Broadway hits and a world premiere coming this season to Florida Studio Theatre

After more than two years of Covid-related shutdowns and disruptions, Richard Hopkins is confident that people who love theater realize they need it more than ever before and will return as they once did regularly.

To attract them, the producing artistic director of Florida Studio Theatre has announced a 2022-23 mainstage season that includes three shows that were successes on Broadway and one world premiere that the company commissioned as part of its Playwrights Project.

“The idea of social connection and human connection is more important ever before,” Hopkins said in a recent Zoom interview. “The two years we spent on Zoom, consigned to our own little balloons made us realize how important it is to be together and theater is the ultimate human connection.”

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FST will open its season Nov. 9 with the Broadway musical “Something Rotten,” about Nick and Nigel Bottom, two brothers living in Elizabethan England who are trying to compete with the success and popularity of William Shakespeare. Their efforts lead them to invent the first example of musical theater. It ran for nearly two years on Broadway beginning in April 2015.

“As soon as I saw it, I said we have to do this,” said Hopkins. The theater has held the rights to produce the show for more than a year, but he wanted to wait until significant numbers of people showed they were ready to return to live performances.

“It’s both Elizabethan and current,” he said. “It’s very smart but at the same time it’s very dumb, and you don’t have to know anything about Shakespeare to appreciate it but the more you know the funnier it is and the better it is.”

It will be followed on Dec. 7 by Heidi Schreck’s “What the Constitution Means to Me,” a personal play about her years-long connection to the document, its shortcomings and its relevance. As a teenager, Schreck won scholarship money competing in speaking contests about the Constitution. The New York Times described the play as a “tragedy told as a comedy, a work of inspired protest, a slyly crafted piece of persuasion and a tangible contribution to the change it seeks.”

For the winter, the theater will present Lee Hall’s stage adaptation of Paddy Chayevsky’s classic film “Network” (beginning Jan. 25), about how a fired anchorman becomes a ratings magnet after an on-air meltdown, and what that success says about the public and the media. The play originated at England’s National Theatre.

On Broadway, actor Bryan Cranston played anchorman Howard Beale in a high-tech production that Hopkins said was more like a “movie on stage. We’re not going to do that. The story is so good and profound and human that you don’t need all that technical stuff.”

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The season’s final play is the world premiere of “Visit Joe Whitefeather (and bring the family!),” beginning April 5.

Bruce Graham’s play is set in 1972 in the small town of Beaver Gap, Pennsylvania, where leaders are trying to rebuild tourism by rebranding the town in memory of a Native American war hero who has no connection to the community. The play was inspired, to a degree, by the town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, which was named for the Native American athlete in 1954.

“First and foremost it’s a comedy about a very small town losing its economic driver of tourism, and somebody comes up with the idea” of renaming it. Hopkins said the play addresses “in a positive and comedic way, the missteps us white folks can take as it relates to people of color and indigenous people. The play will probably offend some of the people on the right and the left because it does push from both sides.”

Three cabaret shows

The new cabaret season will feature two new productions and one update from a decade ago, beginning Oct. 5 with “The ‘70s: More Than a Decade,” which Hopkins created with his wife, Managing Director Rebecca Hopkins, and Sarah Durham. It will feature songs by The Who, Queen, The Bee Gees, Three Dog Night, The Beatles and more.

It was a time when people became disillusioned with “all the things we trusted as a society,” Rebecca Hopkins said. “That’s where the disco era came in.”

The season’s second show, beginning Nov. 16, is “A Place in the Sun: A Tribute to Stevie Wonder,” the singer and songwriter whose career has spanned more than six decades.

“Look at what Stevie Wonder has done socially,” Richard Hopkins said. “He has addressed so many social issues in his music and lyrics and he does it in a way that typically doesn’t inflame people.”

The final show, beginning Feb. 15, is a new version of “Reel Music,” a celebration of songs from the movies that was first presented in 2012.

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It spans a century of film songs and touches on the “power of music in the movies. The movies are telling the story of our lives.” The original included songs from a range of films including “The Wizard of Oz,” “Fame,” “Flashdance” and “Titanic.” Rebecca Hopkins said the update will add in music from more recent movies, including “Coco” and “The Greatest Showman.”

Children’s Theatre season

The company also will present a series of four shows in its Children’s Theatre series, which will grow with a move into the 173-seat Keating Theatre, from the 100-seat Bowne’s Lab.

“We’re able to accommodate the growing demand for the program, so more children and their families can come and it allows us to do more theatrical designs, use more imagination and have a larger impact,” said Caroline Saldivar, the director of children’s theater.

The series begins Oct. 1 with a stage version of E.B. White’s classic story “Charlotte’s Web,” followed in the holiday season with the latest version of “Deck the Halls.” The show is a mix of songs and sketches that depict how the holidays are celebrated in the Sarasota area.

“We challenge ourselves to come up with new sketches and new songs and new elves each year,” said Saldivar, who creates the show with Sarah Durham.

A production of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” beginning Jan. 14, will be presented at the theater and in schools as part of the theater’s Write a Play program, which uses teams of actors working with teachers to encourage students to try writing their own plays.

Each year, the theater receives thousands of scripts from across the state and overseas. They are read by staff and volunteers and the winning entries are staged in a special production each spring, this year called “The Last Acorn and Other Winning Plays.” It begins March 25.

Both “Charlotte’s Web” and “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” have been presented in past years, “but it’s exciting to share the stories with an all new generation,” Saldivar said.

The Children’s Theatre productions are presented on select Saturdays and Sundays and generally run 45 minutes to an hour.

For subscriptions and ticket information: 941-366-9000; floridastudiotheatre.org

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