SJRCC PRESS RELEASE October 2007 FloArts opens performing arts season with musical farce "Lucky Stiff" Florida School of the Arts will open its performing arts season with "...a fortune and a chase and a lovely foreign place..." when it presents the musical "Lucky Stiff" by Linda Ahrens. This performance comes to life when British shoe salesman Harry Witherspoon takes his uncle's corpse on one last vacation to Monte Carlo in order to inherit six million dollars. Harry accepts his uncle's request, only to encounter a faction of characters in pursuit of his inheritance. The show runs October 18 - 20 at 7:30 p.m. and October 21 at 2:30 p.m. in the FloArts Main Stage Theatre on the St. Johns River Community College Palatka Campus and is suitable for all audiences. Admission is $5. FloArts acting instructor and play director Ed Kelly describes the musical as a potpourri of characters, accents and settings. "The show includes British, French, Italian, Arabian and Brooklyn characters," Kelly said. "The highly-imaginative settings range from scenes in a train and airplane to scenes in a Monte Carlo casino, to name a few," he said. The production includes a live orchestra and a dynamic cast of students singing, dancing and acting in multiple roles. "It's an impressive setting with more than a dozen scenic units that magically reveal Harry pushing his dead uncle through a maze of locales," Kelly said. "It's a real Rubik's Cube that needs to function like a Swiss clock." The set design for "Lucky Stiff" plays on the whimsical, unrealistic ideas behind the play. Scenic and lighting design instructor Robert O'Leary said the plot resembles an old melodramatic cartoon with clear-cut villains and heroes. "With this as an inspiring thought, I chose to place the play and its many locations in quite the cartoon-stylized world," O'Leary said. "From leaning, out-of-proportion buildings to magically oversized props, it should take us all back to a time when Bugs Bunny ruled our Saturday mornings," he said. "I think the audience will truly enjoy and have a good laugh from just the visuals themselves." In addition to being one of the largest multi-piece sets designed, the production has presented the technical and design students with new challenges, O'Leary said. "The lines on each set required picking up quite a few advanced carpentry methods to bend lumber to the curves of our style," he said. "FloArts student Dana Jenkins has been chosen to be the first to design with our newly renovated lighting system featuring many new state-of-the-art lighting instruments, computer programmable controls and dimming systems." Costume design instructor Lynnsey Slanina said she drew inspiration from Norman Rockwell in order to bridge the gap between the very stylized, animated set and the real people playing the character roles. "Norman Rockwell's works are classic," Slanina said. "The illustration style is almost cartoony, but we still recognize the subjects as our neighbors, our children, our doctors or our loved ones," she said. "I have taken hints from the way people wear the clothing to the colors and classic styles that they are seen in for almost every illustration." Additional FloArts faculty members contributing to the show are musical director Michael Clark, dance choreographer Lee Dando and voice coach Stephanie Walter. The featured cast list is a mix of first and second year students and includes: Daniel Prill (as Harry Witherspoon) Robin Jackson (as Annabel Glick and a commuter) Charles Hale (as dead Uncle Anthony) Vera Samuels (as Rita La Porta and a commuter) Thaddeus Pearson (as Vinnie Di Ruzzio) Daniel Benvenuto (as Luigi, an Arab, a commuter and the voice of Tony Hendon) Annelise Reding (as Dominique Du Monaco and a commuter) Matthew Hixon (as a punk, a prosperous man, a dapper gambler and a nun) Tim Leonard (as Lorry Driver, an English solicitor, a clothes salesman, a French emcee & bellhop#2) Torey Scarbrough (as an old Texan, a commuter and a French waiter) Garrett Page (as bellhop #1, Mr. Loomis, a croupier, a leper and a commuter) Heather Spillane (as the landlady, a casino character, and tourist) Nicole Minardi (as a spinster, a commuter and Southern lady #1) Andrea Whitman (as a French maid, Miss Throsby and Southern lady #2) and Debra Christopher (as a nurse, a commuter, a casino character, and a drunken maid) Kelly added that the musical has been entered as an associate entry with the American College Theatre Festival that provides scholarship and networking opportunities for college theatre students nation-wide. Florida School of the Arts is Florida's first state-supported professional arts school that serves the entire state of Florida and awards the two-year associate degree. FloArts is located on the SJRCC Palatka campus. For more information, call 386-312-4300. Return to FloArts home page. Return to SJRCC home page.