First things first: Is The Rocky Horror Picture Show finally–finally!–coming to the Flagler Auditorium, a.k.a. The Fitzgerald Center for the Performing Arts? It’s a natural question for Craig Uppercue, who today took over the directorship of the Fitz as Amelia Fulmer exits the stage by the end of the month.
Uppercue saw productions of Rocky Horror through at the always aglitter Athens Theatre in DeLand, where he was education director and artistic director for 14 years.
His answer to the question was a stage reading in diplomacy: “I see a lot of people that would love to see rock concerts and rock festivals and things like that,” he said. “I imagine I will do a lot of polling and analyzing of the data and requests and feedback from the community about what they would like to see at the Fitzgerald, and I, of course, am very familiar with the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But I want to always be very mindful of the mission of the Fitzgerald Performing Arts Center and its relationship of course to Flagler County Public Schools, and always remembering that it’s a student-first mission and that we are a teaching theater for the community.”
Anyway the 2026-27 season is set already, and there’s a selection committee for coming shows, but Uppercue likes to leave doors open, the kind of open doors that attracted him here, like the district’s guiding principles (trust for all, empowering others, teamwork, excellence, quality, and consistency, commitment to individual needs), and particularly “get to yes.”
“Those are really guiding principles in my belief system that children really do come first,” Uppercue said in a half-hour interview last week. “It just aligns so beautifully in my core belief that these guiding principles are taken in such heart, and so I think that will translate to my work with Fitzgerald. These will be the guiding principles of how we operate the theater as well as the work within the school district.”
He’s seen a couple of shows at the Fitzgerald incognito, and seen it through site visits a couple of times as well, all of it impressing him. He had no input in the coming season, but he intends to make his mark. He wants to increase the visibility of the work happening in the schools. “You’ll see many of our performing and visual arts programming on full display,” he says, including art exhibits, concerts and events.
The stage is a bit larger than the Athens Theatre, but “a theater is a theater is a theater,” he said. “They have similar pieces and parts, and so when you’ve been on one stage, you’ve been on many stages.” He noticed the pit at the Fitz. “We’re going to open that sucker up, and I want to see it get put to use, because I’d love to see live music in the theater,” he said. Also: “I would really like to see some touring Broadway come back through.”
If Athens Theatre’s recent history is any indication, the 46-year-old director will inevitably bring a different kind of energy and perspective to the Fitz.
Athens Theatre is hardly ever dark. Compared to the Fitz, it probably puts on twice as many shows in a given year. But when Uppercue first started at Athens, it wasn’t as busy as it is today. It also has its own repertory company. “That’s not something that I am immediately looking to do with the Fitzgerald, but who knows what the future holds,” he said. “Athens Theater in its own way kind of started a little bit slower, and as time went on, and relationships are building and staff was built, it’s kind of created the monster it is today. So I think that you can suspect, since I was the steam behind that engine for so many years, that we might follow a similar course.”
He stepped away as artistic director at Athens two years ago–the work “had really outrun my capacity to run it”–but still stayed on as community manager and lends a hand in different capacities. His wife works there full-time as a production associate and as manager of the costumes and properties shop, their children attend summer camps there. Now he’s focused on the Fitz and its mission with Flagler Schools.
He’s not just the Auditorium director. His position has been redefined as “director of auditorium and the visual and performing arts for the Flagler Public School District.” Yet his annual base salary of $96,627 is a tad less than Fulmer’s, which was $97,760 this year, even though the Auditorium Board asked–and received–a $30,000 supplement from the School Board to put toward the artistic director’s salary (thus freeing auditorium funds for other needs).
“The Fitzgerald Performing Arts Center is often referred to as the ‘Ultimate Classroom for the Arts,’” Fulmer said of her successor. “Mr. Uppercue is a musician, an educator and an administrator with a background in theatre administration which makes him a perfect fit for Flagler’s unique venue.”
Uppercue is a native Floridian, born and raised in Tampa, where his mother had been hired as a residence hall director at the University of Tampa. So he spent his first three years in a girls’ dormitory in downtown Tampa. “Always had built-in babysitters, my mother tells me,” he says.
“I grew up an arts kid. My father was a music teacher prior to his retirement in Tampa for 42 years,” he says. His father taught general music in elementary school, and is also a guitarist and vocalist and a theatrical artist. “I kind of grew up knowing nothing else, and so they did theater, I did theater, they played music, I played music. It was kind of a way of life for the Uppercue family.”
His very first performance was a tap routine to “Puttin’ On the Ritz” at the Tampa Bay Theatre. He was a member of Class Act, a professional acting school, throughout his childhood, and was an actor in innumerable productions. When he wasn’t performing, he was attending performances at what was then the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center–what is now the Straz Center for the Performing Arts. The very first touring Broadway show he saw was “Into the Woods,” with Bernadette Peters as the witch.
That did it: he wanted to be on stage from then on. He was 6 or 7. He didn’t get to meet Peters. “Maybe we’ll get to host her at the Fitzgerald,” he says.
He got his undergraduate degree at Stetson in music performance and education, then a master’s in education leadership at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix (summa cum laude, no less), an education specialist degree at Stetson last year, and just two months ago he completed a doctorate in education, specializing in curriculum and instruction, at Liberty University in Virginia.
His doctorate thesis showed that pulling students out of special area classes such as music and arts for remediation in core learning areas was detrimental, when both goals can be achieved more creatively. He was instrumental in enacting a music and arts requirement in Volusia public schools, where he has been working at different levels for the past 20 years. He was the district’s K-12 fine arts specialist in the last two years, a position he resigned to start at the Fitz.
“We understand he has a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of energy and we’re looking forward to our new relationship,” Sarah Ulis, a member of the Auditorium Governing Board, said today. “Amelia will be tough to replace but I have every confidence it will work out well.” Most of the board members haven’t actually met Uppercue. With the exception of Board President Sandra Siepietoski and Treasurer Cathy Wood, they weren’t involved in the hire, which was largely a district operation, though the board was kept aware of the process. (Siepietoski could not be reached before this article initially published.)
Uppercue himself is used to answering to two authorities, as he did working for Athens and for Volusia schools for so many years, as he will again, working for the Auditorium board and the School Board. Technically he reports to Superintendent LaShakia Moore, but he will more commonly report to her designee, Jeff Reaves, the director of teaching and learning.
And he’ll continue performing: Uppercue is a percussionist who’s performed with the Jacksonville Symphony, plays often in Orlando, and just last December played six dates in Sarah Brightman’s Florida tour. If the pit opens at the Fitz, he might well be among the musicians in it.
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