• Submitted by: manso
• Arts and Culture
• 03 / 08 / 2011

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The bilingual Shakespeare adaptation will be performed at the new South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center in 2012.

Theater options in multicultural South Florida are about to become even more diverse, thanks to an Australian-born, Sarasota-based artistic director’s determination to have his company play a larger role in the state’s cultural life.

Michael Donald Edwards, artistic director for five seasons of Sarasota’s Asolo Repertory Theatre, revealed the company’s 2011-2012 rotating repertory season on Monday in its home at the Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts on the grounds of the Ringling estate and museum in Sarasota.

Among the eight plays and musicals planned for next season is a new version of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet titled Hamlet: Prince of Cuba. The script, a collaboration between Edwards and Cuban-born playwright Eduardo Machado, will run at Asolo Rep March 23-May 6, 2012, then travel across the state to Cutler Bay, where it will be part of the inaugural season at the Arquitectonica-designed South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center. The plan is to have performances in English, Spanish and a mixture of the languages.

Hamlet: Prince of Cuba will not, however, be the first Asolo production at the new center. Las Meninas, a 2002 work by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, will be part of the $38 million center’s “soft” opening late this spring, running May 20-22 after finishing its March 18-May 15 run at the Asolo. Edwards, who directed the world premiere at San Jose Repertory Theatre, is mounting just the second professional production of the play about an illicit affair between French Queen Marie-Thérèse and the African dwarf who was her servant.

Asolo Rep has collaborated with a number of other companies, including the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, the Arizona Theatre Company and the Cleveland Play House, and the company’s musical version of A Tale of Two Cities had a short run on Broadway in 2008. Several of the productions during Edwards’ tenure have drawn national attention and glowing reviews.

When he first came to Sarasota, Edwards says, “I knew nothing about Miami. But I started to meet people, started to read books about Florida and Miami. And I started to feel, ‘Oh, this is why I’m here, to go on this intellectual and artistic adventure.’”

Eric Fliss, managing director of the South Miami-Dade Center, has been making the reverse trip, looking at Asolo Rep’s productions for the past five years. He believes that the quality of the company’s work is exactly the sort of “boutique theater” he wants to bring to Cutler Bay, in addition to the results of cultivating relationships with South Florida-based emerging and experimental theater companies.

“I met Michael when he was on a fact-finding mission, reaching out to everyone. … He was smitten with Miami and with Cuban culture,” says Fliss. “I’ve offered the South Miami-Dade center to workshop Hamlet: Prince of Cuba this summer with Miami actors.”

Michael Spring, director of Miami-Dade’s Department of Cultural Affairs and one of those to whom Edwards reached out, believes that an Asolo-South Florida connection makes sense.

“This is part of his ongoing efforts to connect the dots. It’s natural that a quality theater on the west coast of Florida would look southeast,” Spring says. “This is all about building critical mass. The more opportunities we have for seeing good work, the stronger the community can become. But it’s more exciting when you can co-develop work, not just plop an Asolo production in Miami.”

Machado, now in his second season as executive story editor for the HBO series Hung, says from Los Angeles that he visited Asolo Rep and was impressed with the work there, and with Edwards.

“Michael thinks big. He does his homework. No one at Asolo told him to do this,” the playwright says.

He is crafting the Spanish Hamlet: Prince of Cuba script from Edwards’ edited version of the play, wanting his treatment to “sound somewhat Cuban and still have it be classical.”

Machado, whose mother lives in Miami, doesn’t get much of his work produced in South Florida, though the New World School of the Arts is staging Fabiola April 6-10. He hopes Hamlet: Prince of Cuba will resonate and spark a greater interest in his plays in Miami.

Source: Miami Herald