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Stage: hot ticket
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 17, 2002
Turning an execution into vaudeville
The Sacco and Vanzetti case is more current today than ever -- at least in the Tampa Bay area. Last year, Opera Tampa premiered Anton Coppola's opus on the anarchists who were executed for the murder of a payroll guard after the biggest trial of the 1920s. Now Louis Lippa's Sacco and Vanzetti: A Vaudeville is being staged by Gorilla Theatre.
Lippa sets his play in Sacco and Vanzetti's prison cell two hours before their execution in Massachusetts in 1927. Why "a vaudeville" about the Italian martyrs?
"The more I researched their history, the more incredibly absurd to the point of 'tragic-comedy' it became," Lippa writes. "All those weird personalities -- witnesses, judge, prosecutor -- all those clowns and Keystone Cops events struck my imagination as a kind of vaudeville, ending in the execution of two innocent men."
Bill Martinez, left, and Sean Sanczel star in the Gorilla production, which opens tonight and runs weekends through Feb. 3. Tickets: $19 and $22. (813) 879-2914.
Italian guitarist plays classics
Franco Platino, who is from Sardinia, Italy, won the Golden Guitar award for the best Italian classical guitar recording of 2000 for his debut on the Naxos label. For his next recording, the guitarist will team with flutist Susan Glaser (onetime member of the Florida Orchestra) on Robert Beaser's Mountain Songs for Koch International Records.
Platino plays works of Scarlatti, Bach, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Paganini and others at 8 p.m. Friday in the Student Services Building Auditorium on the Dale Mabry campus of Hillsborough Community College, across from Raymond James Stadium in Tampa. Tickets are $7.
This is the second recital in the 2001-02 Florida Guitar Alliance series, sponsored by La Bella strings. Subsequent performances will be by Martha Masters Feb. 1 and Claudio Marcotulli March 1, both at HCC. For information, call Richard Long at (813) 988-2734.
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