The curtains rise on community-staged plays for both children and adults this weekend.
Wrapping up the 58th season of kids’ plays at Riverside Children’s Theatre, “Disney’s Peter Pan Jr.” opens this weekend, a one-hour, modernized version of the magically forever-young boy, Peter, who with a fairy for a sidekick leads a passel of pajama-clad home-aloners into a pirate-riddled paradise.
The all-children production is based on both the Disney movie and the J.M. Barrie plays. With a cast of nearly 50 rotating through the month-long run, the odds of either having a kid in the show, knowing a kid in the show or being a kid in the show, are sizeable. With any luck, you’ve been watching the star of the show, Kristi Beckett, grow up (in spite of the dreams of her character, Peter Pan) and develop into an accomplished young actress; she played the young Cosette in the big people’s Riverside Theatre professional production of “Les Misérables” two years ago.
And if your kid is not already part of this wonderful organization, you can test the waters at RCT’s Spring Break Play-making Camp March 30 through April 3, led by the actors in RCT-On-the-Go, the recent college graduates hired by Riverside to take stage plays to schools.
Meanwhile, the run of “Gypsy” at the Vero Beach Theatre Guild continues through next weekend. Based on the memoirs of the famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and her show-biz mom, “Gypsy” opened in 1959 and many critics have called it the greatest musical of all time.
Written by Arthur Laurents with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, “Gypsy” is directed by Jon Putzke and stars one of his dinner theater stalwarts, Eleanor Dixon, and Treasure Coast Sotheby’s real estate associate Dahlia Davis.
To the north, at Melbourne’s King Center, the play “Vincent,” by the late Leonard Nimoy, is staged at the center’s Studio Theatre. The one-man show, once performed by Nimoy himself, is based on the letters of Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo. It features James Briggs, an actor trained at Sarasota’s Asolo Conservatory of Professional Actor Training, who plays the role of Theo but then also assumes the character of Vincent, with a screen behind him showing images of more than 100 van Gogh paintings. It is directed by Brant Pope, who for 11 years was the director of the FSU Asolo Conservatory as well as associate artistic director of the Asolo Theatre Company. Shows are Friday and Saturday night at 8 p.m. with a 2 p.m. matinee on Saturday.
Closer to home, at Fort Pierce’s Sunrise Theatre, a packed house Friday night for an Abba tribute band in the main theater and a terrific five-piece blues band, 21 Blue, in the Black Box theater, featuring Longineu Parsons, considered one of the world’s top trumpeters, who also sings and plays flute.
And the next night, another tribute at Sunrise, when One Night of Queen performs on Saturday, with Scottish vocalist Gary Mullen performing the rock vocals once sung by Freddie Mercury.
In Vero, anyone connected to the 200 string instrument students at Vero Beach High School and Gifford Middle School can pay tribute to their remarkable director Matt Stott by coming to hear his violin concert at First Presbyterian Church Sunday afternoon, accompanied by the church’s music director Jacob Craig on piano. Stott, a graduate of Baylor University, has been playing since first grade. His considerable talents on violin have earned him a following in Vero, after he began performing and has recently developed a following for his playing, which until a couple of years ago he had kept more or less under wraps since moving to Vero in 2001.
Craig has been more visible, though he only came to Vero two years ago. A multi-instrumentalist – including bagpipes – Craig will perform on piano at the upcoming Vero Beach Chamber Orchestra concert April 19. Like the chamber concert, the First Presbyterian concert is free.
Given the rabid Mike Block String Camp fans (and yes, he returns to Vero this summer), there may be car-pooling to Stuart tonight for two world-class Celtic fiddlers, Natalie MacMaster and Donnell Leahy performing Thursday and Friday at the Lyric Theatre. MacMaster, a Canadian who plays Cape Breton fiddle, has toured with Alison Krauss, Yo-Yo Ma and Carlos Santana. Leahy, the leader of a family fiddling troupe of eight brothers and sisters, opened for Shania Twain’s world tour. This show features their children as well – and you will not believe how cute their tiny fiddle-playing step-dancing children are in this show (check out YouTube.)
And at the Vero Beach Book Center, Lisa See, an acclaimed fiction writer whose characters are Asian-American women, will be presenting her latest book “China Dolls,” Saturday at 3 p.m. The new novel, published by Random House, involves three best friends who are Chinese-American performers in a glamorous San Francisco nightclub in the 1930s.
Lee’s “Shanghai Girls,” published in 2009 made it to the New York Times Bestsellers list. Other books, including “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” and “Peony in Love” concern Chinese women from past centuries.