2013 – 14 Season

American Theatre Wing

  • National Theatre Company Grant Finalist

Creative Loafing Best of the Bay

  • Best Stage Director, Reader’s Poll – David M. Jenkins
  • Best Set Designer, Reader’s Poll – Brian Smallheer
  • Best Theater Company, Reader’s Poll Runner-Up

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Text by John Cameron Mitchell

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Trask

Directed by David M. Jenkins

Sep. 4 – 29, 2013

Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm

Tickets: $28

Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts

Creative Loafing Best of the Bay

  • Most Winningly Shameless Actor – Spencer Meyers
  • Best Theater Rockers – Jobsite Theater
  • Best Theater Production, Reader’s Poll Runner-Up
  • Best Actress, Reader’s Poll Runner-Up – Amy Gray

This groundbreaking Obie-winning Off-Broadway smash also won multiple awards for its hit film adaptation. It tells the story of “internationally ignored song stylist” Hedwig Schmidt, a fourth-wall smashing East German rock ‘n’ roll goddess who also happens to be the victim of a botched sex-change operation, which has left her with just “an angry inch.”

Macbeth

By William Shakespeare

Adapted and Directed by David M. Jenkins

Oct. 30 – Nov. 24, 2013

Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm

Tickets: $28

Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts

Shakespeare AND Halloween? Yes, please! This new cutting of Shakespeare’s promises to be a razor-sharp treatment focusing in on how the Macbeth and Macduff clans handle power and passions played in front of the ever-present eyes of a certain group of Kindly Ones.

The Hound of the Baskervilles

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Adapted by Peepolykus and Steven Canny

Directed by Katrina Stevenson

Jan. 8 – Feb. 2, 2014

Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm

Tickets: $28

Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts

Creative Loafing Best of the Bay

  • Best Actor, Reader’s Poll Runner-Up – David M. Jenkins

Theatre Tampa Bay Nominated

  • Best Ensemble, Play

Theatre Tampa Bay Recommended

An ancient family curse, a desolate moor, a spectral hound and a deranged killer on the loose. The Hound of the Baskervilles is the most celebrated Holmes story of all, a masterpiece of mystery and suspense. And lord it’s scary… really, really scary.

Crimes of the Heart

By Beth Henley

Directed by Kari Goetz

Mar. 5 – 30, 2014

Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm

Tickets: $28

Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts

Theatre Tampa Bay Recommended

Beth Henley’s winner of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award! Warm-hearted, irreverent, zany and brilliantly imaginative, the play teems with humanity and humor as it examines the plight of three Mississippi sisters betrayed by their passions.

All New People

By Zach Braff

Directed by Paul Potenza

May 7 – Jun. 1, 2014

Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm

Tickets: $28

Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts

Creative Loafing Best of the Bay

  • Best Comedic Performance in a Drama – Jack Holloway

Theatre Tampa Bay Nominated

  • Outstanding Lead Actor, Play – Jack Holloway
  • Outstanding Featured Actress, Play – Elizabeth Fendrick

Theatre Tampa Bay Recommended

It’s the dead of winter, and the summer vacation getaway of Long Beach Island, New Jersey is desolate and blanketed in snow. Charlie is 35, heartbroken, and just wants some time away from the rest of the world. The island ghost-town seems to be the perfect escape until his solitude is interrupted by a motley parade of misfits who show up and change his plans. A hired beauty, the townie fireman, and an eccentric British real-estate agent desperately trying to stay in the country suddenly find themselves tangled together in a beach house where the mood is anything but sunny. From the award-winning writer of Garden State.

Inventing Van Gogh

By Steven Dietz

Directed by Karla Hartley

Jul. 9 – Aug. 3, 2014

Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm

Tickets: $28

Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts

2014 BroadwayWorld Tampa Regional Award

  • Best Director of a Play – Karla Hartley
  • Best Sound Design – Karla Hartley

Creative Loafing Best of the Bay

  • Best Director – Karla Hartley
  • Best Character Actor Who Can Do Anything – Ned Averill-Snell

Theatre Tampa Bay Nominated

  • Outstanding Production, Play
  • Outstanding Featured Actor, Play – Ned Averill-Snell
  • Outstanding Lighting Design – Kaylin Gess

Theatre Tampa Bay Recommended

A haunting and hallucinatory drama about the making of art, Inventing Van Gogh is the story of the final van Gogh self-portrait, painted just before the artist’s death, which has never been seen… until now. Patrick Stone, a contemporary painter, is hired to forge this final masterpiece—and finds himself squaring off, across the years, with van Gogh himself. The result is a compelling mystery about the obsession to create and the fine line that separates truth from myth.

Special Productions

Return to the Forbidden Planet

Book by Bob Carlton, music by various artists

Directed by David M. Jenkins

Co-Produced with The Straz Center

Jun. 12 – Jul. 6, 2014

Thu. – Fri. 8pm; Sat. 4pm & 8pm; Sun. 4pm

Tickets: from $29.50

Jaeb Theatre, Straz Center for the Performing Arts

2014 BroadwayWorld Tampa Regional Award

  • Best Director of a Musical – David Jenkins
  • Best Ensemble Performance in a Musical
  • Best Actress in a Musical – Jaime Giangrande-Holcom
  • Best Featured Actor in a Musical – Spencer Myers
  • Best Set Design – Brian Smallheer
  • Best Costume Design – Katrina Stevenson
  • Best Lighting Design – Mike Wood

Creative Loafing Best of the Bay

  • Best Musical
  • Best Theater Rockers – Jobsite Theater
  • Most Winningly Shameless Actor – Spencer Meyers
  • Best Theater Production, Reader’s Poll
  • Best Lighting Designer, Reader’s Poll – Mike Wood
  • Best Actress, Reader’s Poll Runner-Up – Amy Gray

Theatre Tampa Bay Nominated

  • Outstanding Musical Director – Jana Jones
  • Outstanding Featured Actress, Musical – Jaime Giangrande-Holcom

Theatre Tampa Bay Recommended

Blast off on a routine flight and crash into the planet D’Illyria where a sci-fi version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest set to rock ‘n’ roll golden oldies unfolds with glee. The planet is inhabited by a sinister scientist, Dr. Prospero; his delightful daughter Miranda; Ariel, a faithful robot on roller skates; and an uncontrollable monster, the product of Prospero’s Id.

Ensemble

Job-side Productions

4.48 Psychosis

By Sarah Kane

Directed by Giles Davies

Performed by Nicole Jeannine Smith

Nov. 9 – 23, 2013

Sat. 11 pm, Sun. – Mon. 7 pm

Tickets: $12; $7 with Macbeth tickets stub; FREE for Jobsite season ticket holders.

Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts

Creative Loafing Best of the Bay

  • Best Reason to Take Theater Seriously
4.48 Psychosis is the last play from one of the UK’s most controversial playwrights. It sees the ultimate narrowing of Sarah Kane’s focus in her work. The struggle of the self to remain intact has moved in her work from civil war, into the family, into the couple, into the individual, and finally into the theatre of psychosis: the mind itself.

Reverse Reverse

Written by Jan Farrell, featuring special guest writer April Bender

Directed by Tia Jemison

Mar. 16 – 25, 2014

Sun. – Tue., 8 pm

Tickets: $10; FREE for Jobsite season ticket holders.

Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts

Whether it’s the excitement of finding a new love, rekindling an old love, forbidden love, or all of the above, you will experience it within Reverse Reverse.

A Brief History of Beer

Created, devised, and written by William Glenn and Trish Parry

Directed by Jeffrey Mayhew

Apr. 20 & 27, 2014

Sun., 8 pm

Tickets: $7; FREE for Jobsite season ticket holders.

New World Brewery, Ybor City

A Brief History of Beer is an educational, delicious ramble through the myths and legends surrounding everyone’s favorite beverage! Equal measures theatre, lecture, and surreal drink-a-long game, the Wish founders have combed the records, visited the ruins, and tasted an impossible number of beers to bring you this docudramedy.

The Whole Shabaang!

by Post Dinner Conversation

May. 18, 2014

Sun. 8 pm

Tickets: $10 at the door;

FREE for Jobsite season ticket holders.

Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts

For the first time ever, Tampa’s original long form improv company comes together for one big night in the Shimberg! Featuring their own Tampa-grown style of long form improv, it’s a full force show that pushes the boundaries of comedy and roasts the traditions of improv theater.

A Night of Inappropriately Funny Moments

By April Bender

Jul. 28 – 29, 2014

Mon. – Tue., 8 pm

Tickets: $5 at the door; FREE for Jobsite season ticket holders.

Shimberg Playhouse, Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts

For the first time ever, Tampa’s original long form improv company comes together for one big night in the Shimberg! Featuring their own Tampa-grown style of long form improv, it’s a full force show that pushes the boundaries of comedy and roasts the traditions of improv theater.