- April 18, 2024
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It takes a lot of hands to juggle a campus of five theaters serving more than 200,000 yearly attendees.
Florida Studio Theatre is the third largest subscription theater in the U.S. But its in-house staff comprises 50 full-time staff members.
So how do they do it? Passion.
Actor Dane Becker, improv performer and coach Elise Rodriguez and twin set designers Moriah and Isabel Curley-Clay are just a few of the people behind the theatrical machine that is FST, and they keep coming back for more.
Dane Becker can’t stay away from theater. Seriously.
“Trust me, I’ve tried doing something else, but I just love this silly, stupid industry,” he says with a laugh. “It’s an outlet of expression, and it’s what I feel most comfortable doing.”
Becker, a self-described “huge theater kid,” moved to Bradenton from Long Island when he was 16. At first, he wasn’t sure if he would find the kind of theatrical opportunities he had growing up outside New York City. But as a student at Lakewood Ranch High School in 2010, he dived into the local theater scene by playing Lt. Cable in “South Pacific” at Manatee Performing Arts Center.
“I had no understanding of how much there was … The amount of theater here is so unique.”
After graduating, Becker studied musical theater at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. After graduating, he got his first FST role as Link Larkin in the company’s 2014 production of “Hairspray,” kickstarting what would become a deep appreciation for FST’s variety of shows and educational approach for both its students and professionals.
“It’s a great teaching institution — I always learn something,” he says. “This is a great, safe place to learn and grow.”
Now, after spending the last two and half years working in Los Angeles, Becker says he’s thrilled to be back home for his most recent FST role in the cabaret show “Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits.”
It’s his third show working with Producing Artistic Director and CEO Richard Hopkins and Managing Director Rebecca Hopkins (who co-wrote the show). They’re good people, he says, and those aren’t always easy to come by in his industry.
“They don’t have egos,” Becker says. “I think they really care about people and the product they’re putting out.”
It’s the Hopkins’ collaborative nature that most excites Becker. He rarely works with directors who will take suggestions, particularly for a show they wrote, but much of what results on the Court Cabaret stage came from organic actor-director dialogue.
But this show is more than a collaborative tongue-in-cheek musical revue of songs inspired by Shakespeare. For Becker, it’s a chance to do something that nearly brings him to tears just thinking about.
“To be able to sing my parent’s wedding song (“Somewhere” from “West Side Story”) in front of them, that’s the best part.”
Elise Rodriguez can be called many things: lawyer, coach, improviser, teacher, dog mom … and somehow she finds time for it all.
“When I became an attorney, I knew from the beginning that wasn’t my life’s work, but it took me having a law firm and having employees for me to realize something was missing,” she says. “I needed creativity.”
Rodriguez found the creative space she was craving at her first improv class in her native Miami. She had secretly always wanted to be an actress, and she thrived in the inclusive, fast-paced and teamwork-driven environment of comedic acting. It wasn’t long until she became a member of the city’s Just the Funny improv troupe.
But Rodriguez felt the itch to move and follow a new career path, not just a hobby, so she started contacting the directors of various improv groups around Florida. FST Director of Improvisation Will Luera, whom she had met at a workshop in Miami, responded right away.
He invited Rodriguez to a show and out for drinks after. She went, and it was a combination of his welcoming nature and FST’s unique — especially the whole improv-in-a-cabaret-theater aspect — theater community that swayed her.
She moved to Sarasota in August 2017, joined the FST On Deck improv cast in September, started teaching FST improv classes in January, and transitioned to the FST Improv Mainstage team this winter.
So why improv?
“I think it’s being able to create based on what you’re inspired by in the moment,” Rodriguez says. “It’s a rush, and it’s something led by curiosity and letting yourself be taken somewhere.”
She loves the spontaneity of improv — so much so that she tells her students to throw away any backup plans they might have planned before getting onstage.
This creates a close-knit environment between not only the professional improvisers but the improv students, from beginners to those who have completed the highest level, 601.
“They’re really invested in the theater itself and in their classmates,” she says of her students. “And all the teachers are so different, we all shine in our own ways. ... It makes it feel like I’m contributing something.”
Theater takes up most her time, Rodriguez says, especially now that she’s also coaching FST’s first all-female improv troupe, Busted!. But she still writes wills, visit clients and operates her side business, Elise Rodriguez Freeform Coaching, to coach law students, bar exam takers and new lawyers.
Rodriguez likes to stay busy, and she attributes it to her time in the gifted student program as a child.
“Our brains need to be doing a lot of things at once, or we act out,” she says of such students. “I felt like I was able to be creative and be myself there … And that was gone from the end of high school until I walked into that (first) improv class.”
Moriah and Isabel Curley-Clay are identical in more than appearance.
The twin sisters both earned undergraduate degrees in anthropology at New York University, where they both fell in love with theater design. Then the pair went on to each earn an MFA in theatrical design from Brandeis University.
Now, they’re a freelance set design team based in Atlanta who will have designed the sets for 19 FST productions by August.
“I think it’s definitely beneficial for us, being sisters, because sometimes we’ll approach something the same way, and then sometimes it’s vastly different and we have to persuade each other,” says Moriah Curley-Clay. “It’s like a sound board, and if we’re on the same page from the beginning, we know the story we’re trying to tell, and that reinforces confidence.”
Isabel and Moriah Curley-Clay say their parents, who also have had creative careers, often took them to the theater growing up. However, they found it funny when close friends told them they should participate in theater tech crew in high school. It wasn’t until their college set-design class that it all made sense.
Both Curley-Clays worked with other set designers during their time at NYU, but after they graduated, they realized what they could accomplish together — in Feburary 2016, they were featured in American Theatre Magazine’s seven theatrical artists to watch — and they’ve worked as a pair ever since.
The duo’s FST career began when a director they often worked with in Atlanta asked them to design the set for FST’s “Taking Shakespeare” in 2014. Their experience was so positive, they kept coming back — they say they love the FST team, but the lure of Florida sunshine also helped.
Designing for FST typically starts eight weeks before opening night, they say, and the first step is learning the director’s vision for the environment of the production. Then, Isabel Curley-Clay says their anthropology degree comes in handy because they must do extensive research on the plot of the show, time period, etc.
“Anthropology is about uncovering people’s stories in the past and learning about cultures different than your own,” Moriah Curley-Clay adds. “We learned how to do a lot of research, and we have that scientific crossover.”
After choosing an aesthetic based on research findings, they create several sketches — first rough, then detailed — and models, which the team presents to the director. After modifications, they send it to a build crew that makes the set without on-site guidance from the sisters, who come down from Atlanta about 10 days before opening night. But they’re a detail-oriented pair, so they’re constantly in communication with the build team and props department, they say.
Isabel Curley-Clay says many set designers have to start out as technicians then work their way up into design, but she and her sister never had to. They got design projects right after graduation.
“You don’t want us building things, we got very lucky in that way,” she says with a laugh.
Isabel Curley-Clay also says one major advantage of pairing up to design is not needing to hire assistants. Instead of delegating tasks to someone with perhaps less experience, they lean on each other.
So why set design?
“I like being able to create a different world for each story,” Moriah Curley-Clay says. “And you get to learn a lot of things from the research process. You have to become mini experts on each little world.”
