Straight Outta Florida at Norris Center Theatre

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 7, 2025

CONTACT: Nancy Price NEPriceFL@aol.com

Florida: It’s Not the Heat…It’s the Hilarity!

Compton & Bennett are proud to announce the debut of their latest comedy hit, Straight Outta Florida: Throwin’ Some Shade on The Sunshine State. Compton & Bennett are the authors Assisted Living: The Musical®, the long-running, national touring musical comedy.  

Straight Outta Florida is a 90-minute, song-and-sketch comedy romp. Betsy Bennett and Rick Compton play six characters. While America sees outrageous headlines that barely scratch Florida’s sunburnt surface, these characters take their audiences on a deep dive into Florida’s Sea of Surreal.  

C&B have delighted sold-out national audiences for years with social satire. Straight Outta Florida features some of their most loved characters. There is Earlene, a fifth-generation Florida Cracker. She was the title character in A Cracker at The Ritz and lead it to become the longest running show in Southwest Florida.

Straight Outta Florida has been in development for two years in Scottsdale (AZ) and Naples (FL). It combines new material, such as “The Alligator Alcatraz Rag”, with the strongest bits from A Cracker at The Ritz and its sister script, One Stooge Shy. The result is 90-minutes of comedy that skewers the overblown underbelly of America’s favorite destination.

Earlene and her piano playing sidekick Gazpacho (“He’s cooler than soup!”) check in on Florida’s checkered past. They take their audience inside swamp land scams where the Noah’s Ark Special gets two lots for the price of one.  They watch the catch-of-the-day square grouper earn a trip to the pokey. Empathy and sympathy entwine in the lament “Snow Bird Come, and He Won’t Go Home”.

Florida’s own John Morgan (“For the Morgans”) has chased ambulances into all 50 states. In Straight Outta Florida, he elevates his image…by offering lawsuits to theatre patrons.

Retirees Ben Younger and Naomi Lipshitz-Yamamoto-Murphy have set up shop in Florida. Naomi loves to hate on the state she loves. Ben, a retired Catskills comic, plays ragtime piano and delivers one-liners. Naomi outwits an HOA. They one-up each other with the absurdities of Florida’s roadside flea markets.

The show is bookended by Betsy and Rick as their otherwise normal characters. Betsy offers a list of PG-appropriate obscenities that get her through Florida traffic. They point out that “In Florida, (federal detainees) won’t swim with a porpoise, cuz their flyin’ em down with no habeas corpus.” They celebrate Florida man, who puts the “duh” in Flaw-duh.

Regionally, Straight Outta Florida opens parallel runs in January, 2026 at The Norris Center Theatre in Naples, Florida, and at The Ghost Light Lounge (Theatre Winter Haven) in Winter Haven, Florida. It is available for national booking exclusively through Producers, Inc.

Tickets to Straight Outta Florida are on sale through www.StraightOuttaFlorida.com