With more than 230 films (including shorts) being shown during this year’s 14th annual Sarasota Film Festival, and with lots of filmmakers and stars in attendance, it’s impossible to even begin to cover it all. But let’s talk about a few of the opening weekend activities before we move on to the busy week to [...]

Eleanor Handley, Will Little and Michael Satow in Florida Studio Theatre’s Jericho. Photo by Maria Lyle For many of us, once the first few days and months after the 9/11 attacks passed, we returned as much as possible to our normal lives (aside from dealing with tighter airport security). But for those who lost loved [...]

The FSU/Asolo Conservatory’s Cloud Nine runs through April 22. You don’t have to think too deeply to enjoy Cloud Nine, the current FSU/Asolo Conservatory production in the Cook Theatre—you can enjoy much of the evening simply at a comedic level. But then you’d be missing a lot of what playwright Caryl Churchill has to say [...]

The Golden Apple Dinner Theatre presents Oliver! Photo by Cliff Roles. It’s a good year for Charles Dickens—a celebration of his birth 200 years ago has brought many tributes, including the current PBS Masterpiece Theatre production of his Great Expectations starring Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham. Here in Sarasota, the Golden Apple Dinner Theatre does [...]

The premise of a contest with a variety of people competing to win a new truck—by keeping one hand on it during a marathon session that tests all of their endurance—is one with dramatic and comedic potential. Not all of that potential is realized in Venice Theatre’s Stand by Your Van, but this play, developed [...]

Mark Zeisler and JD Taylor in Red. It’s notoriously difficult to successfully stage plays centered on either a writer or a visual artist; so much of the work goes on inside the creative mind, hard to show during the process. It’s slightly easier when the artist is a painter, who throws around colors and commentary [...]

The legend of singer Johnny Cash still looms large nearly a decade after his death, and a strong contingent of fans turned out for opening night of the Cash-based musical Ring of Fire, at the Manatee Players Riverfront Theatre. I doubt many of them were disappointed by this evening packed with memorable Cash and traditional [...]

Emilio Delgado, Frankie J . Alvarez and Mercedes  Herrero in Asolo Rep’s Hamlet, Prince of Cuba. The works of Shakespeare perhaps more than any other playwright are open to vastly differing artistic interpretations, and that’s held true especially in productions of Hamlet. Settings, costumes and staging have varied much over the centuries, at the least [...]

Lilian Moore, Jason Kimble and Carolyn Zaput in Noises Off. I first saw playwright Michael Frayn’s Noises Off nearly 30 years ago in London, and can still recall laughing until the tears came to my eyes. I’ve seen this onstage-backstage farce a number of times since then, in productions with varying degrees of success, but [...]

De’Zhon Fields in WBTT’s Sammy Tonight! On the one hand, it’s a shame that Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe wasn’t able to present a biographical musical about entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. as originally planned (because of another show that beat them to the rights to his story). The man’s life was certainly packed with drama, from [...]