Venice Theatre

Right touch of crass

December 10, 2009
by This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , Sarasota Herald-Tribune

An agoraphobic’s husband is dating the stripper in the trailer next door until her aerosol-inhaling ex-boyfriend shows up with a gun.

Yes, it's trailer trash soap opera in the fun and catchy musical "The Great American Trailer Park Musical" in the intimate Venice Theatre Cabaret.

The show gives audiences a tongue-in-cheek look at the residents of the Armadillo Acres trailer park in Stark, Fla., where no seances are allowed in the parking lot.

The action is overseen by a comical and strong-voiced trio of women -- Melanie Souza, Laura Priscilla Hoffman and Heather Kopp -- who function as a countryfied Greek chorus, commenting on trailer park life.

Actor and script form fine union in ‘Wife’

January 9th, 2010
by Jay Handelman, Herald-Tribune

Wearing just a simple black frock, a scarf and pearls around his neck, Jeremy Heideman becomes more than three dozen people in “I Am My Own Wife” at Venice Theatre’s Stage II.

He makes you believe there are many more actors on stage in Doug Wright’s play about the writer’s effort to get to the heart of the true story of a German transvestite who beat the odds and survived the Nazi and Communist regimes in East Germany.

Venice Theatre offers magical mystery

October 1, 2009
by Kim Cool, The Venice Gondolier-Sun

Playwright/director Ron Myroup breathes new life into "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," the opening Generations offering of the season at Venice Theatre.

The cast had the audience on the edge of seats one minute and chuckling the next, as Ichabod Crane (Kyle Luckett), a school teacher with a voracious appetite, found a new career; Brom Bones (Andrew Morgan Larkin Connors) learned to say two magical words to his betrothed; and the Headless Horseman (Zak Evanicki) was reunited with his head.

Based on the Washington Irving ghost story, Myroup's version is a delightful love story with a twist in honor of All Hallows Eve.

There's fun in fraud with Venice Theatre's Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

November 16, 2009
by Kay Kipling, Sarasota Magazine

Unless you caught the touring production at Van Wezel a year or so ago, Venice Theatre’s current staging of the show Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is the first chance locals have had here to see this musical adaptation of two earlier comedy films. And it’s welcome fun.

As with the films, Bedtime Story and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, this production introduces us to a couple of con men, Lawrence Jameson (Chris Caswell) and Freddy Benson (Douglas Landin), who are both working a stretch of the French Riviera (it’s really more of a fantasy land), reeling in their all-too-willing female victims with one line or another. Lawrence is older and sophisticated; Freddy is cruder and yet still successful to some extent, at least scaring up meal money with heart-rending stories of his grandmother’s operation, etc.

Siding with West Side Story

August 5, 2009
by Kim Cool, Venice Gondolier-Sun

Venice Theatre’s Summer Stock presentation of “West Side Story” is a winner. Beginning with a first-rate cast selected by audition for the theater’s third summer stock season, the choreography, directing, set, sound, lighting, costumes and music literally make a great show greater.

Directed and choreographed by Brad Wages, the summer stock players sang and danced their hearts out, nailing one production number after the other. That they are doing this against a sharp set, enhanced with cyclone fencing cleverly used as scrim and with outstanding lighting by John Michael Andzulis, adds still more to the overall production. The set and excellent costumes were designed by the theater’s multi-award-winning resident costume designer Nicholas Hartman.

Venice Theatre reaches high with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Wednesday, April 15, 2009
By Kay Kipling, Sarasota Magazine

Some works are challenging (especially for a community theater) to present because of “adult” material; some because previous versions of the work loom so large in the collective memory; and some just because of the emotional range demanded of the actors. Edward Albee's Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, now onstage at Venice Theatre’s Stage II, is surely challenging because of all three.

Denied the Pulitzer Prize when it bowed in 1962 because of its “vulgarity” and sexual frankness, famed probably for most because of the film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and almost overwhelming in its swiftly changing moods, Virginia Woolf asks a lot of the VT cast and of the audience as well. (And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that with two intermissions it’s more than three hours long). But while it’s occasionally exhausting, the Venice Theatre production is also rewarding.