A very good year for arts and entertainment in the Bradenton area
If you said 2015 has been a great year for arts and entertainment in the Bradenton area, it's unlikely anyone would put up much of an argument. Just in case, here are just a handful of the year's highlights.
Locals honored
This year, two Sarasota artists received prestigious and high-profile national awards. Both happen to be named Jacobs, but that's just a coincidence.
The National Endowment for the Arts named Dolly Jacobs a National Heritage Fellow. The NEA has been giving the award to a handful of people, usually about a dozen or so, each year since 1982. Jacobs -- a world-famous circus aerialist and a co-founder (with her husband Pedro Reis) of Circus Sarasota -- is the first circus artist to ever receive the award.
The award, according to the NEA, recognizes "the recipients' artistic excellence and support their continuing contributions to our nation's traditional arts heritage." Other winners have included blues legends B.B. King and John Lee Hooker.
And the National Black Theatre Conference honored Nate Jacobs, the artistic director of the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, with its Larry Leon Hamlin Producer Award. It's the most significant award the conference has for producers, and it indicates that WBTT's work is having a national impact.
Jellicles can
We've gotten used to beautifully mounted and technically stunning productions from Manatee Players in Stone Hall at the Manatee Performing Arts Center, but this season's "Cats," directed by Dewayne Barrett, took the company's artistic levels up to 11. Everything about it was much closer to perfect than anyone has any reason to expect from a community theater. (I've seen maybe five national tour productions of this show, and never enjoyed any of them as much as I enjoyed this one.) Perhaps best of all, in the long-range view, it showed us that the investments in improving the acoustics of Stone Hall over the summer had paid off big-time.
Bradenton Blues Festival
Musically, the fourth annual Bradenton Blues Festival was pretty much on a par with the
first three. You can't expect much more, because the music's always great. This year we had perfect weather (it was kind of hot last year), the new dance floor was a hit with the audience and the on-stage wedding of two Canadian blues fans was an extra treat. Realize Bradenton never messes with its successful festival formula, but it's continuously making tweaks that seem to make each festival just a bit better than the last one.
Film festivals
The Sarasota Film Festival was great, but Bradenton had its own festival that was awfully promising. The Skyway Film Festival featured some celebrities, some respected directors, great panel discussions for industry professionals (and people with industry aspirations), strong crowds and a ton of great films. It included an especially strong lineup of documentaries, especially "3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets" and "The Black Panthers." It's still uncertain whether there will be a 2016 Skyway Film Festival. The latest word, according to an email by organizers, is that there probably will be, and that it will probably be at least partly, and maybe entirely, in Bradenton.
Hail to the King
Stephen King doesn't do many public appearances, but he spoke at Stone Hall early this year to raise money for the Manatee County Library Foundation. The place sold out, even though tickets were, let's just say, not inexpensive. King fans from as far away as Argentina flew in for it. It was pretty cool, and King's talk was highly entertaining.
Within a few months came word that the library had something even bigger planned for 2016. That seemed doubtful, but then we heard that King would be back, this time joined by John Grisham. Grisham will be the star this time, with his friend King interviewing him on stage at the Neel Performing Arts Center at the State College of Florida in January.
New stages
Urbanite Theatre opened in downtown Sarasota, offering a style of theater Sarasota had never seen before. The space is intimate, with seating that can be configured differently for each play. The plays themselves are new, smart, usually intense and almost always fulfilling, And they're almost always sold out, or close to it. The entire run of "Freak" was sold out before opening night, in fact. It seems as though local audiences have been hungry for this kind of theater, but no one knew it.
Starlite Players, also in Sarasota, opened right around the same time, with a very different mission. It stages monthly bare-bones productions of short comedies by playwrights from the area. There's no shortage of quality material, and the seats have been filled.
Packing their trunks
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced this year that it would stop using elephants in its shows. Elephants are cool to watch, but lots of people really hate the use of animals as entertainment. Other animals will still be part of the Ringling Bros. circuses, and parent company Feld Entertainment will maintain its Center for Elephant Conservation in Polk city. That's where all the retired circus elephants will go to live and play.
A pretty significant year, all around, and a pretty great one. The best news is that there's no reason to expect that 2016 won't be even better.
Marty Clear, features writer/columnist, can be reached at 941-708-7919. Follow twitter.com/martinclear.
This story was originally published December 24, 2015 at 2:00 PM with the headline "A very good year for arts and entertainment in the Bradenton area ."