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American Stage opens season with boxing-themed 'The Royale'

 
The American Stage season opens with “The Royale,” featuring Aygemang Clay as boxer Jack Johnson.
The American Stage season opens with “The Royale,” featuring Aygemang Clay as boxer Jack Johnson.
Published Sept. 21, 2017

LIVE THAT FANTASY: THE ROYALE

Three professional sports franchises pour millions of dollars into the Tampa Bay area, branding their images onto caps and T-shirts, flooding the broadcast and print media with every kind of marketing. And a recent study by five arts organizations found that arts and culture nonprofits are at least as influential, a $241 million industry in Pinellas County alone.

But we don't see many plays about sports.

The Royale, American Stage's first show of the season, follows boxer Jay "the Sport" Jackson, a character based loosely on American heavyweight Jack Johnson (1908-1915), who dominated the sport at the height of the Jim Crow era. Yet this isn't the stage equivalent of a sports movie.

"Anyone who was expecting Rocky is going to be disappointed," director Lisa Tricomi said. Aygemang Clay, who plays Jay, creates the effect of boxing with "a lot of body percussion" and movement, Tricomi said.

Playwright Marco Ramirez, an Emmy-nominated writer whose credits include Sons of Anarchy and Orange Is the New Black, went for an expressionistic approximation of boxing in his Broadway debut out of respect for what he called the "simplest, purest form of theater."

"To me, even if we got the best fight choreographers in the world, an onstage fight was always going to look staged, not just because of the fact that they're not actually hitting each other, but because boxing itself is so improvised," Ramirez told Stay Thirsty, an online magazine. "So very much about bodies in space reacting to each other, that the human eye is always going to know when it's phony."

Friday-Oct. 15 at Raymond James Theatre, 163 Third St. N, St. Petersburg. $39 and up. Preview Thursdayday, $29. (727) 823-7529. For showtimes, go to americanstage.org.

MAYBE IT'S TIME: COMEDIANS

This week, veteran comics are making their way to Tampa Bay, an area in need of a laugh.

Billy Gardell, star of Mike and Molly, is a veteran stand-up comedian with a down-to-earth comedy act. 6:30 and 9 p.m. Saturday at Side Splitters Comedy Club, 12938 N Dale Mabry Highway, Tampa. $35-$65. (813) 960-1197. sidesplitterscomedy.com.

Doug Stanhope, host of the Man Show and Girls Gone Wild, is not for the faint of heart. But his live performances are legendary, and twice earned him Time Out New York's best comedy performance of the year honors. 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Improv Comedy Theater, 1600 E Eighth Ave., Tampa. $35. (813) 864-4000. improvtampa.com.

Brian Regan, whose comedy is clean but cutting, had a 2015 stand-up special, Brian Regan: Live From Radio City, that was the first live broadcast of a special in Comedy Central's history. 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, 1111 N McMullen-Booth Road, Clearwater. $53.50. (727) 791-7400. rutheckerdhall.com.

Sharon Wynne, Times staff writer

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OVERTURES: FLORIDA ORCHESTRA

The Florida Orchestra is increasingly adding free, kid-friendly concerts to its public offerings. This weekend features a few, all open to the public.

The interactive Storytelling in Music: String Quartet explores the ways in which music can tell a story, featuring Mozart and more. 12:30 p.m. Saturday at the Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American Museum, 2240 9th Ave S, St. Petersburg. An "instrument petting zoo" precedes the concert starting at 11:30 a.m.

The Science of Sound: French Horn Quintet, a lesson both on the horn and acoustics, starts at 2 p.m. Sunday (1:30 p.m. instrument petting zoo), followed by the Storytelling in Music quartet performance at 3 p.m.; both at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg.