March in the arts

Here we go again, starting a new month with just a few “live” performance events on the schedule, all of them for limited-attendance audiences. As we approach the one-year anniversary of the date Covid shut everything down (that’d be March 13), things are picking up, but they’re picking up slowly.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We’ll get there, and we’ll get there safely. Until then …

When longtime Clearwater resident Chick Corea died in February, the hope of any future reunions with the other members of Return to Forever, the pioneering jazz fusion band he’d put together in the early 1970s, died too.

Return to Forever launched Stanley Clarke, Lenny White, Al Di Meola and a handful of others into the name-recognition stratosphere.

Guitarist Di Meola was 19 years old when Corea recruited him for Return to Forever, as a replacement for the departing Bill Connors. Corea, Clarke, White and Di Meola constituted what’s still considered the band’s “classic” lineup, recording the albums No Mystery and Romantic Warrior. Although they went their separate ways in 1977, the quartet reunited several times over the decades.

Di Meola – who enjoyed a prolific and successful solo career post-Return to Forever – brings his band to the Central Park Performing Arts Center March 27 (4 and 8 p.m. shows). Tickets are here.

Message to Chick: Wish you were here.

More music

This Saturday, March 6, Americana multi-instrumentalist Darrell Scott performs at the Safety Harbor Art and Music Center. Scott is well known for his work with Guy Clark, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle and others of the upper echelon – and he was hand-picked by Robert Plant for his Band of Joy. Tickets are here.

The Palladium Theater’s re-jiggered streaming concert series starts Friday (March 5) with a one-hour concert from the Mile-End Trio (chamber musicians Jeffrey Multer, Julian Schwarz and Marika Bournaki). Next up this month are pre-recorded shows from jazzman Jeremy Carter and blues guitarist Damon Fowler. Click here for the details on all.

The Ruth Eckerd Hall/Capitol Theatre March music schedule took a few cancellation and postponement hits last week – par for the contemporary course, really – and these are the survivors, the shows that remain on the calendar: Country’s Aaron Lewis this Friday (March 5); pianist Jim Brickman (March 14); blues guitar great Joe Bonamassa (March 29). Oh, and several tribute acts. The March calendar (view it here) also lists Sister’s Easter Catechism (March 6), comedian Paula Poundstone (March 20) and Beautiful – the Carole King Musical (March 23).

The extraordinary “lounge orchestra” Pink Martini returns to the Mahaffey Theater March 29. Dapper pianist, arranger and bandleader Thomas Lauderdale fronts the band, which plays multi-lingual, international music and lesser-known American chestnuts, with enchanting vocalist China Forbes out front. Tickets are here.

From Opera Tampa: Troubadour’s Tale, an abridged take on Verdi’s Il Trovatore, March 19-21 on the Straz Center’s Riverwalk stage. St. Petersburg Opera Company returns March 26-28 with March Madness, another “Pop-up” show at Opera Central, Cage Brewing and the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg (outdoors).

TFO music

The Florida Orchestra’s innovative Mahaffey Theater concert series continues with “Serenity,” a program designed by musical director Michael Francis as “precious moments of beauty and peace” on the anniversary of the pandemic’s arrival. Sure enough, “Serenity” – scheduled for March 13 and 14 – includes Barber’s otherworldly “Adagio For Strings,” Albinoni’s Concerto for Oboe No. 2, Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” and Ahmed Alabaca’s Across the Calm Waters of Heaven – A Piece for Peace, written after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., in 2015.

TFO also delivers Mozart’s Serenade No. 10 (Gran Partita) for winds, a concert pairing Haydn’s Trumpet Concert with Beethoven’s Symphony No 1, a Percussion Ensemble concert and a Coffee Concert spotlighting works by French composers. All details and tickets are here.

And now, this

The next drive-in show from freeFall Theatre won’t debut until April 2 – more about this in the coming days – but Stageworks is on deck March 12 with its second show since returning to socially-distanced performance: American Son, a drama by Christopher Demos-Brown.

On March 18, Lab Theatre Project (Ybor City) will debut An Evening With Eberlein, three short plays by Chris Eberlein.

Artists for Conservation: International Exhibit of Nature in Art, with works by 60 artists celebrating nature and spotlighting conservation opportunities, opens March 10 at the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art.