Dive into the bold and brilliant world of Beethoven all season long. Witness the rebirth of the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe. Take the kids to the theater, behold the beauty of Cuban Ballet and discover the origin story behind one of Sarasota’s favorite (adopted) sons—Syd Solomon. Relive the romance of Romeo & Juliet no fewer than four times, pay tribute to the genius of John Williams at least three times and even attend the latest world premiere theater production from a team of Tony Award winners at Asolo Rep. It’s open season on the Cultural Coast, and there is no limit.


MAD TV  It’s a Mad World

Ringling College of Art & Design lets things get a little crazy with Jack Davis: Drawing American Pop Culture, opening this month in the Lois and David Stulberg Gallery. One of the founding cartoonists of Mad magazine, the late cartoonist made a name for himself through colorful caricatures and exaggerated anatomy—particularly the famously huge heads and spindly limbs terminating in oversized feet—and lent his talents to the likes of Time magazine and TV Guide, as well as popular movie posters and album covers, including Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Johnny Cash’s Everybody Loves A Nut. This exhibition will delve past the popular and well-known and into Davis’ origins, with a particular focus on the illustrator’s black-and-white drawings.


Ricardo Graziano, The Blue Hour.


RICARDO GRAZIANO  Graziano En Pointe

When Sarasota Ballet Director Iain Webb first approached Principal Dancer Ricardo Graziano about the prospect of choreographing a new ballet for the company, the opportunity was unexpected, to say the least. “I don’t know what he saw in me,” Graziano recalls now of that day in 2011. “I had no idea that I could create such a thing.” But Graziano accepted Webb’s challenge, and his resulting Shostakovich Suite, a ballet in the classical style and featuring all 24 of the company’s dancers, became a hit for both the company and the audience. Something clicked in the budding choreographer then, and he hasn’t stopped since. This season, Sarasota Ballet’s opening program pays tribute to this young choreographer’s growing body of work with Graziano, Retrospective.

Opening with the classical stylings of Shostakovich Suite, the program quickly moves into Graziano’s contemporary work with En Las Calles de Murcia. Set to Spanish Baroque music, the ballet reflects a warmer side of Graziano’s choreography, punctuated with moments of levity. “When I hear it, I just want to get out and dance,” he says. Further showcasing his choreographical diversity, the program concludes with Graziano’s In a State of Weightlessness, seeing the choreographer create an entrancing contemporary ballet to the music of Philip Glass. “It’s like part of a different world,” he says. And as audiences watch the development of Graziano’s artistic language unfold before them, keep an eye out for what the company calls “The Graziano Fourth”—one of Graziano’s preferred bits of corporeal vocabulary, seeing the dancer poised with bent knees and the upper body completely contracted. It’s quickly becoming a signature move.


FLORIDA FICTION   State of the Stage 

Three theaters bring Florida stories and Florida history to the stage this year, including Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, which closes out the first season in its freshly renovated and rebuilt theater with Ruby . A powerful and haunting musical from the pen of WBTT Founder and Artistic Director Nate Jacobs and his brother, Ruby takes audiences back to August 3, 1952, when a black woman murdered a white doctor in Live Oak, FL. As the town reels from the event and painful self-examination follows, the writer Zora Neale Hurston comes to town as a reporter for a northern newspaper. Earlier in the season, Venice Theatre will present Gulf View Drive, the final in Arlene Hutton’s Nibroc Trilogy, and the story of a young couple that moves into their dream house in Siesta Key, only to be followed by family and ensuing decisions that put their love to the test. And at Florida Studio Theatre, the Broadway hit American Son brings audiences inside a Florida police station for one trying night, when a separated interracial couple reunites after their teenage son goes missing, and The Legend of Georgia McBride tells the tale of a young Elvis impersonator making a living in a small-town Florida bar, forced to adjust when the owner fires him in favor of a new drag show.

The world premiere of Knoxville at the Asolo Repertory Theatre.


KNOXVILLE   World Premiere at the Asolo

When Frank Galati read James Agee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family, the Tony Award-winning director knew he had to author an adaptation and he knew it would be a musical. And when Galati read the finished script for what he titled Knoxville, he knew just the musical pairing to bring it to life: Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty—the Olivier Award-winning music and lyrics duo he collaborated with all those years ago for the Tony Award-winning production of Ragtime on Broadway. If Jake and Elwood could do it, then so could Galati—it was time to get the band back together. And with more Tonys in the line-up than a Sopranos lookalike contest, Asolo Repertory Theatre made room for an exciting world premiere set to hit the stage this April.

Set in Knoxville, TN, in the year 1915, the autobiographical story revolves around young Rufus Follett, who finds his idyllic family life rocked by tragedy, his mind wracked with questions. “Like James Joyce, James Agee created a portrait of the artist as a young man in his novel,” says Galati. “His story goes to the core of the American soul, where faith abides as well as doubt.” Galati adapted the work on his own, only approaching his old collaborators, Ahrens and Flaherty, once he had a polished two-act script. He asked them: “Why does this story sing?”

“It felt fast and contemporary and punchy and emotional,” says Ahrens, and she scoured the script for those perfect moments for musicality, where it feels seamless and organic instead of bringing the characters and production to a halt for a song and dance—easier said than done. “I’m the bridge between spoken word and music,” she says, but had a hard time placing her pylons. She eventually found inspiration in the same place that Galati did—Agee’s words. “It’s all written into this magnificent novel,” Ahrens says, and Flaherty agrees. “It feels like cadences of music,” he says. Flaherty composed a score to root the production in 1915 Knoxville, featuring fiddles, guitars and even cardboard box percussion. “It shouldn’t feel like an opera score,” he says, aiming instead for something a bit more casual and downhome, something to evoke thoughts of Americana, like folk songs on the front porch or watching the stars come out on a summer’s night. Says Flaherty, “That idea is something to be celebrated.”

Syd Solomon—Silent World, 1961. Liquitex on gesso panel, 58 3/16 × 48 5/16 × 1 15/16 in. Museum purchase, 1962.


SYD SOLOMON AT THE RINGLING  Camouflage and Calligraphy

For Sarasota’s art aficionados and culture vultures, the works of acclaimed abstract expressionist Syd Solomon are well known. And for locals, his time here remains a source of cultural pride and a milestone in the area’s artistic history. But a new exhibition opening this December at The Ringling MuseumSyd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed—proposes to dive deeper into the artist’s early life and inspiration than ever before, presenting a definitive origin story for a man who became a local legend.

Dominating the Searing Wing, Concealed and Revealed brings not only several of Solomon’s paintings to the museum, but also several artifacts from the artist’s early life, most importantly his service in World War II and professional start as a graphic designer and calligrapher in Sarasota, on loan from the Solomon Archive. His son, the artist Mike Solomon, has been working on the archive for five years now, and even he has been surprised by what they’ve found. “The general knowledge was always there,” he says, “but the surprise was in the details, and how it connected to his painting.” When the elder Solomon served in World War II, his camouflage designs hid men, tanks and supplies from German air raids following the Normandy invasion. Fake trees on wheels disguised Allied planes resting on makeshift airstrips. And when Solomon and his fellow soldiers liberated the French town of Roye, they held a big celebration with a parade and a printed poster. That original poster will be on display. And when Solomon moved to Sarasota in 1946, he turned his talents to signage for local businesses and layout work for local newspapers. “And a lot of the look of Sarasota in the ‘40s, in terms of advertising and signage, he made,” Mike says. But more than that, both of these experiences—Solomon the camouflagist and Solomon the calligrapher—would greatly influence the celebrated abstract expressionist he became. “For the people who think they know Syd Solomon’s work, they’ll realize it’s a lot more complex than they thought,” Mike says. “It wasn’t just about nature. It’s expressionism. It’s a personal, autobiographical thing.” Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed opens at The Ringling this December.

Courtesy of Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.


SALVADOR AND SELBY   Hello Dali

See a rose sprout butterfly wings, a lily transform into a gramophone horn, a dahlia mutate into a horned beast—Marie Selby Botanical Gardens continues the Jean & Alfred Goldstein Exhibition Series into its fourth year with a hard turn into the trippy, the weird and the downright surreal with Salvador Dalí: Gardens of the Mind. Teaming up with the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, the exhibition will feature 10 of the artist’s botanically inspired and brilliantly colored photolithographs from his series, FlorDalí, which will serve as a centerpiece to be surrounded by artifacts and photos from Dalí’s life and work. Viewed in tandem, the final product and the domestic detritus will serve to provide context to the famed Catalonian surrealist’s work and process, as well as emphasize his continuous connection to nature. Also on display will be photographs from renowned nature photographer and Sarasota’s own Clyde Butcher, whose snapshots of Catalonia will transport viewers to the very wilds that held sway over Dalí’s imagination all those years ago. An immersive exhibition following the likes of which celebrated Marc Chagall, Andy Warhol and Paul Gauguin in years past, the entire Selby Gardens campus will transform to celebrate Dalí’s art and the inherent surreality of nature’s wildest tropical flora. Opening February 9, 2020, and closing June 30, 2020, various lectures, performances, family programs and more will take place throughout the exhibition’s run.


RCLA TOWN HALL LECTURE SERIES  Words of Wisdom

Every year, the Ringling College Library Association proves just how cool libraries can be through its Town Hall Lecture Series, bringing great minds from arts, politics, science and beyond to this sunny slice of paradise for a night of engaging discussion. This year proves no different. The series kicks off in January 2020 with General John F. Kelly, a former marine and four-star general who came out of retirement to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security for President Donald Trump and then as his White House Chief of Staff. In February, California-born Rick Steves brings his European travel expertise to Sarasota. A best-selling author, as well as TV and radio program host, Steves teaches fellow explorers how to travel as “temporary locals” for a more intimate connection with their European destinations. Steves is followed by Wendy R. Sherman later in the month. Now a senior fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Sherman previously served as under secretary of state for political affairs, where she led successful US negotiations for the nuclear deal with Iran and received the National Security Medal from President Barack Obama. The series continues in March with visits from freelance journalist and nonfiction author Sam Quinones, whose latest book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic won a National Book Critic’s Circle award for the Best Nonfiction Book of 2015, and Lisa Genova, a doctor of neuroscience who has been dubbed the Michael Crichton of brain science thanks to her novels Still Alice, Left Neglected, Love Anthony, Inside the O’Briens and Every Note Played. The series concludes in April with celebrated photojournalist Annie Leibovitz, whose photoseries span everything from the resignation of Richard Nixon to the 1975 Rolling Stones tour.


SHAKESPEARE   Old Lovers Die Young

No season would be complete without sprinkling a little Shakespeare on top, but this season sees no fewer than four productions involving those bereaved beloveds, those suicidal sweethearts, those iconic and impulsive inamorati—Romeo and Juliet. Showing its sense of humor, Sarasota Opera kicks off its production of Charles Gounod’s operatic interpretation of the star-cross’d lovers just a single day after Valentine’s Day, while Venice Symphony waits a full two weeks (out of respect) before a concert featuring Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. And at the end of March, Sarasota Ballet will see the company premiere of Sir Frederick Ashton’s full-length ballet version of Romeo and Juliet , translating the romance and tragedy through the power of dance. Not to be left out, the Sarasota Cuban Ballet School dances with The Bard this season as well, bringing A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the stage as choreographed comedy during its March production. Venice Theatre dips back into the drama well with a production of Hamlet that same month, followed by yet another Romeo & Juliet  from the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training in April, performed at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.

Photo 6


BEETHOVEN'S 250TH BIRTHDAY  Nothing Beats the Beets 

2020 marks the 250th birthday for the famed and acclaimed, the unrepeatable and unbeatable, the virtuoso with the most-o—Ludwig van Beethoven—and the musical community is coming out in force to celebrate. Artist Series Concerts brings the award-winning cellist Zlatomir Fung to town this November for a pair of Beethoven-themed concerts, including all five sonatas for cello and piano, and February sees the return of noted pianist Lin Ye, performing Beethoven’s Sonatas in C Major and E-flat Major, followed by more Beethoven in an April concert from Korean violin prodigy SooBeen Lee. Venice Symphony pays homage to the master with its opening performance in November, Bohemian Beethoven, fusing the composer’s Fifth Symphony with the Queen classic, Bohemian Rhapsody.

But it’s Sarasota Orchestra that pulls out all the stops this season with a whopping eight concerts dedicated to this classical master, including two concerts in October, two in January, a special presentation in February that explores Beethoven’s entire Symphony No. 3 (conducted by and with commentary from Sarasota Music Festival Music Director Jeffrey Kahane), another concert in March and closing out the celebration with a performance of Beethoven’s joyous Symphony No. 7. Kahane offered his own thoughts on paying homage to the master.

Is there a particular joy you get from conducting Beethoven’s work? Kahane: There is certainly a visceral quality to Beethoven’s music, a physical and emotional intensity that is very specific to him, to some extent related to his incomparable ability to manipulate rhythm and time, but also to the depth of his humanity and compassion.

The mid-season concert, Beethoven’s Eroica, celebrates Beethoven’s “revolutionary middle period.” What made this work so revolutionary?    The truth is that Beethoven was revolutionary throughout almost his entire mature creative life. But with the Eroica, which comes near the beginning of what we call his “middle period,” he literally shattered the boundaries of what the symphony as a form had been. Nothing like it had ever done in terms of sheer scope. The first movement of the symphony alone is longer than many entire symphonies by earlier composers, and the symphony as a whole is roughly twice as long as most symphonies that had been composed before it. Like a painter working on a monumental canvas, Beethoven clearly needed a much greater expanse of time to articulate and develop his ideas in dramatic fashion and to express the extraordinary range and depth of emotional and psychological states he experienced.

Why is Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 considered to be so challenging?    While the Fourth has its physical challenges, its greatest challenge is a spiritual and psychological one. This concerto is unique among concerti written until that time in terms of the psychological, spiritual and emotional demands it places on the performer. The technical demands of the piece must be made subservient to its poetic and philosophical content—
it is as much a wordless poem as it is a piece of music. It is the piece I have played more often than any other in my repertoire, I would guess perhaps close to two hundred times over a period of more than forty years, and it never once has ceased to challenge and inspire me. When I manage to come close to touching the essence of the music, I become a little bit better person for it. 

Why close the season with a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7?    There is no more joyous music in the entire repertoire. Although we have no surviving images of Beethoven smiling or laughing, we know both from his words and his music that he had a tremendous capacity for joy, and nowhere is that expressed any more thrillingly than in the Seventh Symphony,
especially its ecstatic finale.

Once the season concludes, what do you hope concert-goers will walk away with?   A deeper understanding of why it is that Beethoven is such a central figure in our musical culture, and indeed why he represents the very essence of why we use the word “classical” with reference to the music we play. We run the risk of thinking of “classical” as that which is comfortable and familiar. Beethoven never wanted people to become complacent or comfortable. Quite to the contrary, his intention was as often to shock and to provoke us, as it was to inspire and comfort us. The “classics” are works we come back to over and over again precisely because they have the capacity to cause us to see, to hear, and to think about things in new ways, and I hope that will be the case with this season of Beethoven.

Women identified as Mrs. Suffern, is surrounded by a crowd of men and boys, while she holds a home-made banner in women suffragist parade ‘Help us to win the vote.’ 1914.


SUFFRAGIST PROJECT  The New Roaring '20s

As the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment approaches in 2020, Florida Studio Theatre celebrates the woman’s right to vote—and all the women who fought for it over the centuries and decades—with a massive community project uniting more than 20 local partners throughout the bi-county region for more than a year of women-focused programming. Entitled The Suffragist Project, plans have been in the works and wheels turning for months now, with four playwrights commissioned earlier this year to create brand new plays to premiere as the project culminates next August—when the theater will also bring in 10 performers from across the country to channel the likes of Abigail Adams, Frederick Douglass and the fiery orators through history who supported women’s suffrage—but, thanks to the many partners involved, the community will have plenty to see and experience as the project builds to its climax.

In addition to further FST programming, the American Association of University Women - Sarasota Chapter will be marching in the annual Sarasota holiday parade, dressed all in white in homage to the suffragettes’ chosen garb, while the Venice Chapter will create a separate presentation focused on issues such as women’s voting participation and pay differentials. Merrill Lynch and Bank of America will be organizing discussions on women’s suffrage during restaurant happy hours throughout the entire 16 months of the event, and the Sarasota County Library System will be promoting books relating to women’s suffrage and hosting exhibits and panels across the county. At the Ringling Museum, an exhibition on female photographers will be on display, Manatee Village Historical Park will be hosting multiple themed teas and luncheons with trivia sessions related to women’s history, and Sarasota Contemporary Dance will premiere two new performances: Dancing in the Moment, featuring an intergenerational improv dance group, and a concert uniting modern dance and famous suffragist speeches through history. Both Booker High School and New College will also be participating, with the latter hosting a lecture series called How the Suffragist Movement Betrayed Black Women and a theatrical production entitled Fiery Women: The Words of African-American Suffragists.

“I hope people realize what we’re standing on, that it brings people the courage to stand up, and that words matter,” says Kate Alexander, FST’s Associate Director At-Large and Director of the Suffragist Project. “Culture is living and fluid. It isn’t fixed. So when we change the day—when we affect the quality of the day—we are the future. There’s still work to be done.”

Springtime performance of the Sarasota Cuban Ballet School.


SARASOTA CUBAN BALLET SCHOOL   Season of Collaboration 

Fresh off the heels of a much-needed renovation, including a new roof and smashing new paint job, the students and dancers of the Sarasota Cuban Ballet School (SCBS) will no longer be dancing around buckets under leaky ceilings this season. And though a new air-conditioning system is also in the works and the school has its eyes set on expansion, that’s not what has Ariel Serrano, SCBS co-founder and co-artist director, excited about this upcoming season of collaboration.

Securing a partnership with Selby Gardens, the school opens its season in floral decadence with Orchid Evening, seeing the young dancers perform within the botanical beauty of the Selby campus. Featuring new choreography from SCBS Choreographer and Master Teacher Tania Vergara, the performance will also debut brand new staging conceived by Serrano and his team, bringing the dancers out into the crowd. “The performance is almost interactive,” Serrano says. “We’re actually dancing through the audience.”

The collaborations continue with a December performance of The Nutcracker that brings SCBS into the state-of-the-art digs of the Venice Performing Arts Center for the first time. And with a little help from the Selby Foundation and others, including a set designer offering his skills pro bono, the school will freshen up the classic performance with its first brand new set in eight years. Not quite traditional but nothing too bizarre, Serrano calls the fresh collection of backdrops and props “a new vision.” And, for the first time, the performance will be accompanied by live music from the Venice Symphony. “That’s key,” says Serrano. “We’ve been waiting for this opportunity.”

Closing out the season, SCBS will return to the Venice Performing Arts Center in March to showcase its students in the Spring Time Triple Bill, including performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ocean and Paquita, before the End of Year Show at Booker High School, featuring the entire Sarasota Cuban Ballet School.


CHILDREN’S CLASSICS   Culture Kids

Enjoy a night out with the whole family this season, as several cultural organizations around town have slated programming perfect for the little ones. Pinocchio opens on the Florida Studio Theatre stage this October, bringing the children’s classic to life for all the real boys and girls who come to see, and the theater’s Children’s Theatre series continues through the year with Deck the Halls in December, Tomas and the Library Lady in January and The Star That Could Not Twinkle and Other Winning Plays, featuring plays written by local students grades K–6, in March. Putting the “Tunes” back in Looney Tunes, the Venice Symphony presents “Bugs Bunny at the Symphony II” in January, seeing Bugs and Daffy, Elmer Fudd and Pepe Le Pew, Tweety and Sylvester and more projected on the big screen while the symphony plays along to classics like What’s Opera, Doc? and The Rabbit of Seville and brand new Warner Bros shorts like Rabid Rider and Coyote Falls. And in an odd bit of serendipity, the season holds two stage productions of Roald Dahl’s Matilda—one from the Manatee Players in January and another at Venice Theatre in May.

Also in May, The Players Centre for Performing Arts will bring the little ones to the mainstage for a performance of The Music Man Jr. That same month, Asolo Repertory Theatre approaches its season’s end with a new child-friendly musical production of the Robin Hood story, penned by the five-time Tony-nominated playwright Douglas Carter Beane and composer Lewis Flinn, followed by a production of Snow White in June. On the more dramatic side, Sarasota Opera’s youth opera program brings the emotional Brundibar to the opera house in November. A touching story of friendship, perseverance and love conquering evil, this youth opera was often performed by the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp during World War II, to lift spirits and bring a flicker of light to the darkness.


SINGING IN THE ALPS   Musically Inclined 

Something about that crisp mountain air and bountiful echo space of the Alps brings out the musicality of the soul, and no fewer than three productions this season pay homage to this alpine phenomenon. Asolo Repertory Theatre opens its season this November with a production of the classic musical The Sound of Music, where the power of song projects full force from the Swiss Alps to the stage, and in March the Sarasota Orchestra pays homage as well with “My Favorite Things,” performing selections from the play. That same month, Sarasota Opera takes audiences into a small village in the Austrian Alps with La Wally, a tragic Italian opera of star-crossed lovers caught in the middle of a bloody family feud.

 

20th Anniversary of the West Coast Black Theatre Troupe.


WESTCOAST BLACK THEATRE TROUPE  New Digs, Same Great Sound 

For too long, Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe struggled to find a permanent home for its performers and productions. “Being coined ‘The Vagabond Company’ and not having a space to call our own was one of the most frustrating parts of founding the company,” says Nate Jacobs, who founded WBTT in 1999 and today still serves as artistic director, as well as something akin to resident playwright. And when the company did find a home—a pair of buildings off Orange Avenue, gradually rehabbed and repurposed for WBTT’s needs—the result was workable, but less than ideal. That all changes this 20th anniversary season, as the space undergoes long-awaited renovations, transforming a makeshift home into a state-of-the-art theater worthy of an acclaimed company developing a national following.

For the performers of WBTT, the renovation will mean upgraded dressing rooms and dedicated spaces for props and costuming, as well as a whole second stage area for rehearsals, workshops and educational programming. For the audience, it means bona fide theater seating for a comfier experience, new lighting and sound systems, so as to better see and hear the performances, and, at long last, expanded bathrooms and lobbies to cut down on crowding before shows and during intermission.

“This means permanency,” says Jacobs. “A place where Westcoast can grow its roots and begin its perpetual journey in the world. We’ll continue to grow our programs and continue to bring exciting, challenging and impactful theater to the stage.” Constructed by Willis A. Smith, the newly dubbed Gerri Aaron and Aaron Family Foundation Theatre Building will open in December, with the troupe being back in the building for the opening of Caroline, or Change on January 8. In the meantime, catch the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe performing with Key Chorale in American Roots: The Gospel Experience this October, its 20th Anniversary Gala at the Van Wezel in November and at the Sarasota Opera House with A Motown Christmas in December.

 

SCI-FI IN SARASOTA   Above and Beyond!

Jaws, Jurassic Park, the Harry Potter and Indiana Jones franchises, and, perhaps most importantly, Star Wars—arguably none of these iconic moments of cinema would have the impact they have without the tireless work of one composer: John Williams. The man has five Oscars, 24 Grammies, four Golden Globes and countless fans of all ages who know his work by heart. He’s second in Oscar nominations only to Walt Disney himself, and one can literally sing his praises. But with Episode IX of the Star Wars saga coming out this December, 87-year-old Williams has announced that it will be his final outing with the franchise. Sarasota has quite the send-off in store.

In January, both the Venice Symphony and the Sarasota Orchestra incorporate Williams’ incomparable scores into a pair of sci-fi-themed concerts, with Cosmic Convergence and Space and Beyond, respectively.  And in March, the Pops Orchestra closes its season with By Popular Demand, seeing the audience choosing what they want to hear from categories including “John Williams Film Scores,” while the Sarasota Orchestra revisits some Star Wars themes in its My Favorite Things concert. But Venice Symphony has the final word in April, with its tribute concert A Movie Maestro: A Tribute to John Williams.


NUNS ON STAGE   Get Thee To  A Nunnery! 

Divinely inspired? Who knows, but two stage productions this year just so happen to convene in the convent—though with very different approaches. At The Players Centre for Performing Arts, the Tony-nominated musical comedy Sister Act spices up the traditional life of contemplation with the story of a woman on the run taking refuge with the sisters, resulting in not only musical hijinks, but spiritual discovery for all involved. Later on in the season, the Manatee Players stages a production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-winning story of faith, tradition and the power of accusation with Doubt: A Parable, pitting a progressive young Father Flynn in a battle of wills with the formidable Sister Aloysius. And just to round out the theme, hear Prince Hamlet order Ophelia to the nunnery in Venice Theatre’s March production of the Shakespeare classic.