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Stage
Trading 'Hairspray' for a weekend party
By LANE DEGREGORY
Published August 17, 2006
She gets strangled on stage and thrown to the ground. She makes out with a tall redhead, writhes in his lap. And in one show-stopping number, she drops into a painful split. A year after making her Broadway debut in Hairspray, actor Michelle Dowdy returns to St. Petersburg this weekend to perform in the musical Wild Party. Four performances of the racy Andrew Lippa show will be held at the Palladium Theater Friday through Sunday. Dowdy, 19, is still understudy to the lead in Hairspray. She landed the Broadway role the same week she graduated from the Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High. She and a group of friends, mostly Gibbs alumni, decided to return to their hometown and put on a play. All of the actors, directors and producers are between 15 and 21. Set in the 1920s, Wild Party is based on a book-length poem written in the period. The musical, which debuted off-Broadway in 2000, tells the story of a vaudeville dancer and clown who want to throw the ultimate Prohibition-era party. Much of the material is R-rated, including scenes of a lesbian trolling after a minor girl and two brothers who are gay lovers. Because of her Broadway schedule, Dowdy could not take on a leading role in Wild Party. She has 10 lines and sings three songs as a character called Mae. The show is directed by Jamieson Lindenburg, who is Michelle's roommate in New York. Glenn Grieves is the producer. Both men are Gibbs High graduates who are studying theater at Marymount Manhattan College. Leading roles in Wild Party are held by Ann Cornelius, a student at Shenandoah Conservatory; John Bambery, who's studying at Boston Conservatory; Arienna Hoeppner, a musical theater major at the University of Miami; and Leonard Williams, who is studying musical theater at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. $10-$15. (727) 822-3590 or www.mypalladium.org. - LANE DeGREGORY, Times staff writer
[Last modified August 15, 2006, 10:22:18]
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