Here’s what’s behind the curtain this week in Tampa Bay theater…
“FROM FORTH THE FATAL LOINS OF THESE… OW! GAH! STOP! O PLEASE GOD STOP!” The spanking-new Tampa Shakespeare Festival debuts tomorrow evening at 6 p.m. at Water Works Park downtown with Macbeth, followed by Romeo & Juliet on Friday. According to producers, the action-packed outdoor stagings feature the following totally non-gratuitous acts of brutal violence: one (1) rude civil brawl, two (2) duels, five (5) murders and finally two (2) single combats comprising a smashed face, two stabs to the chest, two stabs to the neck, two stabbed legs (left and right), two cut throats, seven stabs to the stomach, one evisceration and one dashing out of brains. So, old and English like Downton Abbey, otherwise not so much. The two plays will alternate in free performances through March 22.
SHE’S SO UNUSUAL: Last October, SCENE BREAKER broke the news of the escaped goat who tried to eat the skirt straight off the hips of actress Nicole Jeannine Smith during Hamlet rehearsals. So we’re now obliged to report that the 2014 BotB winner’s life continues in I Love Lucy mode. In rehearsals for Jobsite Theater’s Orlando, Smith has thus far tripped up an onstage staircase, walked into a papier-mâché tree, flung a shoe from her foot during a run-thru, bruised her behind and stumbled over a traffic cone outside the theater. Starting previews tonight and opening Friday, Jobsite’s staging of Sarah Ruhl’s “joyous, dreamy” adaptation of the Virginia Woolf tale about an English nobleman who navigates centuries of social change in a woman’s body is getting its southeastern U.S. premier with a Who’s Who of celebrated local actresses, including Smith, Emily Belvo, Jonelle Meyer, Ami Sallee and Katrina Stevenson as the title man and/or woman.
ATTENTION BAY-AREA PLAYWRIGHTS: TEMPUS FUGIT, TICK TICK TICK! You have until March 31 to submit your ten-minute, local-angle play to Stageworks Theatre’s TampaWorks festival. Your submission must follow standard playwriting format, cannot exceed ten pages, and must be set in the Tampa Bay area. (No word on whether that extends as far as Pasco County, but SCENE BREAKER feels compelled to beg you to please not write a play set in Pasco County.) Selected entries will grace the stage in the June TampaWorks festival at Stageworks alongside the winners in Gorilla Theatre's Young Dramatists Project. You will email your play to Stageworks Producing Artistic Director Karla Hartley at stageworkspad@gmail.com, should you complete it in time. Get crackin’.
SPEAKING OF LOCAL PLAYWRIGHTS: Along with poets, photographers, musicians, printmakers and other artists, playwright and CL theater critic Mark Leib has landed one of this year’s annual grants from the Arts Council of Hillsborough County, made possible in part by the big FIVE BY FIVE fundraiser held at the Tampa Museum of Art last fall. Leib’s grant will help pay actors and cover tech costs for a full Stageworks production of his play The Funny Thing Is, I Still Love this Place, a comedy about marriage plans gone awry that presumably contains not even one (1) evisceration, although we've not read it.
Got a tip for SCENE BREAKER? Email Scene Breaker in care of A&E Editor Julie Garisto, julie.garisto@creativeloafing.com.
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2015.