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Arts Alive! podcast: Actor Cody Farkas
It’s barely half over, but at this point it looks, theatrically speaking, like 2026 might be remembered as The Year of Cody Farkas.
The Pasco County actor, singer and dancer didn’t exactly appear out of nowhere; he’s performed with Stageworks, the Off-Central and the USF theatre company, as well as Sarasota’s West Coast Black Theatre Troupe.
Since January, however, Farkas has appeared in three shows with Jobsite Theater, including the rock musical Green Day’s American Idiot, opening tonight at the Jaeb Theatre in Tampa’s Straz Center for the Performing Arts.
In this hyper-kinetic, three-ring circus of a musical, he’s Johnny, the erstwhile leader of a gang of three alienated, confused suburban kids looking for more out of life.
The trio is part of a larger ensemble of alienated, confused suburban kids, all of whom dance, thrust and fist-pump, individually and together as a unit, like a school of wary fish not content to be in the same spot for too long.
Based on the 2004 album American Idiot, a “punk rock opera” by the California rock trio Green Day, the play mixes elements of Hair, Rent and Spring Awakening, but has a freshness and spirit unlike anything that came before, or since.
Farkas, whose most recent Jobsite show was the making-of-Jaws play The Shark is Broken (he starred as Richard Dreyfuss) is quick to praise his fellow American Idiot cast members, as well as the triumvirate of creatives who brought the production home: Director David M. Jenkins, Music Director Jeremy Douglass and choreographer Alexander Jones.
Click on the arrow to listen to the conversation.
