BEST THEATER NEWS OF THE YEAR: Eric Davis founds freeFall Theatre

The Tampa Bay area is notoriously short on theater companies, and it’s exciting anytime an enterprising soul decides to do something about it. Now the exceedingly talented actor Eric Davis (most recently in Sleuth at American Stage) has started the freeFall theater company, with its first show, The Wild Party, premiering at the [email protected] in St. Petersburg. The musical, by George C. Wolfe and Michael John LaChiusa, turns the entire Studio into the set, with the audience sitting amid 15 actor/singers and watching the action unfold all around. The story is all about a Jazz Age party and the wayward characters who inhabit it; by the end of the evening, the riotous goings-on have turned to tragedy. Let’s hope that freeFall continues more happily than that and that Bay area audiences will find their choice of dramatic events expanding well beyond the limited menu available today.