SAND GRANT PLAYERS WRAP UP SUCCESSFUL THEATRE SEASON
April 1, 2019
Cedar Key’s premier theatre company, the Sand Gnat players, wrapped up another season of scintillating classical theatre with their take on Samuel Beckett’s haunting Waiting For Godot. Director Vurl de Pesto Futz, feeling the play’s original message a trifle dark, changed the ending slightly. In the Cedar Key production, Godot actually does show up , treating the other characters to grouper sandwiches at the Big Deck. “Who needs these depressing plays?” proclaimed dePesto Futz. “And we all need to eat, don’t we?”
In a similar vein, Sand Gnat Players’ artistic director D.Darbelly Erst altered the next production, the big budget musical Titanic. “Folks who live on the water don’t need to see maritime disasters” reasoned Erst, known affectionately to his fellow thespians as “Surf’s Up,” “so we made a teensy change.” In this production, the great ocean liner misses the iceberg but true tragedy ensues when, during an altercation at the shuffleboard court, Mrs. John Jacob Astor’s poodle Quigly is swept overboard while chasing a cherry tomato. “Why me?” laments Mrs. Astor, as the whole cast breaks into the musical’s most famous number, “The Dog Goes on and on.” As the distraught Mrs. Astor, Sally Sadie Crady hits new heights as well as heretofore unheard notes as she captures splendidly the cruel universe’s cold treatment of the tragic millionairesse. And local actor Luc G. Dirk gives the ill-fated Captain Smith a firm yet yielding presence reminiscent of his riveting portrayal of Slivka in last year’s production of While Dung Beetles Bellow.
The really big local theatrical news involves the promise of a fabulous new performing space. Rumor has it that famed Danish architect Jorn Utzon, designer of the Sydney, Australia Opera House, has bought the lot on which the old Captain’s Table rested and plans to build a similar structure here. The new space will apparently house not only a grand and multi-faceted stage but also a mall, numerous restaurants, a bowling alley, and a shooting range. With his new performing venue on the horizon, “Surf’s Up” Erst has announced the Sand Gnat Players new season, which includes Cats, Hamilton, The Book of Mormons, Les Mis, Evita, The Phantom of the Opera, Dear Evan Hanson, Into the Woods, Cabaret, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Hamlet, although in keeping with the Players’ upbeat approach to theatre, Hamlet discovers his father actually choked to death on a mung bean, forgives Claudius, and marries the happy, happy Ophelia.
