Asolo Rep receives $100,000 grant from Barancik Foundation

The gift will go toward supporting the 2015-2016 season as well as continuing the studies and community programs in the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training.

By Nick Reichert
| 3:42 p.m. September 23, 2015

The $100,000 grant will go toward funding the 2015-2016, which includes productions of "West Side Story" and a world premiere of the original musical "Josephine." Micheal Donald Edwards, producing artistic director, announces the season.

Arts + Culture

Entering it's fourth year of the ambitious "American Character" project, which has been exploring what the American experience is and what it means to be American, the Asolo Repertory Theatre has sizable season ahead of it. Productions of the iconic "West Side Story" as well as regional premieres of Broadway transfers of "All The Way," "Living on Love" and "Disgraced" are highlights of the season. In addition, Asolo Rep is producing and staging the world premiere of "Josephine," a biographical musical about influential jazz singer and dancer Josephine Baker, opening at the end of April. Fortunately for Asolo Rep, they have a bevy of supporters including the local and private Charles and Margery Barancik Foundation.

Scene shop crew assembling set pieces during last year's season in the Mertz Theatre.

The foundation announced on Wednesday the donation of a $100,000 grant to go toward funding the upcoming theatrical season as well as continuing the educational and community programs of the theater and Florida State University's MFA, three-year acting conservatory.

"We are thrilled to support the strategic partnership between Asolo Repertory Theatre and the FSU/Asolo Conservatory, reflecting the Barancik Foundation’s interest in arts and education,” says Teri A Hansen, president and CEO of the Barancik Foundation.

The grant will allow Asolo Rep to hire some of the best theatrical talent on and backstage from around the country and from theater hotbeds like New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. And the grant will help purchase materials such as sets, props and costumes.

On the educational side, the grant will help underwrite the conservatory's London program, which has second-year MFA students travel to London for six weeks to study acting and stage techniques from the classical theater repertoire. Upon their return from London, current and future conservatory students will use those lessons during their intensive and extensive New Stages Tour. The tour has the student actors perform fresh 45-minute adaptations of William Shakespeare plays to approximately 15,000 students and adults in schools and venues across the county and the state of Florida.

"The grant recognizes the unique, mutually beneficial relationship that Asolo Rep and the conservatory share," says Linda DiGabriele, managing director of Asolo Rep. "It’s enlightened donors like the Barancik Foundation that see how supporting this partnership benefits the community through the audiences we reach and the artists we attract, and our overall economic impact and tourist appeal."