About
Asolo Repertory Theatre is one of the premier professional theater companies in the United States and the largest in the American Southeast. Located in Sarasota, Florida on the grounds of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Asolo Rep presents six to seven productions each season spanning classics, contemporary drama, musicals, and world premieres — performed by Equity actors in rotating repertory alongside graduate students from the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training.
The company was designated the first State Theatre of Florida in 1965 and became a founding member of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) in 1966. Its partnership with Florida State University is foundational: FSU faculty created the company, FSU operates the on-site conservatory, and the building itself — the FSU Center for the Performing Arts — is a state facility. The theater’s endowment exceeds $26 million.
What makes Asolo Rep genuinely unusual is its architecture. The two main performance spaces are not purpose-built modern boxes — they are historic European theater buildings that were dismantled, shipped overseas, and reassembled in Sarasota. No other theater complex in America can claim anything like it. And what makes it genuinely great — season after season — is the depth of expertise embedded in its long-tenured artists and artisans. Resident Sound Designer Matthew Parker, who has been with the company since 1993, is the clearest example of what that kind of institutional commitment looks like.
Artistic Leadership
Peter Rothstein assumed leadership of Asolo Repertory Theatre on July 1, 2023, following an extensive international search by the theater’s board. He came to Sarasota from Minneapolis, where he had spent twenty-five years building Theater Latté Da from an itinerant storefront company into one of the most respected innovative musical theater organizations in the country — directing 82 mainstage productions and 13 world premieres along the way.
His signature work is All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914, a piece he created for live broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio in 2007 that has since traveled to Off-Broadway (2018), earned a Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience, and been broadcast worldwide on PBS. The production is now part of Asolo Rep’s own season, completing a remarkable journey from public radio studio to national stage. It has become a beloved holiday event at theaters across North America.
Rothstein trained at St. John’s University (B.A., Music and Theater) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.F.A., Directing). Before leading Theater Latté Da, he directed at the Guthrie Theater, Children’s Theatre Company, The 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle, Minnesota Opera, and Florida Grand Opera. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Theatre Communications Group, the McKnight Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board.
At Asolo Rep, his productions have included Man of La Mancha, Sweeney Todd, and Ragtime. He has spoken clearly about his ambitions for the company: to grow the audience, to nurture new voices, and to be the theater that puts the next significant work on stage before anyone else does.
Ross Egan serves as Managing Director alongside Rothstein. The previous leadership team — Producing Artistic Director Michael Donald Edwards and Managing Director Linda DiGabriele — jointly retired in 2023 after extraordinary tenures of 18 and 50 seasons respectively.
History
The story of Asolo Rep begins in a hill town near Venice. The theater itself — a jewel-box Italian opera house — was originally built in the town of Asolo, Italy. When the State of Florida learned of its existence in 1949, it was purchased, crated, and shipped to Sarasota, where it was reinstalled on the Ringling Estate. It opened on January 10, 1958 with a performance of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail.
Two years later, faculty from Florida State University founded a summer acting company to perform in the space. What began as a seasonal FSU faculty venture transformed over the following decades into a year-round professional LORT company — one of the most significant regional theaters in America.
Performance Spaces
2025–2026 Season
“Hope, Heart and Rock ‘n’ Roll”
| Production | Notes |
|---|---|
| Come From Away | Tony Award-winning musical — opened Nov. 12, 2025 |
| All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914 | Peter Rothstein’s own creation — Drama Desk Award winner — Dec. 2025 |
| Primary Trust | Pulitzer Prize-winning drama — Jan.–Feb. 2026 |
| Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d | Jan.–Mar. 2026 |
| The Unfriend | U.S. Premiere US Premiere |
| Fiddler on the Roof | Apr.–May 2026 |
| Marie and Rosetta | May–June 2026 |
| Lady Disdain | Lauren Gunderson World Premiere — June–July 2026 |
FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training
Florida State University operates a fully residential Master of Fine Arts in Acting program on the Asolo Rep campus in partnership with the theater, consistently ranked among the top 25 MFA programs in the world. Each cycle admits 10–12 graduate students who train alongside professional Asolo Rep actors throughout the season, performing in Conservatory productions at the Cook Theatre and in supporting roles on the Mertz mainstage.
The program’s second year includes an intensive session at FSU’s London Study Center in Bloomsbury, where students work with master teachers and international artists before returning to complete their training in Sarasota. Conservatory graduates have gone on to Broadway, film, television, and leadership roles at regional theaters nationwide.
Education & Community Engagement
Master Craftspeople
What makes a regional theater company great over the long run is not only its artistic leadership but the artisans who show up every season and build the world audiences inhabit. At Asolo Rep, no figure better represents that continuity than its resident sound designer.
Matthew Parker has been the resident sound designer at Asolo Repertory Theatre for over thirty years — one of the longest continuous runs in that role at any major American regional theater. He arrived in Sarasota in 1993 after early work at Flat Rock Playhouse in North Carolina, where his credits included I Hate Hamlet and the world premiere of Gilligan’s Island: The Musical. He has been a constant presence at Asolo ever since: across nine Artistic Directors, three performance spaces, a global pandemic, and well over a hundred productions.
Sound design in regional theater is a discipline that rewards long residency in ways that lighting or scenic design often does not. Every room has its own acoustic fingerprint, and Parker has spent three decades learning the Mertz Theatre, the Cook Theatre, and the Historic Asolo Theater at the molecular level — understanding how sound travels through each space, where the anomalies are, how audiences hear differently in different seats, and how the acoustics change when a house is full versus half-empty. That institutional knowledge is not transferable and cannot be hired in from outside.
His technical work drew national trade press attention with Asolo Rep’s production of Evita (2017–18 season opener), a production requiring 28 simultaneous RF microphone channels across 29 actors and 13 musicians. Parker deployed Lectrosonics wireless systems with Countryman B6 lavalier elements throughout, and developed custom frequency coordination plans to manage interference from nearby television broadcast transmitters — a recurring challenge in the Sarasota RF environment. The production was featured in Live Sound International (March 2018) and on ProSoundWeb and the Lectrosonics press network as a case study in high-channel-count RF coordination in a regional theater context.
His credits span the full range of Asolo Rep’s programming — large-cast musicals, intimate two-handers, world premieres, classic revivals, and Shakespeare. Selected recent credits include Ragtime, Shakespeare in Love, Roe, Rhinoceros, Living on Love, Eureka Day, Inherit the Wind (2024 — a reviewer specifically noted the sound design as “dreamy rather than realistic,” an unusual and intentional interpretive choice), Anna in the Tropics (2025), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Primary Trust (2026).
In a profession where designers often move from house to house chasing the next credit, Parker’s decision to plant himself at a single theater for three decades reflects a different set of values — a belief that the depth of craft that comes from knowing one institution thoroughly is worth more than breadth. Asolo Rep is, in meaningful part, what it sounds like because of him.
Notable Productions
Asolo Rep has a strong record of originating and premiering new American work alongside its classical and musical programming:
- All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914 — Created by Peter Rothstein. Premiered on Minnesota Public Radio (2007), Off-Broadway (2018), Drama Desk Award winner. Now broadcast worldwide on PBS.
- Working — Re-imagined production with new songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, overseen by Stephen Schwartz.
- Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer by Cheryl L. West — Rolling world premiere launched on the Terrace Stage during the pandemic.
- A Tale of Two Cities — Sold-out world premiere run.
- Beatsville — Co-production with Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre.
- Barnum — Co-production with Maltz Jupiter Theatre starring Brad Oscar; multiple Carbonell Award wins.
- The Life of Galileo — Received national review from the Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout.
- Perfect Mendacity by Jason Wells — World premiere.