A theatrical tragedy: Tampa Rep’s ‘King Lear’ ends its reign early

Covid has claimed another victim: Shakespeare’s most tragic royal character.

Tampa Repertory Theatre’s production of King Lear, which opened Feb. 4 at the University of South Florida, got as far as two performances of a scheduled three-weekend run when one actor after another began testing positive for the coronavirus.

Producers held out hope that things would get better, and the show could go on, but King Lear was officially canceled Tuesday morning.

“We had six cases in the cast,” said artistic associate Jim Sorensen, who was working as the technical director for King Lear. “Nobody was severely affected, nobody was hospitalized. We were prepared for an actor or two to go out, with understudies, but we can’t handle six.”

King Lear had a total cast count of 13.

“It’s not so much that we couldn’t have found actors to possibly read the roles, possibly even perform the roles,” Sorensen added. “We didn’t want to send a bunch of people onstage on book” – meaning with scripts in hand, to walk through the story.

“Maybe one or two would be fine, but the other thing is there was a fair amount of swordplay involved, and most of the major characters had a sword in their hand at some point. So that adds a whole new element of difficulty.”

Ticket refunds are available here.