignores the realities of running a professional not-for-profit theater company.

Todd Olson, the producing artistic director of American Stage in St. Petersburg, lands decidedly in the latter camp, and he told Daisey so — in an email Daisey reproduced, and responded to, on his blog.

One theater blogger summed up the exchange this way: “Mike Daisey has been challenged to a cage match by Todd Olson, AD of the American Stage Theatre Company in Tampa FL [sic]. Olson says: balance my budget, wretched actor miscreant; Daisey says: bring it.”

Well, yesterday came round two. Olson wrote back and Daisey printed that email, too, responding to it point by point.

The theatrical blogosphere is abuzz. Read the rest of this entry »

The sexier technical parts of this show – a cute girl covered in gore wielding two handguns, a blood-soaked guy clutching a dead cat prop, the gunfights, the special effects rigs that shoot blood at a rate of 80psi – have been chronicled here, on the Jobsite blog and in a feature story in the St. Pete Times.

Still, there are loads of hours spent every night on making all the behind-the-scenes preparations and even more hours spent cleaning and resetting everything after the show. This work is not so much magic as it is just plain ol’ elbow grease.

I may be in the directors chair, but with so much to do and such a solid tech crew taking care of things, I recognize how little I know about how some things work or the time that goes into making it happen nightly.  I’m around, but usually just feel in the way during setup and breakdown.  So, I decided to ask everyone just exactly how their night goes whenever they come to the theater. They’re surely not getting paid enough for all of this, the least they can get is proper credit.

If you see the show, the first thing you’ll notice afterwards is the stage manager (Jaime Giangrande-Holcom) and the two ASMs (David Valdez and Katie Grey) scurry out with buckets of warm water, mops, giant squeegees and lots and lots of rags as the audience is still exiting the theater. Time is of the essence – every minute that blood sits out, the harder it gets to clean.  Large plastic bags are brought out and maimed bodies are loaded up into them like a really weird crime scene. The set starts getting scrubbed from top to bottom and all the blood is eventually worked down into a trough, and then from trough into a bucket, where it’s then disposed.  Bits of ‘entrails’ and spent shell casings are picked out as they go for recycling or reusing. As the water activates the baby detergent in the blood (primarily Karo syrup with chocolate syrup, food coloring and Chris Holcom’s “secret ingredient”) the whole theater starts to get an odd sorta-sweet, sorta-nursery smell to it. “Smells like chocolate baby,” so says Katie. Read the rest of this entry »

So I have been mad crazy busy these past few weeks with the final touches to The Agreeable Husband. I say final touches, but this is just the beginning.  We are polishing up for our premiere performance tonight at the 7th Annual Ybor Festival of the Moving Image It’s a one-night-only deal, we are one of the mainstage performances (And, btw, none of this would have been possible without the incredible support that David Audet has extended to us through the Festival). It will be our first full performance in front of an audience.  Following the premiere, we workshop the piece for a few weeks – sort of a back to the drawing board treatment based on how the audience received it as well as filling in the new elements that were too complicated to add to try for right out the door.  After that we will be appearing during the summer and fall at various stages in the Bay Area and around Florida.  Each for probably a weekend run, then more working it then more performances in another space – you get the idea.  I have never worked on a project of this size quite like this, to have the opportunity to toss a piece in front of an audience and then have the opportunity to adapt before it gets seen again. Read the rest of this entry »

I was recently contacted by Underground Xpress, a local Tampa underground video program that covers local music, local bands and other local talents. The creative epicenter and host, Lady Grace, agreed to an interview about Underground Xpress.

How and when did UX start?
I took up videography in July of 2008 and wanted to start an internet video podcast as a learning project. Music immediately came to mind as the main concept because I have spent the majority of my life supporting the local music scene. I wanted to stick with something that I love but I also didn’t want to limit the focus to just music. The words Underground Xpress came to mind because I knew that I would want to cover more than just music and support all sorts of underground arts.

Now I had the idea, the name and I knew how to do the video podcast. Now all I needed to know was whether or not I could pull the whole together. Host it, film it, edit it and so on, when I was really only just learning everything for the first time. So…I got a video camera and a friend and I went to a concert that night to film it and interview the band. I guess we needed to see what we were made of. That night we interviewed and videotaped our first band. and as they say…. The rest is history. Now UX is on public access and the internet and it is becoming the newest source for Underground artists to be supported and promoted locally and nationally on the world wide web.

What inspired you to start Underground Xpress? Read the rest of this entry »

We at Jobsite Theater have been collecting quotes sent to us via email or Twitter or what-have-you since Wednesdays preview production.  We’ve also culled a few soundbites from bloggers who’ve attended over this opening weekend.

The best quote though came from a bartender friend who saw the show Sunday afternoon who sent a text message late last night, as my wife and I sat on the couch watching a DVRed episode of The Dog Whisperer.

i loved your show more than pussy

Wow.  Immediately I asked the girl to text him back and ask if I could use it.  He didn’t have a problem with it (It was Jeff Diamond, New World Brewery). Thinking later on it, I REALLY wanted to use the quote but wondered if I could really get away with it officially in our online materials.  That quote actually screams to go into a print ad, which I know no paper would run (well, CL might …). Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Leib

In a move that could significantly enhance the visibility of Tampa Bay area playwrights, a group of writers met Tuesday night at St. Petersburg’s Studio@620 with a representative of the nationally based Dramatists Guild as well as representatives from Tampa’s Stageworks and Sarasota’s Florida Studio Theatre. The meeting was organized by Bradenton playwright Jack Gilhooley and was limited to members of the Guild in the area from Clearwater south to Venice.

Ten persons, including several whose work has been produced in New York and locally,  talked with DG representative Rob Anderson of Orlando about starting a website, organizing play readings, publicizing local playwrights and stimulating local theaters to be more accepting of locally produced work. Following a welcome from the Studio’s artistic director, Bob Devin Jones, the playwrights spoke of the difficulty of getting produced locally and expressed a desire to emulate Miami-area DG members who have recently had success in making themselves more prominent.

A common theme in the discussion was the seeming refusal of local theaters, from St. Pete’s American Stage to Sarasota’s Asolo Rep, to promote and produce the work of their areas’ writers. Read the rest of this entry »

As a director and producer, I’m not typically easily rattled.

Jobsite Theater tends to pick material that we’re confident we can do well and that will still push us, our artists and our audience just enough to make it all worthwhile.  As a director I really only go for work that speaks to me on some internal level.  It doesn’t have to be all deep and shit, or something that has to change the world, but I certainly have my sensibilities and predilections. As a producer I’m a bit more conservative.
Every so often, though, a play comes along that everyone can see from a mile away will be a sick challenge, but one that would pay such dividends if it was pulled off well.  As a working collective, sometimes the intense discussion will in the end push us away from such work, or at a minimum hold us off for a year or so until we’re perhaps better prepared to handle it.

Kari Goetz caught this on her iPhone in rehearsal

Right now we are very literally knee-deep in one of those shows that sparked a lot of debate within the company – The Lieutenant of Inishmore.  It thrills me endlessly and makes me wanna poop my pants a little all at the same time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bechir Sylvain, the picture says it all.

Last fall I had the incredible opportunity to work intimately on stage with Bechir Sylvain in Six Degrees of Separation.  I post his head shot because not only does it paint him as this irresistible yet down-to-earth-and-all-around-lovable, sincere guy.  It is also an accurate depiction of the actor who has claimed Tampa as his temporary home since the beginning of November.

When Bechir was offered the role of Mister at American Stage’s King Hedley II it seemed as though he might be our neighbor indefinitely. But, alas, his time in Tampa ends this weekend, and I wanted the Daily Loaf readers to know about this gem of an artist who has graced our stages and our local establishments for the last four months. Read the rest of this entry »

Susan Hussey with her husband, Aubrey Hampton.

I’ve just found out that Susan Hussey, co-artistic director of Gorilla Theatre, has succumbed to cancer after a brave struggle. Susan was a playwright as well as a producer, and her work confronted issues of social and national significance. She was also one of the kindest persons in the theater, here or anywhere. I never heard her say a negative word about anyone – not another theater person, another writer or critic – and she brought dignity to every project she participated in.

Creative Loafing sends its warmest condolences to her husband Aubrey Hampton and to their son Trevor. Susan was a unique personality. Her gentleness, her thoughtfulness and her talent will be sorely missed.

Marion Baldeon and Casey Hicks in The Agreeable Husband (Photo: Alex Catalano)

One of my goals when I took the leap last February and became a freelance artist was not only to have more time to commit to Jobsite, but also to collaborate with the artists I’ve met in the Tampa Bay area on original projects.  This not only ensures more work for artists in our community, but it raises a consciousness for Tampa-grown art.  The first to come to a fully realized production is The Agreeable Husband, a dance-theater piece based on Amy Vanderbilt’s “Complete Book of Etiquette”, a how-to book for husbands and wives published in 1952.  We need the community to help us with the next layer of the project, set to open this April.

I am conducting interviews with mothers, fathers and children who grew up with this book and its ideals.  If you or someone you know fits this description, we’d love to have your perspective in this project.  Please e-mail AgreeableHusband@gmail.com.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amanda Roa and Tina Tidwell of Mosaic Dance

This past weekend the Mosaic Dance concert hit the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, performing on stage in the TECO Theater.  I had a chance to talk with Co-Artistic Directors, Ashley Evans Hilton and Tina Tidwell, as well as two of their featured dancers, Claire Elbrink and Amanda Roa.  About halfway through composing my notes for writing this entry, I felt like I was experiencing deja vu.  Read the rest of this entry »

The highest-attended play in American Stage history.

There’s a lot being made about the state of professional theater in America these days.  You see theater closings almost daily, arts organization bailout packages are a hot topic, calls are being made for President Obama to create a Secretary of the Arts, layoffs are ubiquitous and now even the Kennedy Center is pitching in to provide support for arts organizations that may not make it another year.

Our industry is by no means recession-proof, and one that appears to be in as much trouble as the rest of the country. Yet, somehow, most of the professional theaters in the Tampa Bay area seem to be amidst their best seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, John Fleming’s article accusing me of a conflict of interest was published in the St. Pete Times. I’ve already responded to these charges in earlier blogs. But Sunday’s article upped the ante: John said that because my review of Tommy J and Sally came out in Creative Loafing a week before my review of Jobsite Theater’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, I could be suspected of showing favoritism to the Studio at the expense of Jobsite. This is nonsense. The fact is that Tommy J was only running for two weekends while Picasso was running for three, and therefore I had to get the Studio review published first if I were to review the show at all. Reason: For over a decade, Creative Loafing’s policy has been only to publish reviews of shows that are still running when the review comes out. If I’d waited a week, the show would have closed before my review appeared — meaning no review at all. I was aware that Studio artistic director Bob Devin Jones had worked closely with author Mark Medoff on the play in the Washington D.C. area, and that Medoff was coming to St. Petersburg for the premiere. The production sounded important and I didn’t want to miss a chance to weigh in on it. So I reviewed it first, and the next week reviewed the Jobsite show.

But as long as John Fleming has put my treatment of the Studio out there as possible evidence of favoritism, let’s look at the two plays that premiered there before Tommy J . In early December, the Studio offered Circumference of a Squirrel — and I gave 90 percent of my column that week (Dec. 10-17) to Six Degrees of Separation at Gorillla Theatre, and a total of one paragraph at the end of the column to Circumference. Is this favoritism? The Studio show before that one was Terrible Jim Fitch (November 6-7). But because that was only running for one weekend, I didn’t review it, preview it, or even mention it in my column at all. Is that favoritism? I only wish that John, in his phone conversation with me about the article he was contemplating, had asked me about the Tommy J review. Then he might have refrained from suggesting, to all the thousands of SPTimes readers that my integrity had been compromised. I’ve been theater critic for Creative Loafing for more than ten years, and this is the first time that anyone has suggested that my opinions have been influenced by any sort of favoritism for any sort of reason. I don’t like it and I’m not going to sit back quietly while it happens.

[Editor's Note: Ami Sallee Corley is an actor, a teacher and now a blogger for CL. (That's Ami in the photo with Drew DeCaro, Bechir Sylvain and Petrus
Antonius, fellow members of the cast of Gorilla Theatre's recent Six Degrees of Separation.) I'm pleased to have her join the conversation, which she begins with a particularly cogent question for area artists.]

In a city where an artist’s choice is to   survive on crumbs or leave, why would anyone want to stay and starve as an artist in Tampa?

I believe there are some pretty fantastic reasons out there.

If we are to build a thriving, sustainable arts and culture scene here in Tampa, we should at first focus on what makes it tempting to stay.  Here goes. Read the rest of this entry »

As mentioned in an earlier post, the St. Pete Times’ John Fleming has raised conflict-of-interest questions re Creative Loafing’s theater critic, Mark E. Leib, who has reviewed shows at theaters where he either has or will have readings or productions of his plays. In making his argument, Fleming allowed that it wasn’t unheard of for critics to also be playwrights, and mentioned Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold, who is also a playwright and translator, as a prominent example.

I know Michael, so I emailed him to get his take on the issue. Interestingly enough, he also knows Mark: he was the dramaturg for a production of one of Mark’s plays when it was staged at ART in Cambridge, MA. While Michael was happy to hear of another writer following the “classic dual path” of theater critic/playwright, he acknowledged there are pitfalls. Here’s what he said: Read the rest of this entry »

As discussed earlier on the Daily Loaf, St. Petersburg Times performing arts critic John Fleming recently questioned Creative Loafing theater critic Mark E. Leib about a possible conflict of interest in Leib’s relationship with two theaters. Now Fleming has published his criticisms in the Times.

Here’s the situation:  Gorilla Theatre recently hosted a staged reading of Leib’s new play, A River in the Desert, and this spring the Studio@620 will stage Leib’s Art People. Fleming, backed up by the ethics chair of the American Theatre Critics Association (Lawrence Bommer, a Chicago critic/playwright who has written reviews for CL sister paper the Chicago Reader), points out that because Leib reviews plays at both Gorilla and 620, having his own plays produced at these venues gives the appearance of a conflict of interest.

There are valid questions to be asked here, and Mark answered them on the Daily Loaf, generating a debate in the comments section between past and present CL staffers. But the Times article tries to pump up the controversy further with a question I find bogus: Read the rest of this entry »

So now we’re less than a week away from the staged reading of my play A RIVER IN THE DESERT at Gorilla Theatre and I get an e-mail from John Fleming, arts critic for the St. Petersburg Times. What he wants to know is, isn’t it a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of such a conflict, for me to have a reading at a theater that I also review? And further, isn’t this also the case with the full production of my play ART PEOPLE at The Studio at 620 later in the spring? Am I perhaps being unethical? Please comment. I call him immediately and leave a message on his voice mail. Then, this morning, he calls me at home and asks for a response. I tell him this: During the ten years that I’ve been theater critic for Creative Loafing, I’ve made it a policy never to ask a local theater to produce one of my plays. I’ve always felt that that would be putting an intolerable pressure on the theater’s artistic director, who might worry that I would review his theater’s work negatively if he/she didn’t produce my work. But last year, Bob Devin Jones of The Studio@620 asked me to be one of the writers interviewed in the Studio’s writers series. Read the rest of this entry »

A rare opportunity for Tampa Bay area playwrights to work with a nationally acclaimed dramatist will occur this Saturday at The Studio at 620 in St. Petersburg. Playwright Mark Medoff, celebrated for When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder and Children of a Lesser God, will be in town for the premiere of Tommy J and Sally (at the Studio), and he’s agreed to run a free workshop there from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday the 10th of January. There’ll even be food. For more information, call the Studio at 727-895-6620.  Tommy J and Sally runs Jan. 8-10 and 15-18.

With only two weeks before the staged reading of my play A River in the Desert at Gorilla Theatre, we’ve had to make some quick personnel shifts. First Michael O. Smith, who’d agreed to play one of the two leads, had to pull out because he had too many other commitments. We asked another fine actor, Bob Heitman, to take the role and he graciously accepted. Then Chris Rutherford, who had agreed to play the other lead, also had to drop out because of prior engagements, including one that occurred on the same night as the reading. We’re still in the process of finding another actor. Now I should say that these sorts of problems are not at all unusual in the theater. In the years that I’ve been writing plays I’ve seen a lead actress break her foot the night before opening, a hired press agent fail to bring any press to a NY show, a director tell actors that he “couldn’t put his finger on” the problems that were leading these actors literally to beg for help, and several other sorts of mishaps too distressing to recount. And I’ve learned that I just have to accept them and move forward as quickly and confidently as possible. I have faith that River’s director, Jim Rayfield, will work swiftly to solve whatever problems come up, and I’m willing to provide any help when needed. Hopefully, when the reading premieres January 15, we’ll have the right cast and a sharp audience. Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to being Creative Loafing’s theater critic, I’m also a playwright (my first professional U.S. production was in 1980 at the American Repertory Theatre), and I’m about to embark on one of those experiences that makes playwriting so pleasing and nerve-wracking at the same time: an early exposure of a new play to an actual audience. In future posts, I’ll talk about the rehearsal process and the play itself, what drove me to write it and what sort of response it provokes. For the moment, I’ll talk about the chapter of the adventure I’ve just completed: the NY reading-that-wasn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

Jobsite Theater officially turned 10 years old last month, which we celebrated with Jobsite’s Rockin’ 10^th Birthday Party at New World Brewery.

The anniversary got me thinking.

At the very beginning, this company was an experiment I was willing to go along with for a year. Considering my initial move back to Tampa was supposed to be to get my head straight after too many years of continuous schooling, it didn’t seem such a heavy commitment. The end of that year saw Jobsite having its greatest success to date in our original mounting of The History of the Devil, it saw the door fly wide open for us to work regularly at TBPAC, donors and sponsors started falling into place and on a personal front I’d begun a relationship with a pretty cool chick who actually put up with me and wasn’t batshit crazy.

It’s been year to year since. How are we doing? Still moving forward? Am I settling? The end of the year analysis has always pointed to things being in good, if not always magically fantastic, shape.

I still consider myself lucky to be here at all, a blue-collar kid from Jacksonville whose cultural upbringing consisted of funny car races, fish fries and turkey shoots. Honored that this thing has become something durable, dependable and necessary. Blessed to have so many people on both sides of the curtain who care enough to give, collaborate and make time to spend with us.

So – what have I learned in 10 years? Let me see if I can make a list. 10 for 10.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was resistant at first. “Listen to My Heart,” the musical revue based on the songs of David Friedman now at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, flirts dangerously with sugar shock, starting with the composer’s bio. Friedman, a Broadway and film conductor known for producing the CDs of the late, much-beloved cabaret singer Nancy Lamott, describes his oeuvre as  “…songs of inspiration, love and hope that take on new emotional meaning in these challenging times.” Sure enough, when fiercely happy-faced singers exhort the audience to “Open Your Eyes to Love” because “Help Is On the Way,” the revue threatens to shift from uplift to “Up with People.” And early on, when the company surrounds Friedman at the piano, lovingly touching his shoulders and singing to him as much as to the audience, you might be forgiven for assuming the show could have been subtitled All About Dave.
But as directed by Rick Criswell and Karla Hartley, Listen to My Heart moves beyond just a celebration of one man’s inner voices to become a showcase for five terrific singer/actors, including three of the best female musical theater performers in the Bay area. Heather Krueger brings a heartbreaking delicacy to “You’ll Always Be My Baby” about a mother and daughter. Alison Burns’ lyrical precision locates both the yearning and the irony in “Nothing In Common.” And the second act opens with a triple whammy: a wrenching performance of “Catch Me” by John Sawyer, followed by Fred Ross’ tender “I Can Hold You” and Nadeen Holloway’s rip-roaring “My Simple Wish.”  (Her simple wish? To be “rich, famous & powerful!”) Despair, redemption, greed — it’s the national mood, wrapped up in one haunting, then hilarious package. In fact, you could almost say these songs “take on new emotional meaning in these challenging times.”
You can still see the show tonight (Saturday Dec. 6) at 7:30 p.m. or tomorrow (Sunday Dec. 7) at 4 p.m. in TBPAC’s TECO Theatre. Stay for the post-show discussion and tell Friedman and company how you liked it; Listen to My Heart has been workshopped before, but Friedman told Friday’s audience that this cast is his favorite so far, and there’s talk of restaging the production someday in TBPAC’s Jaeb Theatre.

A late-night run of The Vagina Monologues as a boost for a theater facing hard times? Doesn’t sound likely, especially in Tampa Bay, but that’s what happened at American Stage. The company staged the Eve Ensler play as part of its After Hours series; according to Artistic Director Todd Olson, almost 1,600 people came to see the show, each paying an average of $10 per ticket (the series is pay-what-you-can). On three nights, there were so many would-be spectators, people had to be turned away, and on average the show brought in 65 audience members per performance. Local celebrities took turns as guest monologists throughout the run, among them CL Publisher Sharry Smith and Events Editor Leilani Polk.
“We knew going into this year that we had to have our main asset, which is our stage, work for us more if we were going to counter all of these cuts that we were getting from various places. And that’s how the After Hours series was born, out of necessity,” Olson told me… Read the rest of this entry »

Top Bay area actor Brian Shea is going to be back on the boards after a year-and-a-half hiatus. Shea, who has three times won CL’s Best of the Bay award will be appearing in The Santaland Diaries, After Hours at American Stage. The show will run December 2 – 28, with showtimes at 10:30 p.m. Tuesdays to Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays. Shea hasn’t been on stage since October 2007, when he had a small part in American Stage’s Othello. Congratulations to American Stage artistic director Todd Olson for rescuing one of the area’s finest actors from an undeserved oblivion.

And here’s word on the new theater season about to begin at Bob Devin Jones’ Studio@620. (The Wild Party, which played at the Studio a few weeks ago, was a freeFall, not a Studio production.) First play on the schedule (Nov. 6-7) is James Leo Herlihy’s Terrible Jim Fitch, about a violent small-time crook who tries to explain himself to the girl hustler he’s just brutalized. Appearing in the play are Tom Stovall and Hersha Parady.  Then (Dec. 4-14) the Studio offers John Walch’s Circumference of a Squirrel, performed by Gavin Hawk. The one-man show is about Chester, an odd rodentophobe who recalls how his father’s irrational hatred of squirrels ultimately affected every aspect of his, and his son’s, lives. With the Studio’s theater series, combined with American Stage’s new After Hours program and the recent appearance of freeFall, there’s a small surge in Bay area theater underway. Considering the vastness of the Bay area metropolis, it’s surely about time.

Tampa’s Jobsite Theater has just announced a new Monday night play-reading series that may lead to at least one mainstage production each year. According to Jobsite artistic director David Jenkins, ensemble member Lori Shannon expressed an interest in running such a series – and he handed her about 40 scripts that he’d received from all over the U.S. (he gets about 400 scripts a year). Shannon read through the collection and chose four promising plays: The Ballad of Johnny 5 Star by David Hauptschein and David Vlcek (reading Nov. 10), Two Gentlemen of Corona by Jim Geoghan (reading Jan. 19, 2009), Magenta Sunsets and Brown Silk by P.J. Gibson (reading Feb. 23), and Hugging the Shoulder by Jerrod Bogard (reading April 6). Jenkins says that the authors may not necessarily attend the readings – there’s no money available to pay their way – but Hauptschen and Vlcek have said they’ll come to Tampa from Chicago anyway. In any case, the majority of the Jobsite board of directors will be present at each reading in order to determine whether the play should move on to the mainstage. Admission for the public will be $5 (free to season ticket holders). Readings are at 7:30 p.m.

Congratulations to Jobsite as it takes one further step toward becoming an important regional theater power.

Meanwhile…Gorilla Theatre has announced which shows it’ll have to cancel or postpone because of the Fire Marshall’s insistence that an additional exit and a firewall be built. Bill Leavengood’s staged reading of Charley and Emma – about Charles Darwin and his wife - won’t take place till November, and the full production of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest – about the overthrown of communism in Romania – is being cancelled. So Gorilla’s next full show will be John Guare’s fine play Six Degrees of Separation, opening Dec. 4. It’s not too early to buy tickets, though: call 813-879-2914.

The premiere of freeFAll Theatre Company’s The Wild Party at The Studio@620 is unprecedented in that 13 of the show’s 15 actors are members of the Actors’ Equity union. Usually – though not always – Equity actors are those with more experience and, arguably, more talent. But most smaller theaters can’t afford the minimum salaries that Equity demands for its artists. So it’s common to find one or two Equity actors in the smaller theaters, while the rest are non-union. Outside of Broadway tours, it’s unusual to find even six or seven Equity actors in a show. (For that matter, it’s rare these days to find 15 actors of any sort in a show: much easier on any budget are the six-or-fewer-actors shows that you find so often on national stages.)

I asked freeFAll’s artistic director, Eric Davis, a fine actor himself, how he was able to afford so many union actors. Read the rest of this entry »