Tampa Tribune - Murder Ballads: A Tribute to Nice Cave and the Bad Seeds article
© Tampa Tribune
TAMPA...Nick Cave, an Australian-born songwriter, musician and novelist, has fired up Big Guava artists with his Gothic tales of killing sprees and crimes of passion.
Now Tampa's Jobsite Theater has pulled together area artists to create a show inspired by the numbers on ""Murder Ballads,'' an album by Cave and his band, the Bad Seeds.
Among the original staged works selected for the show, which includes a film, dance piece, music and theater, is ""The Curse of Millhaven,'' a play by actor-writer Shawn Paonessa and writer Neil Gobioff. The two have collaborated on plays for Jobsite in the past, including ""Learning Swerve'' and ""Breathing Oblivion,'' and with Chris Holcum, ""The Acropolis Project.''
""Cave's song "The Curse of Millhaven' is about Lottie, a teenage girl who commits a series of murders,'' says Paonessa, who routinely appears in Jobsite productions. ""The song is pretty much a catalog of all the people she's killed. It's so ludicrous.''
Since the two had not written a comedy since the 1999 ""Learning Swerve,'' they decided to bring laughs to the story.
""It's short, sweet and funny for funny's sake,'' says Paonessa, a 28-year-old University of South Florida alumnus who majored in English. Among his favorite writers are Kurt Vonnegut and Carl Hiassen.
Gobioff is a Harry Potter fan who also graduated from USF with a degree in English.
""We both wanted something lighthearted,'' says the 29-year-old Web page developer. ""We started with a comedy sketch and then put some depth into it.''
Paonessa, who works as an office manager during the day, thinks Lottie might simply be bad or insane.
""We used the song as an outline, and we asked ourselves, "Why does this girl do these things?' ... I was SO tired of teenagers having scapegoats. People blame the video games. Well, maybe the Twinkie DIDN'T push her over the edge.''
As artists, both of them love living in Tampa, although they say the city has limitations.
""People ask me why I don't move to New York or L.A., but I'm likely to have a lot more choices of things to do here'' rather than compete with thousands of other aspiring actors and writers,'' Paonessa says. ""But we do need several theaters here, all low-cost and located in the same area, so people can always have theater as an option when they are going out.''
Gobioff adds, ""There is a grass-roots arts community in Tampa, but it needs to blossom. It has more of a "subculture' feel. ... Mainstream [folks] need to recognize that it is there.''
""Murder Ballads: A Tribute to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds'' opens Friday and runs through Aug. 17 at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center's Shimberg Playhouse, 1010 N. MacInnes Place, Tampa; 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday; $15.50; (813) 229-7827; www.tbpac.org
Album "Murder Ballads" Inspires Jobsite Show
published July 28, 2003