Here’s what’s behind the curtain this week in Tampa Bay theater...
PAGING SACHEEN LITTLEFEATHER... MISS LITTLEFEATHER, YOU’RE ON! Monday is the big night for the first-ever Some Sort of Theater Awards, a sendup of sorts—if the Theatre Tampa Bay Awards are the Oscars, these are the MTV Movie Awards, according to the organizers, sketch comedy troupe Some Sort of Show. Presenters and willing victims will include actors, directors, designers, and stage managers working on both sides of the Bay, including past BotB and TTB winners, and the show is open to the public. Scheduled bestowals include “Most Least Musical Play,” “The Name in the Envelope Award” and “Most Misleading Title.”
BECAUSE NOTHING GOES TOGETHER LIKE SICK KIDS & VAMPIRES... From every full-price ticket purchased for this Friday night’s performance of Jobsite Theater’s smash suckfest comedy Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, 10 bucks will go to USF Health’s innovative Ybor Youth Clinic. Jobsite did the same last year for one performance of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and raised nearly a grand for the clinic, which provides, according to its website, “high quality, innovative, compassionate and nonjudgmental health care services to all youth in an environment tailored to meet their specific and unique needs,” needs which may or may not include protection from sunlight.
...OR WELL KIDS AND POSSIBLY PERVY PRIESTS: After this Thursday evening’s opening-night performance of John Patrick Shanley’s oft-produced Doubt: A Parable at Carrollwood Players, the actors and director will sit down for a talkback with the audience. The theater is offering $10 Thursday tix to students with ID, partially in hopes that many will stick around to really tune in — as only kids can do — to the post-play dissection of the drama’s deeply dissectable themes.
THEY ONLY KILLED RASPUTIN THREE TIMES: Veteran actor Greg Thompson’s character has died before the final blackout in three consecutive plays just this year: Jobsite’s Inventing Van Gogh (by assisted suicide), East Lansing at the Tampa Bay Theatre Festival (by B-cell lymphoma), and New Stage Theatre & Conservatory’s Hamlet (by Hamlet). Starting tonight, Thompson appears in an HCC Ybor student production of Jason Milligan's sometimes-funny, sometimes-tough anthology of Dixie-set one acts Southern Exposure, and is taking bets on whether he may actually survive this one.
TO AIR IS WILDE: Tampa Repertory Theatre will kick off TampaRep on the Air with a radio reading of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in the WMNF Live Music Studio, with such local luminaries in the cast as Nathan Jokela, Jordan Foote, Steve Mountan and the inimitable Matthew McGee as—you guessed it—Lady Bracknell. The public is invited to the taping Monday night, which will air on WMNF at a later date.
WALK-ON DEAD: Actor Ricky Wayne, known to Tampa Bay theater audiences for performances at American Stage (Art) and as half of the improv duo Hawk & Wayne (with Gavin Hawk), appears all this month on AMC’s “The Walking Dead” as “O’Donnell.” CL theater critic Mark Leib profiled Wayne in 2012.
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