I counted roles in 24 mainstage productions across 14 seasons and I might have missed something. And, you know, not lightweight stuff: Count Dracula, Victor Frankenstein, the Marquis de Sade, Hamlet, of course currently Macbeth. You may not know it if you’ve only seen him at his serious, but he’s also a gifted damn comedian: playing both a Victorian colonial administrator and modern snotty little British girl in Cloud 9, the sensitive ponytail yoga guy in The Thanksgiving Play, a very silly Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles. If you thought the guy just does “style,” you’d be wrong there, too, as anyone who saw 1984 or Constellations can tell you — he can do contemporary realism. Even in Shakespeare I find him as equally skilled in the comedies as he is the tragedies. Get you a guy who can do both!
Very few artists have made such an impact on Jobsite — I would dare say the Tampa Bay area — as the illustrious Giles Davies.
I hate to see him go back to Cincinnati after the run of MACBETH, but we tried valiantly to keep him here longer and things just are what they are for now. This is not at all an inimicable parting but one of pure circumstance. It’s not my story to tell in full and so I won’t, leaving that to a feature coming soon to a Creative Loafing near you, but I will sum it up as a confluence of stuff from the high cost of rent to Florida Florida-ing in its support of the arts to Cinci presenting him with a much more viable alternative to us right now.
So, this is a goodbye for now — we know at least until the end of the season. In order to get him back down for a show or a partial year as he did for quite a while (up to shortly before the pandemic, Giles split his season between Tampa and Cinci) some things would need to change for us — we’ve never had actor housing reliably available to us, and our financial position is not exactly one that can afford the extra costs of travel and housing for someone not already living here.
That doesn’t mean I won’t try. If we manage to finally land this NEA Shakespeare in American Communities Award for 2026, we might be able to work something out. If you’ve been living under a rock, I guess I should tell you Giles has pretty much been a centerpiece of our Shakespeare program since, fittingly, the MACBETH he did with us in 2013 (though that was not his first show with us, that was Quills in 2011). Even years he was not in the Shakespeare show he served as an advisor and text coach, and so that may be a more budget-friendly option if we can’t come up with the full 8-9 weeks of housing.
Let me be clear: he’s had a huge hand in the success of this program and so much of it is about what he does that is not performing. I don’t want to bore you to death with all the work that a Shakespeare text coach does, but I’ll leave it that Giles has so much knowledge and skill here — not to mention an astute teaching apparatus — that he can’t help but rub off on the others around him but he goes so much further than that, residing as a resource off stage for everyone else in the cast even while he has his own full plate. Scribbling notes to give later when he himself is offstage for a second with a trick here or a tip there to help another fully unlock the text and convey it to the audience.
If you think we make the complicated language of Shakespeare make sense, Giles is in large part to thank for that. It’s like having Tom Brady on the 2020 Bucs — we’ve had a second coach in the locker room for the past 14 seasons.
I suppose it helps that we both approach Shakespeare the same way, with the same vocabulary, from the same school, but I can’t tell you how much faster the work comes and how much more rich it can get when you have two folks to bounce off of.
The success of the work we do in schools is also a credit to Giles’ time and energy, he tirelessly puts himself out there — sometimes at times of the morning I wouldn’t agree to if asked, heh — because he sincerely loves the work and making the connections and sharing his passion.
As an actor, I’ve relished my time with him on stage from goofing as the Watson to his Holmes (The Hound of the Baskervilles), the Betty to his Clive (Cloud 9), and watching audiences squirm as the O’Brien to his Winston (1984). I’m only remiss we’ve never been able to tread the boards together working on the Bard.
I haven’t even gotten into the grand litany of other things he’s done for us: serving as a fight director, directing Orlando and several side projects, performing in side projects and one-person shows off the mainstage, organizing the fun Shakespeare on Tap Beer Week event every year at the Indie, helping me with freelance events, the list goes on and on.
And that’s just it: this is just who he is, an incredibly passionate artist — understandably incendiary in moments — who fully understands the gifts they have and the great responsibility that comes with them. He has honored us for these 14 years, easily becoming one of our most-beloved faces, and I hope that if you’ve appreciated his work, or if you’ve heard of it and not witnessed it, that you can help me honor him with your presence over the final two weeks of MACBETH.
Cinci’s gain (again) will be our great loss, but trust I will do all I can to get him back down here when we have the means to do so.*
Love you, brother! Until next time!
MACBETH is on stage through Feb. 9 at the Straz Center in downtown Tampa. Thu. – Sat. 7:30, Sun. 2pm. There is a ticket special on remaining seats Jan. 30-31, use code BLOOD.
*I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but it is worth noting that if the $70,000 — or even the initially cut sum of $32,000 — had not been taken off the table a month before the season started by the State of Florida, I might have been able to put a band-aid on this particular situation for the rest of the season until I could figure something else out. All this stuff has so many consequences.
