From teaching to doing with Broadway Theatre Project and Mark E. Leib

This weekend, theater behind the scenes experts — and stars — give us the goods. For the Broadway Theatre Project, 37 guest faculty members and young artists will share their professional stage and screen expertise — luminaries like Donna McKechnie of A Chorus Line fame (pictured) and fellow triple-threat Herman Payne, who have trained young Tampa Bay performers for the past month in an intensive workshop. Check out what they accomplished at two major performances staged at USF Tampa. $55.50-$95.50. Workshops throughout the month; finale show on Sat., July 27, 3 and 7:30 p.m. (USF College of Visual & Performing Arts Theatre I, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa. 813-974-2323. broadwaytheatreproject.com.)

CL Theater Critic/professor Mark E. Leib’s comedy The Funny Thing Is, I Still Love This Place will be given a staged reading at Tampa’s Stageworks. The play is about a young woman who commits to marrying a poor poet, without realizing that her parents are out to break up the match. Leib has enlisted an all-star cast to read: Roxanne Faye, Matt Lunsford, Paul Potenza, Natalie Symons and Jim Sorenson. Leib’s other plays have been produced Off-Broadway, at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre, at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, and at St. Pete’s Studio@620. Admission is free. And audience talkback will follow the reading. (Tues., July 30, at 8 p.m. Stageworks Theatre, Tampa. 813-251-8984. stageworkstheatre.org.)