American Stage snags Anna in the Tropics, fresh off Broadway, to kick off its new schedule of award-winning works.
By JOHN FLEMING
Published February 22, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - American Stage will open its 2004-05 season with a Pulitzer Prize-winning play set in an Ybor City cigar factory, Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz.
"There is something attractive about opening our season with something new and interesting," said Todd Olson, artistic director of the theater, which released the season lineup today. The Broadway production of Anna in the Tropics, awarded last year's Pulitzer for drama, was scheduled to close today, after only 113 performances. The play's short run allowed American Stage to secure performance rights in time for next season.
Figuring that Cruz's play would be on Broadway longer and unavailable to regional theaters, Olson had planned to open the season with The Drawer Boy, a popular new work by Canadian playwright Michael Healy.
"On Jan. 4, after we just had a board meeting at which we announced the season, with Drawer Boy on it, (Cruz's agent) called to say that we could have Anna," Olson said. "We did some fast footwork and made the change. We'll save Drawer Boy for another time."
Olson probably will direct Anna, the first work by a Latin-American playwright to win the Pulitzer for drama. It tells what happens when a lector reads Anna Karenina to the factory workers and their lives begin to mirror Tolstoy's novel.
Cruz's play, which premiered in 2002 at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, received strong reviews there and in productions in New Jersey, Chicago and southern California before falling afoul of New York critics who, for the most part, gave it lukewarm notices.
The play's impressionistic, lyrical style seemed out of place in such a large venue as Broadway's Royale Theatre. All previous productions were in small theaters. Olson thinks it will be ideal for American Stage's intimate 140-seat space.
Cruz, born in Cuba, raised in Miami and now living in New York, will be in Tampa in March when Anna in the Tropics is the subject of the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library program "One Community, One Book: Tampa-Hillsborough Reads."
Metamorphoses, Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of Ovid's telling of Greek and Roman myths, is the second show on American Stage's 26th season. A surprise Broadway hit in 2001 that won the Tony Award for best new play, the staging features a large pool of water in which much of the performance takes place.
"I think it will be a great challenge, but we want to raise our artistic bar with plays like this," Olson said.
David Auburn's Proof, which won both a Pulitzer and a Tony, is also on the schedule, having once been announced for the 2002-03 season at the theater, then removed when rights went to Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota. "It's a good play, and there was a sense that Proof should have been here," Olson said.
American Stage will put on a pair of musical revues in the Palladium Theater, a 1,000-seat venue: 8-Track: The Sounds of the '70s by Rick Seeber, and the premiere of I Left My Heart: A Salute to Tony Bennett by Olson and David Grapes, whose previous show, My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra, has been a hit around the country. Olson will direct the Sinatra revue for American Stage at the Palladium this summer.
Olson explained that putting on such potentially popular revues in the larger space was "a strategic move" to generate extra revenue for the theater's biggest production of the season, Shakespeare in the Park, Much Ado About Nothing this season (opening April 16) and yet to be announced for 2005.
Also on the schedule are Golf with Alan Shepard, a play about four old friends bantering and philosophizing their way through 18 holes of "the cursed game," and The Exonerated, a series of stories of people who were convicted of capital crimes and then later acquitted and released.
Olson said the current season, his first as artistic director, has gone well so far. "Every show we've done has made its numbers (ticket revenue projections) and more," he said. "Critically, every show has garnered much more good than not."
The SantaLand Diaries was especially strong at the box office, with net income of more than $20,000, said Olson, who plans to bring back Brandon Boyd in David Sedaris' mordant Christmas tale as a nonsubscription special for a week next season.
Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz (Sept. 10-Oct. 17); Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman (Nov. 12-Dec. 11); 8-Track: The Sounds of the '70s by Rick Seeber (Jan. 21-30); I Left My Heart: A Salute to Tony Bennett by David Grapes and Todd Olson (Feb. 4-13); Golf with Alan Shepard by Carter Lewis (Feb. 25-April 3); Proof by David Auburn (May 27-July 3); The Exonerated by Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen (July 22-Aug. 21).
