Tampa Bay’s newest shows are ‘Weird’ and ‘Gorey’

Despite a similarity to the Haunted Mansion attraction at Walt Disney World, the latest from St. Petersburg’s American Stage isn’t a Halloween shriek-a-thon.

The show, according to director Anthony Gervais, “is not scary. It’s kid-friendly. Bring the whole family.”

It is, he says, just plain weird.

Opening Thursday, Weird in St. Pete is what theater people call a “promenade roaming show,” meaning it’s not a sit-down-and-watch experience in an auditorium. It takes place in the myriad brightly-colored rooms of the FloridaRAMA art experience; conducted by tour guides, the audience moves with the show.

In different sections of FloridaRAMA are various characters from local folklore, including writer Jack Kerouac, St. Pete co-founder Peter Demens, and Mary Reeser, who, it is believed, “spontaneously combusted” inside her downtown apartment in 1951. American Stage’s producing artistic director Helen R. Murray wrote the script.

“I don’t want to give too much away, but there is a lovely element of back-and-forth,” Gervais says. “There is some conversation between the actors and the patrons at times. Which is, of course, optional.”

It’s the spiritual cousin to last season’s Gervais-directed 10 Ways to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse, which American Stage set in the wilds of Boyd Hill Nature Preserve. At night.

“That was my first foray into immersive theater,” the director explains. “It really does allow me to flex some different creative muscles in structuring these things. Because it’s totally different.”

Immersive, interactive productions are one way of attracting new, perhaps younger, audiences.

“I’m thinking that it’s yet another opportunity for some folks who might not go to the theater, or think that that they’re interested in theater, to see something that excites them,” Gervais says.

Weird in St. Pete is approximately 50 minutes long. A new performance begins every half-hour.

Which means, like the Haunted Mansion, there’s a “people-moving” aspect to the show. “I told the actors, we’re doing a play and we’re also kind of running a relay race here. We’ve got to hit our beats, and play our moments and serve the story – and we’ve also got to get that baton passed to keep the ship running. So that the next show stays on time.”

The cast includes Jonny O’Brien, Sarah Beth Saho, Culver Casson, Stephen Riordan, Edward Leonard, Dylan Barlowe and MacKenzie Aaryn.

Find showtimes and tickets here.

The gang’s all here: The cast of Jobsite’s “Gorey Stories.” Image: Stage Photography of Tampa.

These stories are Gorey

A series of vignettes based on the rather unsettling pen-and-ink drawings of the late Edward Gorey, the “neo-gothic cabaret” Gorey Stories opens Friday (with previews tonight and Thursday) in a Jobsite Theatre production at the Shimberg Playhouse (Straz Center) in Tampa.

The Jobsite company, which prides itself on putting up spooky, weird stuff every October, produced Gorey Stories in 2007, and again in 2011.

“That’s quite a while ago,” says artistic director David M. Jenkins. “It’s not like people just saw it. There are a whole lot of people who’ve clearly become fans of Jobsite since 2013 or thereafter. And they’ve heard all these crazy stories.”

It’s a series of vignettes, some of them musical. In a way, this version of Gorey Stories shares a through-line with the company’s successful run of Shockheaded Peter in 2021. “You can call Shockheaded Peter the colorized cousin of Gorey Stories,” Jenkins suggests. “There are a lot of things, aesthetically, with how we’re using puppets and marionettes, and things like that. Shockheaded Peter really upped what we’d ever done before. And now we’re going back and applying those things to Gorey Stories.”

What Jobsite didn’t have, in those earlier times, was musical director Jeremy Douglass, whose underscore, incidental and show music has become an integral part of the whole Jobsite-bizarro experience.

The idea, Jenkins says, was “We’ve done the weird with Jeremy; let’s go back and revisit this thing with him.”

The cast includes many returning Jobsite favorites – Katrina Stevenson, Colleen Cherry, Spencer Meyers, Giles Davies, Summer Bohnenkamp and Jonathan Harrison.

Jenkins, who directed the production, has just this week taken over the lead role in The Boy Who Loved Batman at the next-door Jaeb Theatre. Kari Goetz took over last-days supervision of Gorey Stories.

“I’ve been rehearsing Batman during the day, and going into Gorey Stories at night,” Jenkins explains.

“This is burning the candle like crazy. But if you get the call, you get the call.”

Find showtimes and tickets here.