Here’s what’s behind the curtain this week in Tampa Bay theatre...
FREE LOVE:Improbable Athenaeum (pronounce it “ath-en-eee-uhm”) will present a free, script-in-hand staging of Dorothy L. Sayers’ 1940 comedy Love All this Saturday at 2 p.m. at the newSeminole Heights Branch Library in Tampa. Better known for her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels, Sayers wrote nine plays including Love All, a romp about a romance writer, his mistress and his playwright wife that manages to squeeze a career-versus-family angle into a story about a literary love triangle.
SKIT-CHO-PHRENIA: Composing original music for Jobsite Theater’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (now rehearsing), polymathic local artist J. Elijah Cho is teaching himself the accordion in order to integrate the instrument’s dulcet tones into his eclectic score. Actor/songsmith/writer/producer/blogger Cho also authors theLocal Stages cornucopia of theater events and archives, and is a leader of theSome Sort of Show sketch comedy troupe, for which he is teasing a “big announcement” soon (check back).
Q: HOW IS THE WESTERN BLACK RHINO LIKE EUGENE IONESCO? A: Both are extinct. The rhino outlived the Romanian playwright, perhaps only to prove the absurdist’s point about the meaninglessness of human existence. Tampa theatergoers have a rare opportunity to see one of Ionesco’s best, funniest works this weekend and next in a USF student production of 1959’sRhinoceros, a politically subversive story about villagers transforming into rhinoceri. Seriously.
SKIRT 0, GOAT 1: During rehearsals for New Stage Theatre & Conservatory’s seven-actorHamlet (opening next week), a fugitive goat who had sprung itself from a menagerie kept at Country Day World School in Largo, where the company is in residence, snacked on the skirt of the actress who plays Ophelia. A minor problem, except for the fact that the actress was still wearing it. The goat’s parole has been revoked indefinitely and the skirt remains at large.
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