Weekend spotlight: Big shows in small packages

Theater fans with a penchant for small casts and intimate venues have only to look to downtown St. Petersburg’s The Studio@620 this Memorial Day weekend. Here David Ives’ “two-hander” (that means there’s only two people in the whole show) Venus in Fur enters its final weekend.

And in Tampa, LAB Theater Project’s Cooler (a world premiere black comedy by Craig Houk) is onstage Thursday through Sunday, with more shows on the same schedule through June 1. Cooler is also a two-hander (or … is it? There’s a ghost story in the mix).

Like close-up intensity? Prefer looking right in the performers’ eyes? These are both shows to check out.

With a star turn by St. Pete-born Broadway performer Rachel Prather, Venus in Fur is a late-night sparring match (both verbal and on another level entirely) between a fledgling actress and a stage director (played by Travis Moore).

Cooler pits two formerly famous actors (played by Kyle Stone and Jason Hoolihan) against one another in a battle of wits, fists and egos. The small performance space at LAB has been transformed into a well-appointed “man cave,” and the action inside turns things delightfully claustrophobic.

Schedule and tickets for Venus in Fur.

Schedule and tickets for Cooler.

Meanwhile, Jobsite Theater (in Tampa’s Straz Center) has a cast of six in its relatively small black box theater, the Shimberg Playhouse, for its whimsical and slightly left-of-center production of the poetic The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, as written in 1920 by Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. Schedule and tickets here.

So what else?

Saturday afternoon at the Mahaffey Theater: The International Ballet of Florida’s “Don Quixote.” Publicity photo.

As it’s a holiday weekend, you might guess there aren’t a whole lot of concerts or other big events. And you’d be right. But there are a few diamonds to decipher, for your entertainment pleasure:

Game show and talent show host, judge and all-around funny guy Howie Mandel is at Ruth Eckerd Hall tonight, with his standup comedy. Howie told us all about it in this Catalyst interview. Tickets are here.

And still more funny stuff: Tonight at the Palladium Theater, it’s the White Collar Comedy Tour, three, count ‘em three standups, all from the professional world and all with stories to tell. There’s a doctor (Sarasota EMT Vien Phommachanh), a lawyer (Mark Christopher) and a schoolteacher (longtime local favorite Mike Riviera). Find the Catalyst convo with Dr. Phommachanh at this link). Tickets are here.

International Ballet of Florida, a professional company out of the Sarasota area, is onstage at the Mahaffey Theater Saturday at 1 p.m., for a performance of Don Quixote. Find tickets at this link.

The pop singer known as Halsey (three consecutive platinum albums) is in concert Saturday at the Mid-Florida Credit Union Amphitheater. Tickets for the “For My Last Trick” tour are here.

The last Masterworks concerts in The Florida Orchestra’s current season are Saturday (8 p.m.) and Sunday (2 p.m.) at the Mahaffey Theater. The entire program consists of Mahler’s ambitious Symphony No. 3. The Master Chorale of Tampa Bay will join TFO for these performances; find tickets at this link.

Conductor Michael Francis and TFO members will perform excerpts from the work tonight at 7:30, again at the Mahaffey. The affable maestro will entertain and elucidate during the program, cleverly titled Inside Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. Tonight’s event is pay-what-you-can admission. 

Friday’s guests on our Arts Alive! podcast are TFO principal tympani John Bannon, who’s retiring (after the Mahler, of course!) with 40 years on his punch-card, and John Shaw, principal percussion, who’ll talk about the orchestra’s percussive brotherhood, and about his musical compadre John Bannon.

Your Weekend Spotlight appears every Thursday in the Catalyst’s CREATE section. 

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