Words, music, dance—they come together in many forms on the stage. But I don’t think Tampa Bay audiences will have seen anything quite like the amalgam soon to be bubbling up at the Mahaffey Theater for “The Good Peaches.”
Staged only once before in this country at the Cleveland Play House, the script by Pulitzer Prize-winner Quiara Alegría Hudes (“Water by the Spoonful,” “In the Heights”) is a girl-vs.-nature epic in which Aurora, on a mission to deliver a wedding dress to the queen, fights to survive a giant storm. The American Stage production, which will be performed twice on Saturday, Sept. 20, brings together three actors, eight dancers from St. Pete’s projectALCHEMY, and 70, count ‘em 70, members of the Florida Orchestra—all on the Mahaffey stage at once.
So what inspired American Stage Producing Artistic Director Helen R. Murray to embark on this massive endeavor?
“First and foremost, it’s a great script,” Murray told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay in a recent pre-rehearsal chat. “It felt like something that we get as St. Petersburgers, you know, staying strong in the face of the storm. And the fact that the central character is this young child… it felt like, you know, anybody can do hard things… And then [Hudes] brings this beautiful idea to the table of what happens if you collaborate with an entire symphony? It was me that said, ‘If you’re gonna go that far, let’s bring in a dance company as well.’
“It is a ridiculous amount of work, but it’s also the kind of stuff I actually get excited about directing.”
The Good Peaches
Time Sat., Sept. 20, 2 & 8 p.m. 2025
Location Duke Energy Center for the Arts – Mahaffey Theater, 400 1st St S, St. Petersburg, FL 33701, St. Petersburg
Signing on partners, let alone synchronizing schedules and figuring out the shared costs, was no simple task. “There was a lot of chasing people down,” said Murray.
But as it happens, the project jibed exactly with the others’ respective missions.
“This is completely in line with what we are all about at the Florida Orchestra,” TFO Resident Conductor Chelsea Gallo, who will conduct “Peaches,” told CL. “We’ve been exploring recently how to incorporate more theater elements into what we do.”
For Alexander Jones, artistic director of projectALCHEMY, the appeal lay right in his company’s mission statement: “Create. Collaborate. Transform.”
That said, these are three different entities with three different ways of working. For the orchestra members, it meant—as it does with every piece they perform—getting the music “in their book” six weeks before performance. For Jones and his dancers, it meant developing movement phrases throughout the month of August, while staying ready to modify them when collaborating in person with the actors, who began rehearsals Sept. 2. The musicians will rehearse on stage with actors and dancers only twice before the Sept. 20 performances.
But communication has continued throughout. Gallo watched tapes of Jones working with his dancers—“The choreography is so beautiful and fluid—it’s just like water.” And Murray worked with Gallo in picking which musical pieces would bring the story to life.
As in Cleveland, the score for “The Good Peaches” at American Stage will include the four evocative “Sea Interludes” (one of which is entitled “Storm”) from Benjamin Britten’s opera, “Peter Grimes,” and four movements of John Adams’s oscillating “Shaker Loops.” In addition, Gallo chose to add a lush overture by the British Jamaican composer Ayanna Witter-Johnson, plus “aleatoric” music—sounds evoked at random.
“There’s going to be this really cool moment where I’ll give numerical instructions to the musicians,” Gallo explained, “and one by one they’ll interpret the words on the page to produce sounds completely at their discretion…For example, if I put up one finger, the bass drum will start a long roll, kind of like thunder. And then maybe that player will choose to create swells that sound like the storm is approaching, and when I put up the number two, the woodwinds blow unpatched air into their instruments, kind of sounding like the wind is picking up.”
Murray’s been getting so deep into the music that she’s been dancing to it in her living room. And Jones is stoked by the material, too.
He’s particularly taken with “Shaker Loops.” “That’s kind of my jam—a low hum, with the same vibe the entire time, that allows me to dance through it, with it, amplify it.”
If we don’t take risks we’re not gonna keep finding new audiences
Helen R. Murray
The sense of excitement among all of the partners is amplified by the fact that it’s like nothing they’ve done before.
When the Florida Orchestra plays for Opera Tampa, the musicians are always in the pit, said Gallo, and the singers and actors up on stage—“that very traditional angle of collaboration. But with this, this is so unique because the orchestra will be right on the stage, and all the acting and dancing will happen around the orchestra.”
That configuration will be new for Jones, too. His company has worked with live musicians before, like the saxophonist Jeremy Carter, “but I don’t know what it’s going to be like for the dancers to be on stage with a 70-piece orchestra behind you.”
As for Murray, she knew from the start that this project presented risks. But she welcomes them.
“We’re in a world right now where theater has become more and more of a niche art form, and if we don’t take risks we’re not gonna keep finding new audiences. This is a brilliant script, but it’s also a family-friendly script. It’s not a hyper-long show and there’s a kid at the center of it. Kids get to see themselves represented that way and they get to take in three different art forms in one. So it’s really huge.”
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