Drama Queen

Nan Barnett to head National New Play Network

Nan Barnett, the theater professional whose business savvy helped grow Florida Stage from a college-based professional company to the country's largest regional theater devoted to new plays, has just been named the new executive director of the National New Play Network (NNPN).

 Barnett has spent this season as executive director of Actors Express in Atlanta, an NNPN member company celebrating its 25th anniversary season.  But she built her career as an actor and administrator alongside Florida Stage artistic director Louis Tyrrell until the acclaimed company, which was based in Manalapan for most of its 24 years, ceased operations in 2011 due to the bruising recession and a loss of support after a move to West Palm Beach.

Florida Stage was a NNPN member theater, and Barnett led the organization's board while she was managing director of the company.  Miami's New Theatre, Sarasota's Florida Studio Theatre and the Orlando Shakespeare Theater are also members, and Miami's Zoetic Stage is an associate member. 

"You don't get two dream jobs in a lifetime, but I think I might have," Barnett said Monday from her Atlanta office.  "NNPN has taken ideas that were floating around the field and tried them, moved them forward...Several of our programs are being replicated in other organizations, which is flattering."

Barnett said that among the NNPN initiatives with great potential are the New Play Exchange, a database of new works that should help plays come to the attention of more theaters, and NNPN associate memberships.

Founded in 1998, the NNPN began an innovative "rolling world premiere" program, in which several members theaters agree to produce a new play in the same season, giving the playwright more national exposure and the chance to continue developing a script as he or she sees what different actors and directors bring to the work.

Barnett, who earned her bachelor of fine arts degree from the North Carolina School of the Arts Professional Training Program, will start her new job in May. She and her actor-husband Gordon McConnell plan to keep their home in Florida, but she notes that the timing is right for a move:  Their son Hunter goes off to college in the fall.

She succeeds Jason Loewith, who is leaving NNPN to become artistic director of Maryland's Olney Theatre Center.  NNPN is based at Washington D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theatre.  For more information on NNPN, visit the organization's web site.

Manzelli, Tyrrell get new gigs

Actor-director John Manzelli, a Barry University theater faculty member, has been with City Theatre and its popular Summer Shorts program for four years, last season serving as the festival's artistic director.  As the company prepares for its 17th season of presenting a collection of short plays, Manzelli has a new title and greater responsibilities.  Stephanie Norman, one of City Theatre's founders, has left her active leadership role for a new job and is joining the company's board of directors.  So Manzelli, who will continue as an assistant professor of theater at Barry, is becoming City's newest producing artistic director.

"In this economy, we're trying to look at programming that makes sense," Manzelli said Tuesday.  "We're talking to the Arsht Center and the Broward Center about collaborative partnerships and co-presenting."

Playwright Susan Westfall, another City Theatre founder, returned as the troupe's literary director last year, and will continue leading the annual CityWrights playwrights' weekend, which just received a $75,000 grant from the Knight Arts Challenge.  Attorney Steve Eisenberg is joining the company as its general manager.  For info on City Theatre, call 305-755-9401 or visit its web site.

Also on the theater jobs front, Florida Stage founder and artistic director Louis Tyrrell has found a new home at Delray Beach's Arts Garage.  Tyrrell, who led the critically acclaimed theater for 24 years along with managing director Nancy Barnett, has been out of work since Florida Stage's board abruptly shut it down and filed for bankruptcy in June.  The company's debt had risen to $2.7 million in debt (some of that money paid by subscribers for a 2011-2012 season that didn't happen), and bankruptcy proceedings continue.

While Barnett has returned to acting (she recently appeared in After the Revolutionat the Caldwell Theatre Company), Tyrrell is again focusing on the new play work that helped make Florida Stage a nationally respected theater.  He is becoming artistic director of a new company dubbed The Theatre at Arts Garage.  The facility at 180 NE First St. in Delray's Pineapple Grove area presents multidisciplinary work, including dance, music visual arts and movies.

On a modest $150,000 budget for his first  season (Florida Stage's at one point hit $4.1 million), he will present a series of Tuesday evening play readings in February, with Israel Horovitz, John Guare and William Mastrosimone in attendance to hear the works and participate in post-play discussions. Tyrell says he's hoping that the fourth playwright will be Eve Ensler, but that isn't set yet.  From March 1 to March 4, the Theatre at Arts Garage will present The New Play Festival, an event inspired by Florida Stage's 1st Stage New Works Festival, with readings of six new works and Mastrosimone leading play-writing workshops.  Pulitzer Prize winner Marsha Norman will be the keynote speaker. The company's first full production, a play-with-music titled Woody Sez (about folk legend Woody Guthrie), will run March 16-April 8.

"I had a reflective summer, and when this opportunity came up, it felt right on so many levels," Tyrrell said.  "You have to ask, 'What is the new model? What do people want in an evening of going out to theater?'  The Arts Garage space is a raw, storefront space.  It's great fun...There are relationships that don't go away, that exist because of a shared love of new work.  But there will be new writers, new titles, new stories to tell."

For info on Arts Garage, call 561-450-6357 or visit its web site.

A dramatic shocker from Florida Stage

If you had told me last week that I would begin this one by writing about the end of Florida Stage, I would have thought you'd been overindulging in the real version of what the Hair cast pretends to smoke in Act Two. 

But no, this particular nightmare is real.  It is, of course, most painful for artistic director LouisTyrrell, managing director Nancy Barnett and the nearly 30 others on the company's staff.  Twenty-four years after Tyrrell got Florida Stage going, all those theater pros are suddenly out of work in a time when joblessness is way too common  -- though few would argue that a career in theater guarantees security and stability.

But the abrupt closing of one of South Florida's finest companies, a theater with a well-deserved national reputation for developing new plays, is a loss for so many others too.

Theater lovers, those people for whom plays and musicals are created, have lost one of the region's most adventurous companies.  Subscribers who had no reason not to sign up for a 2011-2012 season that will never be have now lost their good-faith money, and that certainly does nothing to foster trust among folks thinking about buying a season's worth of tickets to another theater.

The long list of playwrights whose work came to life at Florida Stage -- a list that includes Michele Lowe, Israel Horovitz, Deborah Zoe Laufer, William Mastrosimone, Michael McKeever, Thomas Gibbons, Christopher McGovern, Michael Hollinger, Christopher Demos-Brown, Carter W. Lewis, Steven Dietz, Nilo Cruz, David Wiltse (and so, so many more) -- now has one less place devoted to exploring, developing and impressively staging the products of their imaginations.

Plenty of out-of-town actors, directors and designers worked at Florida Stage (and by "out-of-town," I mean people who don't live in South Florida), but so did numerous artists who choose to make their careers here.  Working at Florida Stage was a sought-after gig and, more often than not, a professionally fulfilling one.  Creating a role in a brand-new play is a thrill.  So is working at a company with high artistic standards.  With Florida Stage gone, there's one less "home" for South Florida artists, one less place to help them cobble together a living doing what they love.

And yes, for those of us who spend our nights watching plays then analyzing them for readers, losing a company that has made so many of those nights interesting or wonderful or thought-provoking just plain hurts.  Oh, there were plenty of times that I drove north to Manalapan or, in the past year, West Palm Beach for a Florida Stage show and drove home with the word "why" tumbling around in my brain.  Why that show? Why that staging? Why a particular actor?  But actually, even when I was less than crazy about a Florida Stage play, I could nearly always figure out why Tyrrell chose the script.  Something about the writer's voice.  Or the ideas in the script.  Or the creative passion it stirred in him.

Having followed Florida Stage's story for nearly all of its 24 seasons, I hate the way that such an artistically impressive, risk-taking, important company is now in the process of vanishing, its last act bankruptcy.  I understand that some of the folks who tried to write a different ending believed that going public with the company's financial problems -- the $1.5 million in debt that finally sank Florida Stage -- would hurt attempts to find donors and sell tickets. That "logic" seems counterproductive.  If an award-winning, widely respected theater company is in trouble, ask for help.

Perhaps, in these hard times, nothing would have come from a "save our theater" campaign.  But perhaps Florida Stage could have been saved and bankruptcy avoided. Anyone who treasures the artistic, intellectual and emotional riches that great theater brings is poorer for the loss of one of the region's finest companies. 

(Photo of Lou Tyrrell and Nan Barnett by Bob Eighmie)  

 

 

 

Carbonell nominations share the love

Nominations for the 35th annual Carbonell Awards -- our region's version of the Tonys, the Helen Hayes Awards, the Joseph Jefferson Awards and so on -- have just been announced, and the results are a little more equitable than they have been for the past few years.  (That is, unless you're associated with the Caldwell Theatre Company, New Theatre, The Naked Stage, The Promethean Theatre or the Women's Theatre Project, which got a single nomination apiece.)

Still, people from 13 different companies have reason to go to the ceremony at the Broward Center's Amaturo Theatre on April 4.  Miami-Dade and Palm Beach County theaters collected 36 nominations each, while Broward theaters came back strong with 27.  Top nominated musical? Miss Saigon at Actors' Playhouse, with 11. Top play? Blasted at GableStage, with 7.

For all the details and a complete list of nominees, check out my story at MiamiHerald.com.

Florida Stage picks a season

The new play-driven Florida Stage just held its fifth annual 1st Stage New Works Festival last weekend, and artistic director Louis Tyrrell isn't letting any dust gather on three of the seven scripts that were read to a cumulative crowd of more than 1,000 adventuresome theater fans.

Among the most buzzed-about works, each for different reasons, were Christopher Demos-Brown's Captiva, Carter W. Lewis' The Americans Across the Streetand Israel Horovitz's Beverley, now retitled Fighting Over Beverley, which featured Tony Award winner Frances Sternhagen as the title object of two seventysomething men's affections.

The world premieres of Demos-Brown's and Lewis' plays and the southeastern premiere of Horovitz's will be part of the company's 25th anniversary 2011-2012 season at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach.  Also in the lineup are the National New Play Network "rolling" world premiere of Stephen Sachs' comedy Bakersfield Mist, a still-unrevealed new musical, and a summer musical that will either be brand-new or a remounting of a past musical hit.  Audiences will get to vote on a new show or a new production of Backwards in High Heels, Beyond the Rainbow, Cagney or Dream a Little Dream.

Bakersfield Mist kicks things off Oct. 19-Nov. 20, followed by Captiva Dec. 7-Jan. 8, Fighting Over Beverley Jan. 18-Feb. 19, the new musical March 21-April 22, The Americans Across the Street May 9-June 10 and the summer musical June 20-Sept. 2.

For subscription information, call 1-800-514-3837 or visit the Florida Stage web site.

(Photo of Carter W. Lewis, Louis Tyrrell and Israel Horovitz courtesy of Florida Stage.)

 

 

Tony winners coming

Two Tony Award-winning actresses are headed to South Florida next month, one for a play festival, the other to perform her solo show and conduct a master class.

Arriving first is Frances Sternhagen, who returns to Florida Stage, where she starred in The Exact Center of the Universe in 2001.  Sternhagen's will be the marquee name during the company's fifth annual 1st Stage New Works Festival Feb. 3-6.  She'll participate in a reading of Israel Horovitz's new play Beverley(about a love triangle involving folks over 70) at 8 p.m. Feb. 5, and she'll also be interviewed about her career by artistic director Louis Tyrrell at 7 p.m. Feb. 4.

Tickets to the festival range from $25 for a day pass to $100 for all festival events, which includes seven play readings, two panels, the Sternhagen interview and a party.  Florida Stage is in the Kravis Center, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach.  For info, call 1-800-514-3837 or visit the theater's web site.

Also headed to South Florida is Tony winner Donna McKechnie, the dynamic actress and dancer who originated the star part of Cassie in A Chorus Line.  McKechnie will do three performances of her solo show, My Musical Comedy Life, at the PlayGround Theatre Feb. 12-13.  She'll also conduct a master class for students 15 and older at the theater from 4 to 7 p.m. Feb. 7.  Participation is limited, and there's a $35 fee.  McKechnie's director, part-time South Florida resident Richard Jay-Alexander, will also offer a pair of student workshops on Feb. 19 -- one from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. for students 7-13, the other from 2 to 5 p.m. for students 14-17.  The fee for those sessions is $30.

McKechnie will perform her show at 8 p.m. Feb. 12, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Feb. 13 at the PlayGround, 9806 NE Second Ave., Miami Shores.  Tickets are $50 and $100 for opening night (the higher price is for premium seating and an after party), $30 for the matinee, $45 for the Sunday night show.  For information, call 305-751-9550 or visit the PlayGround web site or Ticketmaster.

Florida Stage unveils 1st Stage lineup

For its fifth annual 1st Stage New Works Festival, Florida Stage is shifting its staged reading extravaganza to a long weekend at its new home in West Palm Beach's Kravis Center for the Performing Arts.

Running Feb. 4-6, with a kickoff reception Feb. 3, this year's festival will feature readings of seven new plays -- some of which, as in the past, will get future full productions.

On this year's bill are Israel Horovitz's Beverley, a comic love triangle involving a woman and two men in their 70s; Deborah Zoe Laufer's Leveling Up, a play about video game addicts who just might have a future launching missiles; Kew Henry's Poet, about two muses assigned to Edgar Allan Poe; Carter W. Lewis' The Americans Across the Street, featuring a world-weary man whose greatest delight is ranting at his neighbors; Andrew Rosendorf's Brilliant Corners, about a divorced jazz lover whose family wants money; Christopher Demos-Brown's Captiva, a dark comedy about a family reunion upended by a hurricane; and John Herrera's Tiempo de amor, a play about a young woman torn between an older Spaniard and her controlling mother in 1920s Havana and Tampa.

In addition to the readings and opening party, a keynote address (past speakers include Marsha Norman, John Guare and Horovitz) will be part of the new play celebration.

For information, call Florida Stage's box office at 1-800-514-3837 or visit the theater's web site.

One more theater 'prom' is history

So the 34th annual Carbonell Awards happened last night, with not too many surprises except for everyone singing Happy Birthday to Oscar Cheda (visiting for the evening from his road gig with In the Heights) and a late-in-the-show tribute to Carbonell-winning sound designer Steve Shapiro, who's leaving South Florida for a prestigious teaching job.  But of course the winners were surprised -- some more so than others. 

John Manzelli, for instance, who now teaches at Barry University and is a Naked Stage founder, won best lighting design for his work on Marco Ramirez's Macon City: A Comic Book Play.  Manzelli, as he admitted in accepting the award, isn't reallya lighting designer.  But he's a multi-talented guy -- actor, director, teacher and, yeah, now lighting designer -- who figured out how to make Macon City look way cool. And now he's got a Carbonell to show for it.

The night's dominant theaters (check out my Miami Herald story for full results) were two Coral Gables companies with a gazillion Carbonells between them, Actors' Playhouse and GableStage.  Their wins -- six to Actors' for its great production of Les Misérables, five to GableStage (for Speed-the-Plow and Farragut North, plus the special Bill Von Maurer Award for the company's contributions to South Florida theater) -- were certainly deserved.  But if I were running a theater in Broward or Palm Beach County, I might be questioning (to put it mildly) the voting process today.  (For the record, I'm not among the folks who select Carbonell nominees or vote on winners.)

The awards show itself, staged for the second year by newly appointed Carbonells executive director Amy London, was solidly entertaining but a little more low-key -- somehow simpler -- than last year's bash.

The opening year-in-theater number, though ably sung to the tune of The Twelve Days of Christmas by the Carbonell "Choir" (Steve Anthony, Irene Adjan, Barry Tarallo, Christopher Kent, Lisa Manuli, Julie Kleiner, Sally Bondi and the very bearded Avi Hoffman, in rehearsal for GableStage's The Quarrel), wasn't as clever as last year's opener.  The numbers from the nominated musicals were terrific, particularly Nathaniel Braga's head-over-heels Bigger Isn't Better from the Maltz Jupiter Theatre's Barnum, Everett Bradley's sexy a capella Some Like It from Caldwell Theatre's Vices: A Love Story, and the night's showstopper, David Michael Felty's glorious Bring Him Home from Actors' Les Miz.

Winners and presenters were on their best behavior (though presenter Ken Clement tried to get some faux bad blood going with the Women's Theatre Project).  GableStage's Joseph Adler, when not onstage accepting awards, got thanked a lot. Gregg Weiner, named best supporting actor in a play for Farragut North, said, "There's not a show that goes by that Joe doesn't bust my ass," something that always pushes him to get better.  Mad Cat Theatre founder Paul Tei, who had spent the day shooting Burn Notice, won best actor in a play for GableStage's Speed-the-Plow, and he happily detailed his career-long love of the play, his great recent experience with it (castmate Amy Elane Anderson is now his girlfriend) and his gratitude toward Adler, whom he called a "mentor and my second father."

All in all, it was a pleasant, inside-South-Florida-theater event, without the dramatic highs or lows that have marked past ceremonies.  Now that London is in charge of the Carbonell organization, it will be interesting to see how the always-delicate relationship between the theater community and those who carry out the Carbonell process evolves.

Florida Stage picks its next season

Florida Stage has just launched the world premiere of the nostalgic Dr. Radio, but producing director Louis Tyrrell and managing director Nancy Barnett are already looking forward to next season, their first in the company's new digs at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach.

Officially, Florida Stage's first show in the Kravis' Rinker Playhouse will be Low Down Dirty Blues, a Randal Myler-Dan Wheetman musical incorporating the innuendo-laced songs of blues legends.  It runs July 15-Sept. 5, inaugurating earlier start times for the company's shows -- 7:30 p.m. for evening performances, 1:30 p.m. for matinees. 

The company's just-announced 2010-2011 season contains three world premieres and a southern premiere, with three of the four shows coming from Florida Stage's recent 1st Stage New Works festival.  Andrew Rosendorf's Cane, the first piece in a company-commissioned group of plays titled "The Florida Cycle," opens the season Oct. 27-Nov. 28.  In it, the theater says, "the past and present are deeply connected in a story of betrayal and bloodshed, water and wind, family and fortune."

Next up, running Dec. 15-Jan. 16, is Karen Hartman's Goldie, Max & Milk, a warmly funny play about a single lesbian mom and her Orthodox Jewish lactation consultant. Michael Hollinger's Ghost-Writer, a play about a novelist whose secretary completes his masterwork after tragedy strikes, gets its southern premiere March 2-April 3, 2011.  Next season winds up May 4-June 5, 2011, with Carter W. Lewis' The Cha-Cha of a Camel Spider, a dark comedy about a young poet, two mercenary soldiers and an Afghani taxi driver who happens to love the music of Led Zeppelin.

For info on Florida Stage's upcoming shows, call 1-800-514-3837 or visit the company's web site.

Carbonell nominations revealed

This morning brought news of the nominations for the 34th annual Carbonell Awards, South Florida's version of the Tonys or the Joseph Jefferson Awards or the Helen Hayes Awards or however you want to look at them -- though I think by now the Carbonells are as well-known nationally.  I say "news" because I'm not on the nominating/judging panel, so the long list of names was just as much of a surprise to me as to anyone who wasn't in the secret room last night where the tough decisions got made.

For a full list of those honored with nominations, check out my online story.

I'm posting a photo of Paul Tei and Gregg Weiner (and Amy Elane Anderson) in GableStage's Speed-the-Plow, because both guys have reason to smile today. Tei got nominated as best director for Broadsword at his own company, Mad Cat, and for his leading performance in Speed-the-Plow.  Weiner did even better: a best actor nod for Dumb Show at Promethean, two best supporting nominations for A Doll's Houseat Palm Beach Dramaworks and Farragut Northat GableStage, and a chance to share in a best ensemble win for Farragut North or Broadsword.  Wonder if Weiner, who played the devil in Broadsword, really does have magical powers....Just kidding, but I'm thinking he'll be buying a lot of drinks for his friends come April 12, which is when the winners will be revealed.

All in all, it's a pretty solid list of nominations, though I would have paid more attention to Rock 'n' Roll and Dead Man's Cell Phone at Mosaic, and might have pushed for The Glass Menagerie or Mauritiusat New Theatre. 

Amy London will again direct the Carbonell Awards show, which happens at 7:30 p.m. April 12 in the Amaturo Theater at the Broward Center.  Tickets go on sale Friday and cost $25 ($20 each for groups of 10 or more).  Check it out (on Friday) at the Broward Center's site.