2022 – 23 Season
The 2022-23 season is Jobsite’s 24th year of bringing the Tampa Bay region exciting, engaging theater experiences in an intimate environment. We have expanded our residency at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts from producing solely in the 98-seat Shimberg Playhouse to splitting seasons between it and the 320-seat Jaeb Theater.
As we look ahead to the 25th season, we’ve chosen to use the 24th to honor our past to secure the future. After two years of great uncertainty, we hope the 2022-23 season brings audiences back in full force. Producing Artistic Director David M. Jenkins notes, “we had very honest conversations as to how critical it is that we line up a season that’s going to be hard for our audiences to resist.” The 24th season is programmed with shows that fit squarely into what regional audiences have come to expect from Jobsite, including several popular titles from our company’s past.
A season pass is the best way to save money and provide meaningful support to Jobsite’s ensemble of over 60 regional artists. The 2021-22 season was only made possible through the generosity of the community and grants that covered expenses the box office never could. Jobsite hopes that by offering the kind of work we’re certain the region wants to support that we can begin the financial recovery process so that there is a 25th season and beyond.
Creative Loafing Best of the Bay Reader's Poll
- Best Stage Director – David M. Jenkins
- Best Professional Theater Company Finalist
Mainstage Season
Picasso at the Lapin Agile
By Steve Martin
Directed by Kari Goetz
Sep. 16 – Oct. 9, 2022
Preview Performances: Sep. 14 – 15
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center
In his first comedy written for the stage, the original “wild and crazy guy” plays fast and loose with fact, fame, and fortune as two of the 20th century’s legendary geniuses muse on humanity’s achievements and prospects as well as other fanciful topics with infectious dizziness. It’s 1904 and Albert Einstein (age 25) and Pablo Picasso (age 23) meet in a haven for artists, musicians, poets, and philosophers in Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood. Wait, is there also an appearance by a blue-suede shoed time traveler? This (highly fictional) meeting sees the two connect before Einstein presents his new special theory of relativity and Picasso revolutionizes art with his new aesthetic represented in “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”
Jobsite first produced Picasso at the Lapin Agile in 2009, when it became our best-attended production to date. Jobsite also staged Martin’s Meteor Shower to great acclaim in 2019 and The Underpants a few years before that.
Dracula
Adapted by Steven Dietz, from the novel by Bram Stoker
Directed by David M. Jenkins
Oct. 21 – Nov. 13, 2022
Preview Performances: Oct. 19 – 20
Jaeb Theater, Straz Center
As Count Dracula begins to exert his will upon the residents of London, they try to piece together the clues of his appearances—in a valiant attempt to save themselves from a hideous fate. This adaptation of Dracula brings audiences along for a thrilling trek interspersed with daring special effects and the humor inherent to humans in crisis. Sleek, sexy, and oozing with neo-Victorian flair, Dracula is sure to be an experience full of suspense, seduction, and spectacle.
In 2001, Dracula was a Straz/Jobsite co-production that set records for the space that stood for 15 years! It was also the beginning of what evolved into our residency two years later. Jobsite is excited to get another crack at this title 21 years later, now in the much larger Jaeb Theater.
Hamlet
By William Shakespeare
Directed and adapted by David M. Jenkins
Jan. 13 – Feb. 5, 2023
Preview Performances: Jan. 11 – 12
Jaeb Theater, Straz Center
Jobsite returns to the Jaeb for this searing tragedy of a young student, tormented by their father’s death, that confronts each one of us with the mirror of our own mortality in a far from perfect world. Who can be trusted? Who can be believed? Sent by Hamlet’s father’s ghost to avenge his brutal death, Hamlet’s mission to expose the truth is a perilous journey of madness, murder, and lost love. This is Jobsite’s 22nd season of celebrating the Bard with another epic, engaging staging featuring another powerful score from the company’s award-winning resident composer Jeremy Douglass. “No one in this region ‘Rocks the Bard’ as hard, as relevant, and as daring as Jobsite and their players.” – BroadwayWorld.
Weekday field trip matinees for school students are available starting Jan. 17. All groups attending field trips are offered custom study guides and visits from teaching artists before and after the show. Please call 813.222.1016 or write Spencer.Meyers@strazcenter.org to learn more.
Misery
By William Goldman, adapted from the novel by Stephen King
Directed by Paul J. Potenza
Starring Summer Bohnenkamp and David M. Jenkins
Mar. 17 – Apr. 9, 2023
Preview Performances: Mar. 15 – 16
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center
Misery follows successful romance novelist Paul Sheldon, who is rescued from a car crash by his “number one fan,” Annie Wilkes, and wakes up captive in her secluded home. While Paul is convalescing, Annie reads his latest book and becomes enraged when she discovers the author has killed off her favorite character, Misery Chastain. Annie forces Paul to write a new novel, but he realizes Annie has no intention of letting him go anywhere. The irate Annie has Paul writing as if his life depends on it – and it does. “There are no lulls in famed screenwriter William Goldman’s 90-minute stage adaptation of the Stephen King story, which Goldman himself translated into the 1990 film … [it moves] faster than snow piling up in a Colorado blizzard.” — NBC New York.
Jobsite has adapted literature, specifically horror, for decades. One could rightly claim these productions have helped define our aesthetic. From comic send-ups of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to cult-hits by Clive Barker, it’s difficult to find a Jobsite season without literary spookums. Audiences continue to vote with their feet to let us know this is the content they are here for! This production is particularly important for Jobsite in this recovery season, as it serves as a major fundraiser: all principal actor and director salaries are being donated back to the company.
Jobsite Theater’s ALICE
A cabaret spectacle celebrating the work of Lewis Carroll
Adapted by the ensemble. Art Direction by Spencer P. Meyers. Music by Jeremy Douglass. Lyrics by TBA regional artists.
May 12 – Jun. 4, 2023
Preview Performances: May 10 – 11
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center
Jobsite realized something with 2021’s Shockheaded Peter (winner of not one but two 2021 Creative Loafing Best of the Bay Awards): we missed devising new work. For our first 10 years, a mainstage slot was dedicated to a new show that brought together the embarrassment of talent the company has available. Jobsite Theater’s ALICE is a brand-new cabaret spectacle based on the writing of Lewis Carroll that fuses live music, visual art, puppetry, aerial and circus arts, and plenty of good ol’ fashioned theater magic in an evening audiences may not be able to simply categorize as a play, musical, or something altogether different, but that they will surely talk about for years to come.
Not content to stop with devising just one new show, Jobsite has also committed to a similar approach to develop Federico Garcia Lorca’s unfinished La Maleficio de la Mariposa (The Evil Spell of the Butterfly) for a bilingual 2023-24 mainstage production.
LIZZIE: The Musical
by Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, Tim Maner, and Alan Stevens Hewitt
Directed by Alison Burns Jackson
Jul. 14 – Aug. 6, 2023
Preview Performances: Jul. 12 – 13
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center
Audiences are in for another dark treat with the Drama Desk Award-nominated LIZZIE, a killer rock musical that’s been a certified hit around the world. 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. In 1892 on a sweltering August day in a small New England town, a well-to-do-elderly man and his second wife were brutally murdered with an axe in broad daylight. Lizzie Borden, their youngest daughter, was the prime suspect. She was arrested and tried for the crime, but, with no actual witnesses to the hideous event, 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 still chanted in schoolyards and playgrounds to this day leaves no doubt about her guilt. Full of hot rock licks, riot-grrrl attitude, and gleeful gallows humor, Ralph Remington, former director of the theater division of the NEA, put LIZZIE in the same company as Hamilton and Here Lies Love as “the future of the American musical.”
Jobsite brings LIZZIE to the Shimberg for an intimate concert staging after a popular 2016 run in the Jaeb. That production earned Fo’i Meleah, recently heard as the voice of Audrey II in the Straz Produced Little Shop of Horrors, Outstanding Lead Actress in a Musical from Theatre Tampa Bay. “this is a party with good live music” – Tampa Bay Times. “wild theater, wanton theater … thrilling.” – Creative Loafing.
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992
By Anna Deavere Smith
Starring Andresia Moseley
Aug. 18 – 27, 2023
Preview Performances: Aug. 16 – 17
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center
This Creative Loafing Best of the Bay and BroadwayWorld Regional Award winner is back, this time on Jobsite’s mainstage! Artistic Associate Andresia Moseley takes on 27 characters in this “living newspaper” the LA Times called “the most comprehensive literary response” to the “cacophony of voices at the city’s heart” following the verdict in the Rodney King trial.
“In a word, superb … you will not be disappointed” – BroadwayWorld. “[E]ntertaining as hell … [Jobsite] has done Anna Deavere Smith’s riveting script justice … watch this with your friends and answer the call to action.” – Creative Loafing.
