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Stage
Hot Ticket
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 17, 2003
Life as she sees it
Flash Rosenberg is a photographer and cartoonist who has taken to the stage in Camping in the Bewilderness. Incorporating slide images into her one-woman show, she has been likened to "a comic Simone de Beauvoir working at a deli counter, dissecting a slice of pizza to explain failed romance." Rosenberg's solutions to problems include: tying a helium balloon around her turtle to take him for a walk, writing her phone number on a cracker to test a suitor and baking bread as a tool of time management.
Camping in the Bewilderness runs from Friday through April 27 in the Shimberg Playhouse of Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Show times are 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $15.50. (813) 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045 or www.tbpac.org.
-- JOHN FLEMING, Times performing arts critic
Festival of Living Music fills local venues
In three concerts, the Tampa Bay Composers' Forum presents the annual Festival of Living Music, featuring works of bay area composers and prize winners from around the country in its chamber music competition. The first concert is by students at 12:30 p.m. today in Humanities 117 at St. Petersburg College, 66th Street and Fifth Avenue N, followed at 3:30 by a workshop with Harvard University faculty composer James Yannatos. Both events are free.
The Friday and Saturday concerts are at the Palladium in downtown St. Petersburg. At 7:30 p.m. Friday, works by forum members Peter Blauvelt, Kendall Burnham, A. Paul Johnson, James Kilgore, David Manson and Vernon Taranto Jr. are on the agenda.
The prize-winning compositions will be heard at 7:30 p.m. Saturday. First prize: Steven Gates of Pasadena, Calif. (Fantasy for cello and piano); second prize: Karim Al-Zand, left, of Houston (String Quartet No. 2); third prize: Tamar Muskal, right, of New York City (Dmamah for flute, cello and piano). Also on the program is a string quartet by Yannatos.
Admission to the Palladium concerts: $4-$8. (727) 822-3590 or www.palladiumtheater.com.
-- JOHN FLEMING, Times performing arts critic
Break out your boogie shoes
[Publicity photo]
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People tend to forget that Saturday Night Fever was not a musical. The 1977 movie was a gritty drama about dead-end kids in Brooklyn, and the disco hits were background music. So when the movie was adapted for the stage, a pivotal decision had to be made. Obviously, the whole reason for making the musical was to exploit the popularity of the soundtrack's double album, which sold more than 30-million copies, but none of the characters in the film actually sang. That was left to the Bee Gees, Yvonne Elliman and the Trammps, among others.
The actors sing the songs in the musical, which has two performances this weekend in Clearwater. As a business proposition, the show was inevitable, given the shortage of fresh ideas in big-budget musical theater. It's part of a trend to package pop songs for the stage. Movin' Out, Twyla Tharp's dance musical to Billy Joel songs, is the latest.
Saturday Night Fever plays at 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday at Ruth Eckerd Hall. Tickets: $35-$45. (727) 791-7400 or www.rutheckerdhall.com.
-- JOHN FLEMING, Times performing arts critic
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