With all the talk of breweries coming to Vero, one of Florida’s biggest craft breweries, Cigar City in Tampa, deigned to ask Vero’s resident cowboy-poet-artist (and beer-swiller) Sean Sexton to design a label for a new beer. Cow Boss Imperial Milk Stout, aged on Florida cypress, sweetened with a teat squirt of lactose and released in limited edition at a whopping $9 a bottle, honors the ranchers of Florida through the Cattlemen’s Association, of which Sexton is a long-standing member.
Sexton designed the label for free in exchange for Cigar City’s $10,000 donation to the state association.
“I’m going to the brewery Friday to pick up my gratuity,” he says. “They’re proud of this beer.”
Last week we could only track down two bottles for sale with little hope of future deliveries. So it’s all the more opportune that Bill Brown, who owns the Sexton family’s restaurant The Patio, will be cracking a keg of Cow Boss to toast the Indian River Cattlemen Wednesday, Sept. 2 (that’s 61 pours, folks, and they’ll be counting). Sexton has invited Cracker cowboy poet Doyle Rigdon, a longtime cowboy with the cattle operation of Lykes Bros. on Florida’s West Coast. Sexton, too, will be reading some of his poems as will Will Barker.
The milk stout, which Cigar City calls a dessert beer, starts to flow at 5:30 p.m. and when it’s gone, there’ll be plenty of Bud or other mass-produced suds to wash it down.
Great theater arrives on our shores from the U.K. this week, one performed live by a Cambridge company at two local high schools; the other beamed to cinema screens through the magic of satellite transmission. What’s even more remarkable is the ticket price: $20 for the simulcast from London of “Beaux’ Strategem,” and the Cambridge company here to perform “Taming of the Shrew” is doing it for free – though they happily take donations.
Next Thursday at St. Edward’s auditorium, and again on Saturday at Sebastian River High’s performing arts center, the Cambridge American Stage Tour (CASAT) presents Shakespeare’s classic of sexual stereotyping, written at the tail end – so to speak – of the 17th century and an effort to edge men past their prior right to beat their wives and into the modern era’s trend of just berating them.
It’s the seventh year that we’ve been honored to host this touring company of pre-professional actors, all students at University of Cambridge and it’s thanks to Susan Lovelace, director of Sebastian’s International Baccalaureate program, that we were even put on their radar. Lovelace got to know the group when she was studying for a master’s degree one summer in Cambridge and was approached to help connect the group to Florida colleges and universities.
The company, founded under the patronage of Dame Judi Dench in 2000, often gives a modern twist to Shakespeare’s plays, gearing performances for younger audiences often uninitiated to Shakespeare’s use of puns and double-entendres. This time, though, the jokes provoke more than laughs.
“‘The Taming of the Shrew’ notoriously deals with issues of gender and misogyny that continue to resonate today,” director Kennedy Bloomer told a Cambridge newspaper last week. “Yet as well as exploring these issues, we also want to reclaim the comedy and theatricality of the play.”
He says the “tantrums, fights and people fancying each other” combine with the play’s ambiguity to make for plenty of conversation at the CAST workshops. “If I be waspish, best beware my sting,” says Pack.
As for you beaux with attitude, best get thee to a Cineplex for “The Beaux’ Stratagem,” simulcast next Thursday at Vero’s Majestic Theatre live from the National Theater in London. Simon Godwin, whose latest effort was Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman,” directs George Farquhar’s last play, billed as a “fabulous carnal comedy” that originally debuted in 1707 and judging by reviews has been wonderfully revived. The play is about two men who blow through all their cash and decide to head out in pursuit of marriage for money.
London critics have called the production “deliciously modern” and “unstoppably entertaining.”
If you’ve been following the NTLive series or are lucky enough to make it to the West End, you’ll see a lot of the regulars, including Susannah Fielding and Geoffrey Streatfeild in the lead roles.
Staged a century after “The Taming of the Shrew,” the stratagem is carried out in an era of another currently unthinkable societal edict: Despising someone isn’t grounds for divorce. Never mind that the man should make all the money. Nearly penniless, two friends set out to woo the daughters of Lady Bountiful, a widow and legendary healer whose Resting Rich Face (RRF) greatly appeals to the broke boys, as it has been passed down (with her fortune) to her lovely daughters. The boys aggressively court the sisters, even though one of them is married.
And this is where our playwright finds himself written into a corner. He has to pull a deus ex machina out of his back pocket to make it all work out neatly in the end (Farquhar, dying of tuberculosis as he wrote, asked for pity that he couldn’t spend more time on the ending.)
Like “Shrew,” this play, too, is a comment on the times, as Farquhar believed incompatibility should be grounds for divorce. It wasn’t, and this was a nod to his not-quite-contemporary, John Milton, who felt that a hate-filled marriage was as wrong as adultery.
The Majestic has been simulcasting for six years now and promotes NTLive plays and the MetLive operas under “events” on its website. As mentioned in a recent 32963 article, AMC-24 at the Indian River Mall began only recently to screen those simulcasts and apparently have not yet developed a stratagem for getting the word out either through staff or website. I expect the beaux will be in action there, too.
