Daily Loaf

It’s the musical that had to be written. And only Gil Perlroth could be trusted to bring it off.

When Gulfport:The Musical premieres in January, 2010 at the Catherine Hickman Theater as part of the town’s centennial celebration, it will feature the book, music and lyrics of one of the most prolific and successful playwrights in the Tampa Bay area. At age 81, Gil Perlroth (pictured) has written over 20 shows, including the recent hit at the Venue Theatre, Ain’t Retirement Grand?

After the break, read more about Gulfport:The Musical and listen to my interview with Gil Perlroth on Creative Loafing’s ArtsSpeak podcast. Read the rest of this entry »

August Wilson’s best play, Fences, is about Troy Maxson, an African-American rubbish collector whose bitterness and sense of lost opportunities make him a problematic husband and father.

Set in Pittsburgh in 1957, it’s also about a time when new opportunities for black citizens were slowly becoming real, but the indignities of the past were too raw to be forgotten.

As in all Wilson’s plays, the language is poetic, the characters are indelible, and the metaphors — including, in this case, the trumpet carried by Troy’s brain-damaged brother Gabriel — are brilliant. What happens to a dream deferred? Wilson’s answer is riveting.

American Stage, Sept. 25-Oct. 11, 163 Third St. N, St. Petersburg, 727-823-PLAY, www.americanstage.org.

Read more CL’s Fall Arts Preview.

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.

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 »

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.

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 »

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 »