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© St. Petersburg Times, published February 28, 2002
Music and enchantment
As the song says, it's a tale as old as time. An enchantress casts a spell that transforms a self-centered young prince into a frightful beast. Only if he learns to love, and is loved in return, will the spell be broken and the beast -- and his castle full of servants turned household implements -- revert to human form.
That, of course, is the story line of Beauty and the Beast, which has never quite lived down the paranoia about Disney on Broadway that greeted the musical when it opened in 1994. Julie Taymor's imaginative staging of The Lion King changed minds about whether the movie and theme park juggernaut belonged in live theater, and all three Disney shows -- Aida is the other -- continue on Broadway.
Beauty, which first played the bay area in 1998, opens Tuesday and runs through March 17 at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Tickets: $23.50-$65.50. (813) 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045 or online at www.tbpac.org.
-- JOHN FLEMING, Times performing arts critic
Pianist and composer Robert Helps, who died at 73 in November, will be remembered through some of his favorite music, including works of Faure, Satie, Poulenc and John Ireland. There will also be music of Helps himself, of course, as well as poetry, reminiscence and humor in a memorial at 2 p.m. Sunday in Theatre 1 on the Tampa campus of the University of South Florida, where he taught for more than two decades.
-- JOHN FLEMING, Times performing arts critic
The hothouse poetry of Tennessee Williams is given a European twist in the Gorilla Theatre production of The Glass Menagerie, with Polish-born director Jan Sycz staging the classic. Joanna Sycz, the director's daughter, plays the fragile Laura Wingfield, center, whose faded Southern belle of a mother, Amanda (Julia Flood), cannot cope with life. Carl Donovan is the movie-loving Tom, a self-portrait of the playwright as a young man.
The Glass Menagerie opens tonight and continues Thursday through Sunday through March 17. Tickets: $19 and $22. (813) 879-2914.
-- JOHN FLEMING, Times performing arts critic