Weekend arts forecast: So what else is going on?

The world seems to be quaking as pop icon Taylor Swift’s three-day stand at Raymond James Stadium begins.

Swift performs tonight, Friday and Saturday, and all shows are officially sold out. That’s 55,000 seats per concert. “Resale” tickets are out there if you’re desperate. They will cost you.

Here’s the Raymond James Stadium website.

Non-Taylor Swift concerts

It is the weekend for the 2023 Tampa Bay Blues Festival, held in glorious green Vinoy Park on the bayfront. Robert Cray, Tab Benoit, Tower of Power, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Ana Popovic and others headline the three-day bash (it starts tonight). Here’s our story from earlier in the week.

Punk rock icon Laura Jane Grace plays a solo acoustic concert Sunday at the Floridian Social Club. We spoke with Grace this week; read that interview here.

Largo’s Central Park Performing Arts Center continues to bring in surprisingly cool concerts – to wit, Americana singer/songwriter Iris DeMent will be there Sunday (yes, the Iris Dement who sang stunning duets with John Prine, among others). Find tickets here.

The jam band Umphrey’s McGee is at Jannus Live tonight (Thursday, April 13). Find tickets here.

The Tampa-based Latin Jazz Knights Band performs Saturday, 7 to 9:30 p.m., in the atrium of the Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Find details and tickets here.

Master musician Jake Shimabukuro – he plays ukulele like a solid-gold rock star – returns to the Capitol Theatre Friday. Tickets here. We spoke with Jake a few years ago. Check it out here.

Actor and comedian Rob Schneider is back again, this time for a show Saturday at the Tampa Theatre. Tickets.

Find the Nashville Americana trio The Lone Bellow (Love Songs for Losers) at the Capitol Theatre Sunday. Tickets.

Jazz at the Ballroom is at the Palladium Theater Sunday. It’s a touring show with musicians and singers performing tunes from the Great American Songbook and more. Details and tickets are here.

Where’s the orchestra?

It’s “Wild West” weekend for The Florida Orchestra. Daniel Black conducts the program – Saturday night at the Mahaffey Theater, Sunday night at Ruth Eckerd Hall – filed with, among others, theme music from Western movies and TV shows (Dances With Wolves, How the West Was Won, plus Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, works by Copland, John Williams and James Newton Howard). Find tickets here.

On theater stages

Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, The Newsroom) wrote the recent critically-lauded Broadway adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The show is on the road, with Richard (The Waltons) Thomas as stalwart Southern lawyer Atticus Finch. Catch it in Morsani Hall, inside Tampa’s David A. Straz Center, today through Sunday. Showtimes vary – tickets and details are here.

We spoke with Thomas about To Kill a Mockingbird – find that interview here.

Yet another re-imagining: Running through April 23 at freeFall Theatre is Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery, comic playwright Ken Ludwig’s frantic adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Find details and tickets here.

The late Terrence McNally, multiple Tony Award-winning playwright, took home a Drama Desk and other prestigious prizes for penning the script to the mid 1990s musical Ragtime. American Stage’s production of this very, very well-regarded show opened Wednesday in Demens Landing Park, where it will be in residence through May 14. Tickets for the company’s annual “park” show are here.

There are less than six degrees of separation here, as Terrence McNally was born in St. Petersburg – at St. Anthony’s Hospital, in fact – on Nov. 3, 1938. His parents managed the Penguin Club, on Treasure Island (later to transform into the Penguin Restaurant). The McNally family left the area in 1941 for Port Arthur, N.Y.

The New York-based Potomac Theatre Project is producing a staged reading of Scenes from an Execution, by Howard Barker, Saturday and Sunday at thestudio@620. Performers include Danielle Skraastad, Christopher Marshall, Emilia Sargent, Jim Sorensen, Jay Hoff and Ned Averill-Snell. It’s free, but tickets are required. Get all the details here.

Stageworks Theatre has a staged reading of the classic comedy Arsenic and Old Lace Friday and Saturday nights. Tickets for the fundraising performances are here.

The Weekend arts forecast appears every Thursday in the Catalyst. 

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