As year-end traditions go, the awarding of the “dubious achievement” Hapsters for theatrical highs and lows can be traced back to 1994. So take a stroll down this year’s memory lane with us and remember, the decision of the judges — OK, me — is final.
Best Pulitzer Prognostication: Anyone can produce a play that has already won the Pulitzer Prize. Palm Beach Dramaworks does it all the time. The real skill is in selecting a script before it earns the prize. The Caldwell Theatre pulled off that nifty trick, mounting a top-notch production of Bruce Norris’s politically incorrect Clybourne Park in January, three months before it copped a Pulitzer.
Best Shameless Box Office Grab: Early in the year, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre discovered the commercial value of casting kids from the community in its production of The Sound of Music, assuring ticket sales from the tots’ families and neighbors. At the end of 2011, the theater doubled down on the idea, signing up 240 local youngsters to appear in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, in alternating teams of 30. One wonders what is next. A permanent rotation of Oliver! and Annie?
Best Reason to See Red: Early in the year, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre was crowing about a perceived coup, having snagged the performance rights to John Logan’s Tony Award-winning play Red, with the promise that it would be the Florida premiere. But no one told Coral Gables’s GableStage, which also put the play in its season in November, three months before the planned Maltz production. Oh, well: the Maltz can still brag about having the Palm Beach County premiere of Red.
Worst Theater News of 2012: Nominated several times for the regional Tony Award, Florida Stage grew to become (as it loved to state) “the nation’s largest professional theatre producing exclusively new American work” in its 24 years of operation. Addressing his theatergoers in announcing his new season, producing director Lou Tyrrell said in a press release, “This year, for our twenty-fifth, I think they might expect a few extra little surprises along the way.”
Indeed. In June, just before the scheduled opening of its summer show, Ella, Florida Stage abruptly announced it was closing permanently and filing for bankruptcy, leaving a giant hole in the area’s theater community. The cause? Audience rebellion and attrition from the company’s first season at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach.
The Best Theater News of 2012: Tiny (an adjective producing artistic director Bill Hayes hates to hear when describing his company) Palm Beach Dramaworks moved into new larger, better-equipped, more comfortable digs, trading up from 84 seats to 218 at the new Don and Ann Brown Theatre (the former Cuillo Centre for the Arts). If you are unsure of the theater’s location in downtown West Palm Beach, look for World of Beer and it is across the street to the west.
A year earlier, Dramaworks announced it would open on 11-11-11, a risky declaration with any major construction project, and darned if it didn’t open on time and on budget. It is the kind of well-planned, prudent renovation that makes coming up with punch lines very difficult.
The “So Nice To Have You Back Where You Belong” Award: No, not Dolly Gallagher Levi, but Michael Hall, who came out of retirement to return to the Caldwell Theatre, where he was the founding artistic director, to stage its production of Next Fall. And according to Hall, he is in search of a good script to direct there again.
The “So Nice To Have You Back Where You Belong” Award, No. 2: To Nancy Barnett, for her return to the stage in the Caldwell Theatre’s After the Revolution. She had given up acting to join the staff of Florida Stage, eventually becoming the company’s managing director. And considering how that ended, it is fair to assume she is a better actress than administrator.
The “So Nice To Have You Back Where You Belong” Award, No. 3: Jan McArt, lately a professor and producer or theater at Lynn University in Boca Raton, could not pass up the opportunity to get back onstage in a staged reading of Murder on Gin Lane by Carbonell judge Tony Finstrom. The fact that she loaned them the use of the Wold Performing Arts Center stage may have something to do with the casting, but it was refreshing to see her back in action.
The “I Want To Be A Producer” Award: Three guys from Boca Raton, all in their 20s — Philip Morgaman, Frankie J. Grande and Brian Kapetanis — became real-life Max Bialystocks, producing the $3 million Broadway revival of Born Yesterday, which garnered two Tony Award nominations. True, they lost all of their investors’ money, but they had a great time and they will probably be back producing another show soon.
Worst-Kept Pseudonymous Secret: In Florida Stage’s fifth annual 1st Stage Festival of New Works, a biography of Edgar Allen Poe, called Poet (get it?) by Kew Henry, was among the scripts read. The author turned out to be Kathleen Holmes (same initials, get it?), wife of founding producing director, Lou Tyrrell. There is no truth to the rumor that the play caused the demise of Florida Stage, but it might have been a small contributing factor.
Best Onstage Projectile Vomiting: Kim Ostrenko, for tossing her cookies eight times a week with unnerving authenticity in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage at the Caldwell.
Worst Performance by a Seven-Time Emmy Award Winner: To Ed Asner, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the Dust Bowl-dry history lesson FDR, which managed to include every wrong note of one-person shows, plus a wobbly-accented, fumbling impersonation of the 32nd president. Fortunately, the Caldwell Theatre made a little profit on the booking, which ran a too-long, one-week’s time.
Best (as in Longest) Delayed Opening of a Theater Company: Despite its generally known money woes, the Caldwell Theatre startled the theater community by announcing the creation of a second stage program in Boca’s Mizner Park. This so-called Caldwell 2 was to have opened in early September with Anne Nelson’s The Guys, a mournful tale commemorating 9/11. But shortly before the launch, the production was scrapped, with the dubious claim that audiences would not be interested in the subject after the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks.
So the opening of Caldwell 2 was deferred to December, with a more upbeat selection of the comic Reindeer Monologues. That too was scrubbed, with artistic director Clive Cholerton citing insufficient box office revenues for its mainstage show, After the Revolution. The Caldwell 2 has two more time slots in 2012, but the Vegas odds are rising that the series ever happens.
Best Glasses-Steaming Debut: Palm Beach State College coed Georgina Castens made her professional stage debut in Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll as the nightie-garbed Southern nymphet title character in the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival’s production. Artistic director Kermit Christman knew he had the right play when he read that the 1956 movie version had been condemned by the powerful Catholic League of Decency, and that Time Magazine called it the “dirtiest American-made motion picture that had ever been legally exhibited.”
Castens made a promising debut, but her production photos — still floating around the Internet — are sensational.
Most Optimistic New Company Line-Up in a Miserable Economy: Despite the continuing sluggish economy, Palm Beach County is brimming with new theater companies, or at least announced new companies hoping to open in 2012.
There is Kim St. Leon’s Parade Productions, with definite dates in late January-early February for Brooklyn Boy by Donald Margulies at the Mizner Park Cultural Center. There is The Theatre at Arts Garage in Delray Beach, the troupe headed by Lou Tyrrell emerging from the ashes of Florida Stage with March-April dates for a new Woody Guthrie revue.
Independent producer Alan Jacobson has announced plans to lease Florida Stage’s former space in Manalapan, launching Plaza Theatre in February with a one-woman revue starring Donna McKechnie. And last, and probably least, Gary Waldman and Jamison Troutman, producers of several failed theater ventures locally, are returning to the area to found the Boynton Beach Theater Company. The best it can muster for a premiere is the “long-awaited” revival of Snow Birds, a lightweight revue aimed at the condo crowd, beginning Feb. 1.
Happy New Year, everyone!