2016 – 17 Season
Jobsite Theater is proud to unveil their 2016–17 season, a year where the company will celebrate notions of home. Jobsite is proud to call the Straz Center home: after being made resident theater company of the 99-seat Shimberg Playhouse in 2003, the company also expanded into the adjacent 300-seat Jaeb Theater in 2014. Jobsite is dedicated to providing an artistic home in Tampa Bay area with an ensemble of performing artists of all disciplines who not only work on mainstage productions, but offer late night events, special staged readings, and one-off productions as part of the Job-side program. Jobsite also recognizes that the region is home to so many people from so many walks of life and wants to feel like home, a place where everyone can come together in comfort to enjoy great company as well as engage in important conversations and debate. Finally, Jobsite is “going home” in a way by returning to the kinds of plays, playwrights, styles, and themes that made the company a formidable regional presence.
Creative Loafing Best of the Bay
- Best Link with the Greater Theater World: Jobsite Theater and Israel Horovitz
- Best Moment When Local Theater Turned a Corner - Tampa International Fringe Festival (presented by Jobsite Theater)
- Best Theater Company, Reader's Choice, Runner-up
- Best Local Director, Reader's Choice Runner-up – David M. Jenkins
- Best Local Lighting Designer, Reader's Choice Runner-up – Ryan Finzelber
Mainstage Season
The Underpants
By Steve Martin
Directed by Karla Hartley
Sep. 9 – Oct. 2, 2016
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Tickets: $28
Preview Performances: Sep. 7 – 8 | Wed. – Thr. 8pm | Tickets: $14
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
Jobsite’s 2009 production of comedian, writer, actor, director, playwright, banjo master, and original “wild and crazy guy” Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile broke sales and attendance records and still ranks in the Top 10 of both categories in the Shimberg Playhouse.
The Underpants is a wild satire, adapted from the classic German play Die Hose, where we find Louise and Theo Maskes’ conservative existence completely shattered when Louise’s bloomers fall down in public during a parade. Though she pulls them up quickly, he is sure the incident will cost him his job as a government clerk. Louise’s momentary display doesn’t result in a vicious public scandal but it does attract the attention of two creepy infatuated men, each of whom now want to rent the spare room in the Maskes’ home. Oblivious of their amorous objectives, Theo splits the room between them, happy to collect rent from both the foppish poet and the whiny hypochondriac.
Bursting with Steve Martin’s signature zaniness, wordplay, and whimsy The Underpants is a farcical burlesque set in a nostalgic time-gone-by that sends-up bourgeois snobbery and conformity and also hits on issues of fame, feminism, and the nature of respectability.
LIZZIE
A Killer Rock Musical by Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, Tim Maner, and Alan Stevens Hewitt
Directed by David M. Jenkins
Shows Added
Oct. 14 – Nov. 6, 2016
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm & 8pm
Tickets: starting at $29.50
Preview Performances: Oct. 12 – 13 | Wed. – Thr. 8pm | Tickets: $15
Jaeb Theatre, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
Four ferocious women front a savage six-piece rock band to tell the story of Lizzie Borden, America’s favorite double axe-murderess and Victorian hometown girl-next-door. Borden was arrested and tried for killing her parents but, with no actual witnesses to the hideous crime, was acquitted. The murders remain unsolved making Borden an enduring pop culture icon to this day. History tells us Lizzie was innocent, but the legend as chanted in schoolyards and playgrounds leaves no doubt about her guilt.
Full of hot rock licks, riot-girl attitude, and gleeful gallows humor Lizzie has made Top 10 lists in New York, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Houston, and is now ready to rock Tampa!
“It’s rare for show tunes to require this much intellectual engagement, but every turn of phrase is a revelation … Musically, visually, and storywise, Lizzie is the next generation mash-up of Spring Awakening and Hedwig and the Angry Inch that will surely be packing in the audiences, young and old” – WQED, San Francisco. Ralph Remington, former director of the theater division of the NEA calls Hamilton, Here Lies Love, and Lizzie “the future of the American musical. Get ready.”
As You Like It
By William Shakespeare
Directed by David M. Jenkins
Jan. 13 – Feb. 5, 2017
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Tickets: $28
Preview Performances: Jan. 11 – 12 | Wed. – Thr. 8pm | Tickets: $14
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
After a brief hiatus from the Bard in 2016, Jobsite is not only excited to bring back Shakespeare but to do so in another Cigar City setting: As You Like It will be set in present-day Tampa. 2015’s Twelfth Night, set in 1926 Ybor City, was one of Jobsite’s most successful productions of all time, and the company is equally hopeful for this classic tale of love, lust, and mistaken identity.
Featuring some of the most famous lines penned in the English language like Jaques’ iconic “All the world’s a stage” speech, As You Like It subverts the traditional rules of romance. Gender roles, nature, and politics all become a muddle in a clever and astute comedy that reflects on how bewildering yet utterly pleasurable life can be. Join Orlando, Rosalind, Touchstone the Clown, and all the rest in the fantastical forest of Arden for beguiling games that will surely have you in stitches.
Jobsite has offered innovative and award-winning productions of Shakespeare since their 2002 staging of Titus Andronicus – more than any professional company in the region.
A Skull in Connemara
By Martin McDonagh
Directed by Paul J. Potenza
Mar. 17 – Apr. 9, 2017
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Tickets: $28
Preview Performances: Mar. 15 – 16 | Wed. – Thr. 8pm | Tickets: $14
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
Jobsite is over the moon to finally complete the trilogy from acclaimed playwright and screenwriter (Six Shooter, In Bruges, Seven Psycopaths) Martin McDonagh that began with the very show they performed as resident company at the Straz Center! In 2003 Jobsite produced The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which won multiple Best of the Bay Awards and was named a Top 10 production by both The Tampa Tribune and Creative Loafing. In 2013 the company offered another of the Leenane trilogy, The Lonesome West, also to high acclaim. In addition to this trilogy Jobsite has also produced McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2006) and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2009). McDonagh’s plays are undeniable favorites of the Jobsite faithful and the company is thrilled to once again bring his signature dark wit, kooky characters, on stage mayhem, and crackling dialogue back home.
In A Skull in Connemara, Mick Dowd is hired one week a year to disinter the bones in certain sections of the local cemetery to make way for the new arrivals. As the time approaches for him to dig up those of his own late wife, strange rumors surrounding his involvement in her sudden death seven years ago begin to resurface. Populated by misfits and miscreants all digging for the truth, A Skull in Connemara is a blasphemously funny whodunit complete with flying skulls and bloody hatchets.
Gloucester Blue
By Israel Horovitz
Directed by David M. Jenkins
May 19 – Jun. 11, 2017
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Tickets: $28
Preview Performances: May 17 – 18 | Wed. – Thr. 8pm | Tickets: $14
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
International award-winning playwright, poet, and film-maker Israel Horovitz calls the region and Jobsite Theater home for a portion of the year. Both he and the company look forward to building on the success of last season’s gripping Theatre Tampa Bay Recommended production of Lebensraum, hailed a high critical success by regional critics and described “as good as it gets” from an ecstatic playwright who was in residence through opening weekend.
Stumpy and Latham are working-class housepainters in Gloucester, MA (home to Horovitz’s theater company and the setting of many of his plays). Husband and wife Bummy and Lexi are their upscale clients. Blue may be the color being painted on the walls, but blood-red and blackmail emerge as dominant hues of the palette in this dark comedy. Hang onto your drop-cloths because Horovitz is about to take you into a story painted with seduction, betrayal, and deceit. Who will cash in their paint chips first and take the fall? Who will be left standing when the last lies are told? With themes of gentrification, economic inequality, and infidelity this pitch-black comedy will surely feel right at home here in Tampa Bay!
Cloud Nine
By Caryl Churchill
Directed by Gavin Hawk
Jul. 14 – Aug. 6, 2017
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Tickets: $28
Preview Performances: Jul. 12 – 13 | Wed. – Thr. 8pm | Tickets: $14
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
Jobsite closes the season with a reimagining of what Creative Loafing decorated as a “Top 10 Play of the Decade!” In 2003, shortly after being offered residency at the Straz Center, Jobsite produced a relatively low-budget, low-profile version of Caryl Churchill’s wildly entertaining little play. They would have no idea that it would go on to pack the house night after night while going on to win three Best of the Bay Awards and be named a top 10 production of the year by both The Tampa Tribune and Creative Loafing. By some folks’ estimation the show was a defining moment, cementing that the company had finally arrived and proved their worth to the region.
Cloud Nine can be imagined as a kind of zany British sex farce put into a blender with a Women and Gender Studies thesis. Time shifts, women are played by men, men by women, children by adults, and even black can be white. Act I introduces us to an uptight British family full of dirty little (and no so little) secrets who administer an African colony in the Victorian era before jumping to present-day London in Act II (though, for the characters it has only been 25 years pass) to see how their lives have turned out after a shocking turn before intermission. Cloud Nine mocks colonial and sexual repression in a hilarious farce that is always as playful as it is poignant. As the New York Times observes, “Churchill sees the theater as an open frontier where lives can be burst apart and explored, rather than a cage that flattens out experience and diminishes it.”
Ensemble
Job-side Productions
Superwoman Died Tonight (The Whole Damn Thing)
A Job-side Production & Talk-back
Written and Performed By Lori Shannon
Sep. 25 – 26, 2016 & Jan. 16, 2017
Sun – Mon. 7:30pm
Tickets: $5 (also sold at the door) | Free for Jobsite Rock Stars and Season Ticket holders.
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
The Day Before Yesterday
A Job-side Staged Reading & Talk-back By Israel Horovitz Jan. 23, 2017 Mon. 7:30pm Tickets: $5 (also sold at the door) | Free for Jobsite Rock Stars and Season Ticket holders. Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
One Night In Miami
A Job-side Project
By Kemp Powers
Directed by Lori Shannon
Mar. 20, 2017
Mon. 7:30pm
Tickets: Free | Free for Jobsite Rock Stars and Season Ticket holders.
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
Tampa International Fringe Festival
May 11 – 14, 2017
Co-Produced by Jobsite Theater
Collected Stories
By Donald Margulies
Directed by Matthew Ray
May 21 – 22, 2017
Sun. – Mon. 7:30pm
Tickets: $20 (also sold at the door)
$15 for students, seniors and miltary with ID at door
Free for Jobsite Rock Stars and Season Ticket holders.
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
