After more than 40 years of picking shows for each new season at Florida Studio Theatre, Executive Producer Richard Hopkins still isn’t quite sure how they come together. Do the plays and musicals find him or does he discover them at the right time?

He doesn’t set out to find shows that fit some kind of theme, but one clearly developed as he was making selections for the 2026-27 winter mainstage season.

“The world we’re living in in the United States seems so upturned,” he said, citing a line from Hamlet in which the tormented young prince states: “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right.”

In a way, the new season features stories that attempt to set things right, he said in a Zoom interview with his wife, Executive Director Rebecca Hopkins from London, where they had spent time sampling some shows that he said could find their way to the FST stage in the future.

“There’s more hope in this season and more direction. Here’s the way out. These are the kind of plays you will enjoy going to,” he said.

He won’t have to worry about finding those shows for too much longer. Hopkins announced earlier this year that he will retire within the next two years, turning over leadership to his wife as CEO. The theater will hire new artistic and managing directors from a nationwide search.

By the time he steps down, Richard Hopkins will have led the theater for nearly 50 years. He signed on as an interim artistic director in 1980. And ever since, he has been navigating changing theater styles and audience tastes and desires while helping to grow FST into one of the largest subscription theaters in the country, attracting more than 225,000 audience members each year.

And the theater is expanding to meet its growing audience. The season will proceed as construction continues on the new eight-story McGillicuddy Arts Plaza, which will eventually offering housing for visiting artists and rental units for other creative people working in the area. It also will include two new cabaret spaces and a new mainstage venue, a bar and a 127-space parking garage.  The theater hopes to open the garage and artist housing in 2027. 

Finding connections

“There’s a lot about connection in the new season,” Rebecca Hopkins said. “Each one of these plays finds balance and connectivity.”

That starts with the season opening Tony Award-winning musical “Kimberly Akimbo” by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire and composer Jeanine Tesori, adapted from Lindsay-Abaire’s 2000 off-Broadway hit about a high school student living with a disease that makes her age more rapidly than normal. She looks more like a senior citizen than a high school senior. Lindsay-Abaire worked with Tesori to turn the play into a musical that opened off-Broadway in 2021 and won the 2023 Tony Award for best musical and three other awards.

“Her life is upside down and aging rapidly, but in reality, she’s functioning better than the rest of the world,” Richard Hopkins said.

Sarasota actress Ann Morrison recently concluded a months-long run in the title role on the Broadway production’s national tour that included stops in Tampa and Fort Myers. Richard Hopkins said he had not yet started discussing casting for the production that will run Nov. 18-Jan. 3.

It will be followed Dec. 9-Feb. 14 by “Bully Pulpit,” a one-man play about President Theodore Roosevelt. The play had its world premiere at FST in 2004 in a production that starred its writer/creator, actor Michael O. Smith. He later took the show to a run off-Broadway, where it received warm reviews from critics.

Richard Hopkins said he has considered doing the play again several times over the last 20 years. Smith has declined to perform in the production, but he will be involved in re-examining the script, adapting it as necessary for a new era.

He said the theater will do a fall workshop to make sure it “is working the way we think it should. The world has changed. The culture has changed since we last did it,” he said. Whatever changes are needed, the story of Roosevelt is still relevant.

“It’s such a mirror image to today. The Gilded Age, when a few wealthy powerful people were running the world, running the railroads, and Teddy upset all that. He came from the wealthy class, but he made it possible for regular people to have things,” he said.

The success of last season’s Stage III production of the one-man play “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” prompted a new consideration of the Roosevelt play, which looks back at his achievements as a president, family man, creator of the National Park Service and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The theater will then present the world premiere of “Upgrade” (Feb. 3-March 21) by Sandy Rustin, whose play “The Cottage” was presented in the summer of 2019 before a Broadway production directed by Jason Alexander in 2023.

“Upgrade” was presented earlier this year in FST’s Burdick New Play Festival under the title “Upgradeable.”

“The world is upside down with artificial intelligence and she’s approaching it from a human point of view, about how AI impacts our relationship and she does it with great humor,” Richard Hopkins said.

The play is about an empty nester couple living on New York City’s Upper West Side. They are discovering new aspects to their life through AI, but when their digital companion shifts from helpful to intrusive, things change in their lives.

Rustin is also the author of the hit touring play “Clue,” inspired by the 1985 movie and the board game, and the upcoming musical “Mystic Pizza,” based on the 1988 movie. That musical, which features songs from the film, is scheduled to be presented at Sarasota’s Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall Jan. 6-8.

The final mainstage production is the regional premiere of “How the Light Gets In” by E.M. Lewis, whose play “Dorothy’s Dictionary” was presented in the summer of 2025. It’s about four strangers – a travel writer, a Japanese architect, a tattoo artist and a runaway teenager – whose lives become intertwined as they begin to connect with one another.

“It’s a wonderful play about people living in their own darkness, whatever darkness is, and each of us has his own dark place. This play shows us a way to let the light in,” Richard Hopkins said.

Cabaret season

Each year also brings three original musical revues presented on the company’s two cabaret stages.

Rebecca Hopkins, who creates the shows with her husband, said the focus is on finding distinct styles, sounds and combinations of music and artists to celebrate.

With resident pianist and musical arranger Jim Prosser, they listen to thousands of songs that have a relation to a common theme.

The season opens with “Sailing: Yacht Rock and Beyond” (Sept. 23-Feb. 7) featuring the smooth sounds of the 1970s and 1980s, including such hits as “Margaritaville” and “Brandy” to “Escape (the Pina Colada Song)” and “Arthur’s Theme.”  

“We had a lot of fun as we got into it figuring out what is yacht rock and what is not. It’s really a show about love,” Rebecca Hopkins said.

She describes Yacht Rock as a style of music that ran from about 1974 to 1985. “It’s a California sound, highly arranged and a mix of R&B with a little bit of disco, a little bit of soul. It’s actually a name that got put on to music that pre-existed.”

Richard Hopkins added, “People who were writing Yacht Rock didn’t realize they were because the name didn’t exist then.”

It will be followed Nov. 4-March 21 by “American Rebels,” which was initially  inspired by the nation’s 250th birthday this year.

“We started playing around with that and asked how could we do a show in celebration. In the cabaret, we often start with one idea and then move onto something else,” she said.

The creators decided it was too much to try to capture 250 years of American history through music in a 90-minute cabaret show, “but we ended up focusing on the internal revolutions. Every generation has almost had its own revolution. It’s all based on rebellious spirits and the music that follows it.”

The song list, at least at the moment, includes such hits as “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Man in the Mirror,” “What’s Going On” and “True Colors.”

The final mainstage show is the theater’s seventh edition of “Laughing Matters” (Feb. 10-June 27), a mix of parody songs and sketches that poke fun at life in Sarasota and beyond. The Hopkinses didn’t want to talk specifics but suggested that such issues as artificial intelligence, electric bikes and GLP-1s will surely be part of the mix.

“It will have its Sarasota focus, the way it always does. It will have politics, but that will be sprinkled in,” Rebecca Hopkins said. Political subjects have been tricky since 2016 “because people are so touchy, so divided. They’re looking for reasons to be offended. And there’s enough to talk about without triggering everybody on politics.”

While they have started working on the material, the results of the November elections will play a role both in what will be included and how it will be presented.

Richard Hopkins also will announce a new season for Stage III later in the year.

Subscription sales for the new season begin Aug. 24. Subscriptions start at $79 for the four mainstage shows and $59 for the three cabaret productions. For more information: floridastudiotheatre.org; 941-366-9000