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3 weeks ago | 
sarasotamagazine.com | Kay Kipling
When you consider what goes into conceiving and producing a brand-new musical, you have to be impressed that Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe’s artistic team—and its board and supporters—come together to put forth the effort and the hard work, as they did with Ruby last season and are now doing to close this season, with the show Syncopated Avenue.
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3 weeks ago | 
sarasotamagazine.com | Kay Kipling
You can use up a lot of energy being dead, as the cast members in the current national tour of the musical Beetlejuice, now playing at the Van Wezel, must surely have discovered. To say that this adaptation of the 1988 Tim Burton film starring Michael Keaton is running on high-octane fuel would be an understatement.
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1 month ago | 
sarasotamagazine.com | Kay Kipling
As the 2025 Sarasota Film Festival heads into its closing weekend, it’s welcoming to town two creatives involved with the same show: Chris Brancato, executive producer and creator of the MGM+ show Godfather of Harlem, and a new star of the show’s fourth season, Rome Flynn, playing new-to-town real-life drug lord Frank Lucas.
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1 month ago | 
sarasotamagazine.com | Kay Kipling
There are probably, unfortunately, many younger people who don’t know who Oscar Levant was. But for the Asolo Rep audience, chances are a good number recall the musician, raconteur and pianist, as famous for his talk-show television appearances as for his performances in concerts and onscreen.
So they should find playwright Doug Wright’s compacted look at Levant, Good Night, Oscar, now onstage at the Asolo, a refresher, and often refreshing, look at the amusing but troubled Oscar.
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1 month ago | 
sarasotamagazine.com | Kay Kipling
After a 2024-25 Broadway season whose sizzle was somewhat dampened by cancellations due to Hurricane Milton, the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall surged back post-cleanup with shows like Moulin Rouge and the upcoming Beetlejuice. Now, executive director Mary Bensel has announced the coming 2025-26 season, with hopes for no repeats of storm damage.
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1 month ago | 
sarasotamagazine.com | Kay Kipling
Come and meet those dancing feet… no, not the tapping toes of the classic musical 42nd Street, but a different street entirely in Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe’s world premiere tap dance revue Syncopated Avenue.
The show is the brainchild of the troupe’s artistic director Nate Jacobs, spurred on by his meeting several years ago with a young dancer named Lamont Brown while both were working for Norwegian Cruise Line.
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1 month ago | 
sarasotamagazine.com | Kay Kipling
The volunteer singers of the Gulf Coast Community Choir have been lifting their voices in performance for 25 years. Along the way, they’ve also helped to lift the area’s nonprofits, donating proceeds from an annual fund-raising concert to beneficiaries including All Faiths Food Bank, Pines Nursing Home, and Children First, among many others.
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1 month ago | 
sarasotamagazine.com | Kay Kipling
Jersey Boys exists as one of not that-many Broadway musicals that goes beyond the term “jukebox” when presenting the memorable hit songs of a musical performer or group. In telling the story of the rise and fall of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the show gets us inside the times, place and forces that shaped them and their music. No wonder it’s been a critical success as well as a popular one since debuting 20 years ago.
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1 month ago | 
sarasotamagazine.com | Kay Kipling
"Intense" is the word that best describes No One Is Forgotten, now onstage at Urbanite Theatre in its Florida premiere.
This two-hander play by Winter Miller is in your face from the outset. Centered on two women alone in a grim and anonymous cell—in what part of the world, we don’t know—Urbanite’s production immediately tosses us into their predicament, up close and personal.
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1 month ago | 
sarasotamagazine.com | Kay Kipling
It’s been a while since Asolo Rep has presented a play by Irish playwright Brian Friel, and it’s good to have his work back onstage with the current production of Dancing at Lughnasa, which the theater previously presented more than 30 years ago.
There’s also a film version of the piece, which starred (who else?) Meryl Streep.
