FIU Theatre presents four Main Stage productions each academic year. The following shows comprise the 2013-2014 season:
FALL 2012
CARDENIO
By Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee
Directed by Michael Yawey
Cardenio is the greatest Shakespearean comedy that Shakespeare never wrote. This comic antipasto of a play, updates Shakespearean motifs of mismatched lovers, sexual intrigue, sudden reversals, traveling actors, and a play-within-a-play, into a contemporary high-spirited, gawky romantic comedy.
Set in modern times (with free-range chickens and baby monitors at hand), but placed in the Old World (a villa in Italy), the play centers on a jealous bridegroom who asks his best man to test the fidelity of his new wife (not knowing that the best man is in love with the wife). The groom’s parents show up with the script of Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio and the woman he loved in college. While staging the lost play, characters fall in and out of love, dance, and cook the largest Italian dinner ever seen onstage in South Florida.
SLEEPING BEAUTY
By Rufus Norris
Director TBA – Special Guest Director
This adaptation of the classic fairy tale is a wildly irreverent treat that will delight both children and adults. Yes, there is the princess who pricks her finger and falls into a magical sleep but there is also a vicious ogre mother-in-law, an ungrateful queen, and at the center of it all, a fairy whose magic comes with stinky gas. This isn’t the Magic Kingdom, Princess.
SPRING 2014
JUNE MOON
By George S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner
Directed by Wayne Robinson
Fred Stevens, a young aspiring lyricist moving to New York meets dental assistant Edna Baker on a train. Romance seems imminent but Fred takes a shine to his composer partner Paul’s gold-digging sister-in-law, Eileen. The two men sell a song to a music publisher and it develops into a hit. Ultimately, revelations about Eileen’s true character help return Fred to his senses and Edna, who he realizes he truly loves.
The plot is filled with musical tidbits, people falling in and out of love, betrayals, and everyone grabbing for their own brass ring. It’s a slice of life from the music business world in 1929 New York.
JULIUS CAESAR
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Phillip M. Church
Shakespeare’s classic tragedy about a bold political assassination and its aftermath is full of political plotting; opposing ambitions, shifting loyalties and perfidious betrayals. This powerful play is one of Shakespeare’s best. The themes it explores are also very timely, given today’s acrimonious political climate. The famous line “Et tu, Brute” will forever symbolize the ultimate betrayal.
