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Michael Marotta and Greg Longenhagen. -STEPHANIE DAVIS \/ FLORIDA WEEKLY<\/p>\n
The curtain is officially up on the Southwest Florida theatre season, which, for area arts lovers, makes it the most wonderful time of the year.\n<\/p>\n
For me, the first weekend of October was overflowing with drama, comedy, song and more. First, I got to see the brilliant \u201cRat Pack Lounge\u201d at Florida Repertory Theatre in downtown Fort Myers. This was such a fun, engaging musical comedy featuring the music of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dean Martin \u2013 and the performances made me want to beam myself out to Vegas in the early 60s where I could have a swingin\u2019 good time with martinis and cigarettes. Plus, I got to run into lots of theatre lovers like Michael and Janice Danzig, Doris and Kieth Colgate, Naomi Bloom, Jenny Smith and the director of the show, Michael Marotta, who was catching up with Florida Rep Producing Artistic Director, Greg Longenhagen at the festive cast party after the last bow.\n<\/p>\n
Pretty Woman at the Palm\n<\/p>\n
Before tooling down McGregor to Florida Rep by 8 p.m., I was at the Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre enjoying a pre-show reception and Happy Hour for the opening of the musical \u201cPretty Woman.\u201d It was fun to see several of the ladies arriving in versions of Vivian\u2019s (Julia Roberts\u2019 character) costumes. The brown polka-dot dress and hat that she wears to the polo game, the red designer off-the-shoulder gown she wears to the lobster dinner and more. Afterward, friends raved about how much they enjoyed it. I loved seeing Lydia and Chris Black, Maureen and Will Prather, Jennifer and Roy Benton, Roger and Aimee Bireley, Lenny and Angela Katz, and a whole bunch more.\n<\/p>\n
Theatre kids\n<\/p>\n
A little too bright and early the next morning, I was honored and delighted to get to judge the Southwest Florida Theatrical Society competition for local Lee County high school students \u2013 and trust me, we\u2019ve got some incredibly talented young people around these parts! We got to see singing, dancing, acting, directing, costume and set design, playwriting and other specialties of the theatre world. Having grown up in this area, it\u2019s so gratifying to see how much arts education has flourished over the years \u2013 and how these gifted young people are thriving. I\u2019ve always said that theatre kids are the best. They\u2019re SO supportive of each other \u2013 it may have been a competition, but they were all in it together. It was nice running into several theatre buddies who were also judging, like educator Tiffany Campbell, actresses Shelley Sanders and Anna Grilli, Paula Sisk, Sonya McCarter, Diana Waldier and more who donated their time and talents.\n<\/p>\n
More curtains rising\n<\/p>\n
And since the theatre season has officially arrived, there\u2019s so much to see! The Laboratory Theater of Florida on the edge of downtown is running a thriller for spooky season called \u201cGrey House\u201d until Nov. 2nd. At the Off-Broadway Palm (their intimate black box space, the classic \u201cSteel Magnolias\u201d runs until Nov. 15th. Down south at Players Circle Theatre, the Neil Simon comedy \u201cRumors\u201d runs from Oct. 21st through Nov. 16th.\n<\/p>\n
The beaches are beautiful, spring training is fun, but the arts need us \u2013 support local theatre, you\u2019ll be so glad you did!\n<\/p>\n
\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
Stephanie Davis is a recovering girl-about-town formerly known as the Downtown Diva. A nearly native Southwest Floridian, when she\u2019s not photographing events for Florida Weekly, she\u2019s perfectly content to stay at home binging Netflix with her husband and two cats, Tennessee and Lilibet.\n\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michael Marotta and Greg Longenhagen. -STEPHANIE DAVIS \/ FLORIDA WEEKLY The curtain is officially up on the Southwest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210],"class_list":["post-2035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}