Best Adopted Out-of-Towners: Dear & Glorious Physician
There’s a reason why this set of Gainesville siblings has become a local live favorite and why the seriously local-scene-minded New Granada Records reached beyond the boundaries of the Bay area to grab up Dear & Glorious’ eponymous debut CD for national release. It’s because the group rocks with both guts and brains, to produce a smart, catchy, wiry, subtly dark-hearted take on underground rock that resonates all over, as opposed to just hitting hard or being infectious or successfully setting off the Hip Meter. I’m not saying the best band currently working the Tampa scene actually comes from Gatorland or anything, but Dear & Glorious Physician is definitely up there among the top acts — from anywhere — hitting our small-venue stages. www.dearandglorious.com.
Best Unnecessary Reminder You're Out of Touch with What the Kids Are Into These Days: Underoath @ State Theatre, June 20
I can respect this cult-legendary Lakeland outfit’s originality — comparing most current metalcore to Underoath is like comparing Tic-Tac-Toe to rocket science. I can also respect the almost unbelievable success and loyalty the group has won with such an iconoclastic sound. But I’d rather be given a Tabasco colonic than pop one of the group’s albums into my stereo while stuck in traffic. And watching a largely under-21 sellout crowd “sing” along with every tortured howl at last summer’s MySpace-sponsored secret pre-CD-release show was an expectedly alienating (not to mention aurally unpleasant) experience. Does the new generation really think its disenchantment is so new, so completely unprecedented in human history? Yeah, I thought that about my own angst once, too. Welcome to the world. www.underoath777.com.
Best Non-Musical Local Music Scene Trend: Bass Players as Brewmasters
Crippled Masters bassist Roger Peterson began dabbling in the art of making one’s own beer last year. Soon, Martin Rice, who plays bass for, I believe, every band in St. Pete with a majority of members over 30, followed suit. Others have since voiced an interest in giving the hobby a try. To them and to all, I hereby declare that every band whose bass player learns to brew beer, and gives me some, will be featured in Creative Loafing. No, really, I can’t actually say or do that. But seriously, I did and I will.
Best Mouth of the South: eFFex
Check out human beatbox/vocal-manipulation maestro eFFeX’s live track “The Right Verbage” on his MySpace page. Check out his starring role in a commercial for some British energy drink you’ve never heard of and will never taste. Check out one of his regular live performances. I’ve seen Rahzel’s solo performance, and Cory “eFFeX” Michael can hang with Rahzel. (I won’t write “is better than,” but, like DJ Deacon, I think it fairly often.) And if he can hang with Rahzel, he can hang with anybody, anywhere. This guy’s amazing. www.myspace.com/effex.
Best Indie-Scene Open Mic: Wednesdays @ Bombshell Gallery 2543 Central Ave.
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From spoken word to lauded veteran Bay area singer-songwriters to completely untalented yet captivating weirdoes, Bombshell’s Wednesday-night open mic provides the alternative to Extreme wannabes and Oasis and Jimmy Buffett covers. The first time I went/played, this dude yowled the single greatest lyric I’ve ever heard — “I’m too lazy to load the gun/ and there’s something good on TV” — and a beautiful girl with a beautiful voice played the banjo beautifully. Plus, it’s currently hosted by our pick for the Bay’s best singer-songwriter, Geri X, and you always get at least a couple of tunes from her; hell, she might even let you play her guitar.
Best Reason to Ask Questions and Demand Answers: Ybor City Noise Ordinance Enforcement
How many Seventh Avenue establishments have been metered? How many have been cited? Have any been metered or cited as often as Eighth Avenue’s New World Brewery? Is it easier to single out an establishment for specific metering on the more sparsely noisy/populated Eighth Avenue? (Of course it is.) Have certain Tampa Police officers stated that their disdain for the metering duty motivates them to look for an establishment of which to make an example? (One reportedly has.) Does one unfortunately located business — I’m looking at you, Don Vicente de Ybor Historic Inn — have the right, or the juice, to put the kibosh on a city block’s worth of thriving musical culture? Will the implementation of Ybor’s noise ordinance influence the suppression that will inevitably follow condos onto Central Avenue in St. Pete?
Best Culture Clash: Acho Brother
As Acho Brother, Puerto Rican-born Hector Mayoral blends Latin percussion and guitar styles with lo-fi electronica and folky Americana influences to create an evocative, largely laid-back (mostly) Spanish-language style all his own. Acho Brother’s latest CD, Monkish, slides by dreamily on light beats and emotional vocals and key signatures, going from urgent to oddly Nick Drake-esque and only very rarely approaching Latin-rhythm clichés. It’s a great driving-alone or post-night-out disc. www.achobrother.com.
Best Actor: Steven Clark Pachosa
There doesn’t seem to be a part that Steven Clark Pachosa can’t play. But this versatile actor gave the performance of a lifetime as Martin Gray, the celebrated architect who falls in love with a goat in Jobsite Theater’s version of Edward Albee’s The Goat: Or, Who Is Sylvia? Pachosa managed the part with the utmost seriousness; his Martin was so infatuated with his four-legged lover, he couldn’t bear to hear her disparaged as a dumb animal. Begging for his wife’s understanding, pleading for his best friend’s tolerance, Pachosa forced us to consider our own deepest beliefs about what is acceptable, what is forgivable. And he made this shocking, challenging play impossible to forget.
Best Actress: April Bender
Bender, who’s worked mostly for Hat Trick Theatre, is easily one of the most exciting — and many-sided — actresses on any stage. Just look at the range she’s shown in one season: In Private Eyes, she was Lisa, a deceptively sexy woman whose penchant for brinksmanship made her dangerous to any lothario. In Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, she was Diane, a badly wounded rape victim still trying to understand the role of justice in the universe. And in When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? she was Clarice, a usually demure violinist whose self-restraint gave way to rage when she realized that her husband couldn’t protect her from a vicious drug smuggler. All were complicated characters, and Bender played each one with full respect for their complexity. Call it by its name: pure talent.
Best Play: The Goat, Jobsite Theatre
Edward Albee’s play is an investigation of the source of our morals, the limits of our tolerance and the ungovernability of love. Martin Gray admits to his best friend that he’s fallen in love with, and had sex with, a goat. The friend tells Martin’s wife, who reacts with pain and rage: and Martin’s pleas for understanding only lead to more fury. Is Albee trying to understand why the word tragedy originally meant “goat-song”? Is he illustrating some kabbalistic myth about the coming of evil to the world? No other play of the last quarter-century is as provocative as this shocker, which was presented by Jobsite Theater in a stunning production.
Best Theater Company: Tie: Jobsite Theater and Stageworks
Both of these theaters have become essential to the Tampa Bay area, and both amply deserve to be considered this year’s “best.” Jobsite’s season offered plays of Off-Broadway quality like Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune — one could hardly imagine a better production of this work — Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog, Edward Albee’s scandalous The Goat, and Dario Fo’s We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! Meanwhile Stageworks continued to bring us plays of international significance — Caryl Churchill’s A Number and Molière’s The Miser — along with stateside hits like Diana Son’s Stop Kiss, in a riveting production, and Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories. If you care about serious theater, you’ve got to love these two companies.
Best Director: Kerry Glamsch
In the theater, the buck always stops at the director. Who else is supposed to get the very best out of each performer and make us feel that a play is the work, not of many competing inspirations, but of one over-arching vision? In his version of Diana Son’s Stop Kiss (a co-production of Stageworks and Gorilla Theatre), Kerry Glamsch accomplished all of this and more. Under his inspired leadership, actors Aisha Duran and Brittany McLaughlin, set designer Scott Cooper and costumer Loren Shaw, joined with lighting designer John Burchett to produce a celebration of love and condemnation of bigotry that seemed the outpouring of a single enlightened soul. It probably didn’t hurt that Glamsch is also an actor, writer and professor of drama. One thing’s for sure: He knows his stuff.
Best Artistic Direction: David Jenkins
With tireless willpower, vision and good humor, David Jenkins has turned Jobsite Theater, once a dark horse in Ybor City, into the resident theater company at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and one of the most important producing organizations on either side of the Bay. While some artistic directors search for balance by scheduling mindless fluff next to serious drama, Jenkins’ form of balance never compromises on quality. So last season he gave us an Off-Broadway drama (Frankie and Johnny), love among the 30-somethings (Phyro-Giants!), a Pulitzer Prize-winner about two African-American brothers (Topdog/Underdog), a Tony award-winning shocker (The Goat), an Italian economic comedy (We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay!) and a homegrown riff on Grimm’s Faery Tales. The 2006-2007 season looks even better.
Best Set Designer: Scott Cooper
We’ve had more than our share of realistic living rooms in this theater season: living rooms of the rich and famous, living rooms of the poor and obscure, living rooms in Manhattan and London and Paris. As for real innovation in set design, well, for that there was Scott Cooper’s intrepidly abstract environment for Caryl Churchill’s A Number. Cooper’s daring set consisted of a tilted, circular stage behind which were colored panels in a modernistic array — evoking, for a play about cloning and multiple selves, the sense of a world whose soul was increasingly mathematical. In this bizarre, unsettling space, a man named Salter confronted his three sons — only one of whom was biological — and tried to find peace in a world out of balance. Did the last century of innovation in set design occur or not? Thanks to Cooper, we can now say: maybe.
Best Costume Designer: Amy J. Cianci
If ever a play was made for a costume designer, it was Crowns, the first of American Stage’s new series of Not-Shakespeares-in-the-Park. Regina Taylor’s work was a gospel-song celebration of the church hats worn by African-American women and featured a great deal of discussion of hat philosophy, psychology, etiquette and folklore. Costumer Cianci rose to the occasion. She gave us red hats and green hats, purple hats and white hats, some looking like space ships, some like mountaintops, some like roulette wheels. And for a moment of relief she even gave us a baseball cap (worn backwards, of course). In sum, Crowns was a costumer’s dream; and Cianci, the dreamer, dreamed a splendiferous rainbow.
Best Monologuist: Bridget Bean
Twice during the last theater season, Bridget Bean demonstrated a prodigious talent as an actor of dramatic monologues. First was her appearance in Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads at Gorilla Theatre. Bean played Rosemary, a shallow but well-meaning woman whose neighbor was accused of murder. Chattering nervously, mixing her revelations with gardening lore, Bean was the picture of denial — as a means of mental survival. She was even better in the much more demanding Shirley Valentine, also at Gorilla Theatre (that ape loves them Brits). There she was for two full acts, a middle-aged woman whose life of quiet desperation stood to be transformed — or not — by a last-ditch Greek vacation. Not everyone can hold the stage all by her lonesome for two full acts. But Bean did, luminously.
Best New Theater Company: Cruciverbalist Collective
Playing at Gulfport’s Art Village Courtyard, this wildly-named group gave us Neil LaBute’s autobahn, a group of interesting one-acts in a sturdy production, featuring solid acting and directing. There were two powerful sketches: autobahn itself, in which two foster parents (Susan Demers and Rand Smith) who had just returned their son to a Boy’s Home, tried with difficulty not to feel like failures; and the chilling road trip, in which a man and a young girl (Smith again and Leah Radel) on the way to a secluded location, turned out not to be father and daughter. Autobahn was only the Cruciverbalists’ second production, and it was better than most early works by new troupes. So now: Let’s see more.
Best News About the Tampa Museum of Art: Bye-bye, Beer Can
August brought official word that the city had canned plans to move the museum to the Pavilion, aka, the cubes, adjacent to Rivergate Tower, after appraisals of the building came in much lower than expected. The news seemed to generate widespread relief, perhaps from the incongruity of housing the city’s trove of high art in a building known locally as the beer can. Nothing against the structure, but plans to put the museum there after the original design for a new building by Rafael Viñoly was dumped seemed like an afterthought. Mayor Pam has already popped the top on one new idea: placing the museum farther down the waterfront on Ashley Drive next to the future site of the children’s museum. Now if we can just save Kiley Gardens …
Best Exhibit That's Still Open: Vik Muniz: Reflex at USF CAM
This playful retrospective of work by Brazilian artist Vik Muniz was best in any number of ways, but this category gets straight to the point — unlike many of the shows mentioned here, it’s still open (until Oct. 7), so get in your car and go. Combining sculpture, painting and photography, Muniz renders an image in unusual materials then snaps a photo as the final work of art. Look out for mischievous recreations of art icons, like the Mona Lisa redone in peanut butter and jelly, and Warhol portraits of Jackie O. in ketchup. A serious, documentary tone marks other works, including portraits of Rio de Janeiro’s street children traced in debris from Carnival parties. 4202 E. Fowler Ave., CAM 101, Tampa, 813-974-4133, www.usfcam.usf.edu/CAM/cam_about.html.
Best Long Kiss Goodbye: Covivant's Carrie Mackin 4906 N. Florida Ave.
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813-234-0222
http://www.covivantgallery.com/
Since 1998, she brought more than 90 exhibits of cutting-edge contemporary art to an Art Deco garage-turned-gallery in Seminole Heights. She curated Booty, the first contemporary offshoot of the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, and she organized an exhibit of unconventional family portraits in defiance of a homophobic move from the Hillsborough County Commission. And then she said goodbye. After contemplating the prospect for years, Covivant Gallery owner Carrie Mackin finally made the move to NYC earlier this month. Who can blame her? She found a rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan — a stroke of luck that must have seemed like a sign from God. Technically, there’s still reason to hope that Covivant will live on: If Mackin sells her Heights bungalow (suddenly a daunting task in the cooled-down real estate market) she hopes to buy the Covivant building from her current landlord. With Cappy’s Pizzeria going gangbusters next door on Florida Avenue and plans for at least one other restaurant nearby, the location seems more ready than ever to support arts businesses. Keep your fingers crossed.
Best Resurrection of a Gallery Space: Para Gallery 2929 15th St. N.
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When word got out that Kama Gallery would close earlier this year, a pair of Tampa arts scene veterans stepped in. Joe Griffith, front man for Experimental Skeleton, and his partner, Kym O’Donnell, moved into the historic building just north of Ybor City and reopened it as Para. The space launched on 6/6/06 with an apocalypse-themed exhibit of artists from the Bay area and Orlando who riffed on the idea of the end of the world with tongue — for the most part — firmly in cheek. The current show, a slightly more reserved affair involving two painters and an unconventional jewelry maker (Donna Sweigart, who uses super-strong magnets to hold the resin segments of her bracelets together), suggests that the gallery’s range will encompass established artists working in traditional media as well as up-and-comers breaking all the rules.
Best Programming: The Studio@620 620 First Ave. S.
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727-895-6620
Don’t get me wrong — I love a good panel of art historians, but events at the Studio@620 make some local arts institutions look like industrial nap factories. Folks here are thinking way outside the box, staging events that bring all kinds of people together in the spirit of conversation about the arts, politics and other community issues. Some of the year’s highlights include: a performance by Moving Current Dance Collective inside a spiral-shaped installation of silk bags filled with hair by artist Babs Reingold; bus tours of St. Peterburg’s urban wetlands in conjunction with an exhibit of Florida Highwaymen paintings; a free social justice round table dinner during which 40 people shared a meal and discussed the state of race relations in the city; erotic poetry readings; and a film-noir festival. The Studio likes to bring “lots of different people together to share creative energies,” co-founder Dave Ellis says modestly. Events are either free or ticketed at minimum cost (typically $10) by the nonprofit Studio. Memberships, which start at $25 for students, include free entry to at least four events of your choice.
Upcoming Events at The Studio@620 – Say What? Spoken Word and Open Mic Event – Last Monday of every month, 8 p.m.
This article appears in Sep 20-26, 2006.