Summertime and the living is easy.
Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high.
DuBose Heyward’s lyrics to “Summertime,” from Porgy and Bess, conjure an idealized summer, warm but never too hot, when outdoors is the place to be.
Tampa summers are not idealized. They’re demonized.
Summertime and the low’s in the 90s
Feels-like temp is one twenty-five.
Not to mention the humidity, which wraps around you like a soaked wool blanket.
Tampa summers are the reason we have air conditioning.
Summers like Tampa’s make us crave dark, cool spaces away from the heat and light. Like a theater.
Air conditioning transformed the movie industry. Summers had been the industry’s slowest season. Now, a movie ticket came with a bonus – two hours in a cool oasis, away from the summer sun and heat.
The first air-conditioned movie theater was the Rivoli in Times Square, premiering its Willis Carrier-designed unit over Memorial Day weekend 1925.
However, in the spirit of anything movies can do theater can do better (and earlier), Broadway had an air-conditioned theater almost 50 years before the Rivoli.
Yeah. Take that, cinema boy.
The Fifth Avenue Theatre (West 28th Street and Broadway – go figure), under the management of theater legend Augustin Daly, had an air-cooling apparatus installed in 1877. The Fifth’s other claim to fame is its association with W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Several of the English pair’s comic operas had U.S. premiers there, while The Pirates of Penzance had its world premiere at the Fifth.
A handful of theatrical works are set specifically in summer, an eclectic lot including A Little Night Music, Carousel, In the Heights, 110 in the Shade and The Light in the Piazza.
Summer is essential to some storylines even if the action doesn’t take place then. Grease gives us Sandy ‘n’ Danny’s backstory in “Summer Nights”. Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer is mostly an eye-witness account of an offstage character’s plunge into depravity (said depravity having taken place in the summer of the title).
Broadway songs about summer and related topics are more bountiful. Besides those already mentioned, there’s “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” from Carousel; “It’s Hot Up Here,” from Sunday in the Park With George; “Heat Wave,” from As Thousands Cheer; and “Too Darn Hot” from Kiss Me, Kate, in which Cole Porter suggests summer love may be a myth.
Summer love might not be a myth but love of summer is in short supply here. We curse it, we barely tolerate it, we accept our muggy fate, we say it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity when, in fact, it is both the heat and the humidity, the demonic duo of discomfort.
The Straz is here to help with a lineup of shows, all in our lovely, indoor air-conditioned theaters. The Patel Conservatory is abuzz with young performers preparing for upcoming performances on our stages. Plus, our resident theater company, Jobsite, has two can’t-miss shows coming up: The Rocky Horror Show (July 10 – August 4) and Thrice to Mine, a compelling reconsideration of Lady Macbeth (Aug. 14-25).
Stay relatively cool this season with The Straz’s triple-play: Buy a ticket. See a show. Beat the heat.