During this first weekend of October, downtown’s Dr. Phillips Center will echo with the anguished cries of a mourning mother driven into a sanitarium by specters of sorrow. But these haunted house horrors aren’t Gothic fantasies from an earlier era; rather, they’re relatable modern-day struggles faced by the fractured Goodman family in Next to Normal, the Tony-winning 2008 rock musical by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey. Kyona Levine Farmer, a local director and founder of SparKyL Entertainment, recently spoke with me about her latest production upon one of Orlando’s most prestigious stages, and the coast-to-coast journey that brought her there.
A native of Orlando, Levine Farmer attended Dr. Phillips High School (where she was “super shy”) and majored in English at the University of Florida, before making her way to New York City. “I wanted to write to perform,” says Levine Farmer. “During my day, they didn’t have a lot of stories that I thought were a reflection of the things that I wanted to see, so I pursued writing because I was good at it.” Entering a graduate program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts straight out of undergrad “was an amazing experience for me. Of course, New York will take the shyness out of you.”
After grad school, a 10-year stint in Los Angeles pursuing an acting career led to her brief return to New York in a friend’s off-Broadway play. “I was amazed by the experience of doing his original work there. And when I got back to L.A., I was like, ‘I can do that,’” recalls Levine Farmer, who then produced a script she’d written in grad school using money saved from her day job. “It was the first time that I produced and directed, and I don’t think that I went back to acting after that. I just love the storytelling element of directing.”
Due to a “spiritual feeling that I’m probably not supposed to be [in L.A.] forever”, Levine Farmer returned home to Orlando in 2010, when she presented her play Sweet Evalina at Orlando Shakes and started SparKyL Entertainment, before taking a job teaching theater at a local private school. After meeting her husband, Vince Farmer, the couple began producing shows together, despite his background being more in mathematics and basketball than the arts. “He would always attend the rehearsals when I was teaching,” says Kyona of Vince, “and he’s just really mesmerized by the process of building from start to finish.”
Following a few fallow years, SparKyL sparked back to life in 2024 with The Color Purple: The Musical, performing in the same Alexis & Jim Pugh Theater where Next to Normal will be this weekend. Affording such a vaunted venue isn’t easy as an independent producer — even after the discounted rental rate offered to 501(c)(3) educational organizations and free rehearsal space at a Maitland church — but Levine Farmer says their focus goes beyond profits. “We don’t have any children, so the things that we would do with having children, we invest in doing things that we love,” she explains. “We just really try to give our best to establish the kind of show that we want to be known for.”
On the opposite end of the budgetary scale, SparKyL caught my eye at last May’s Orlando Fringe Festival with Bobby Lee Blood, a family drama that Levine Farmer originally created as a one-woman show. Levine Farmer calls her first Fringe experience “extremely, extremely fulfilling,” adding, “I just didn’t know that it would be so much fun to see so much new work, just to be in that atmosphere of artistry.”
Intriguingly, Bobby Lee Blood featured two different casts: one white-presenting and one African American. “I love new perspectives on stories, [and] there are particular stories that are specific to African Americans, or a certain type of culture or race,” says Levine Farmer. “There are some stories that are universal, [and] I find it fascinating to go into the human perspective of stories that don’t have a specific cultural context.”
Similarly, while Next to Normal features a predominately white-presenting cast (with understudies of color) led by Angela Tims and Mathew Nash-Brown as Diana and Dan Goodman, Levine Farmer cites a personal connection to the material that goes deeper than culture. “I am drawn to just a good story,” says Levine Farmer. “Then once my mother and my mother-in-law were diagnosed with dementia, the topic of the show was extremely interesting to us. And when I opened up the casting, I knew that I didn’t want to stick to a specific cultural cast, so I just opened it up to anyone.”
The common thread connecting all these culturally diverse works is the “message of redemption” that Levine Farmer says she always looks for in a project. “We want hope, and we want stories that will require a conversation,” Levine Farmer says of her script selection process. “I know I need to do something fun and light, something stupidly funny, because we have been doing tons of shows that are dramas that cause a lot of thought. But they feel most fulfilling to me, the shows that really give people something when they leave.”
(Next to Normal, Oct. 3-5 at the Alexis & Jim Pugh Theater, Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, $65-$89.)
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This article appears in Oct. 1-7, 2025.
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