Samuel Issac Nelson III has been named a 2025 U.S. Presidential Scholar, one of the nation’s highest honors for high school seniors.

Nelson, a member of Douglas Anderson School of the Arts’ class of 2025, is one of only 161 students recognized nationwide and among just 20 honored for achievement in the arts. He is one of three recipients from Florida and the only one from Jacksonville.

WJCT Public Media is giving Jacksonville audiences another chance to experience the best of British theatre without leaving town. As part of its partnership with London’s National Theatre and BY Experience, Film at WJCT Studios will screen Mrs. Warren’s Profession on Wednesday, November 5.

In Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, the past hangs heavy over a Connecticut farm where resentment, survival and yearning intertwine. Josie Hogan, the sharp-tongued daughter of an aging tenant farmer, scrapes out a life shaped by both hardship and wit. Her father, Phil, schemes to secure the family’s land from their landlord, James Tyrone Jr., whose charm masks deep grief and self-loathing. What begins as a bluff for ownership becomes a night of searing honesty, as Josie and Tyrone’s defenses crumble and their pain is laid bare beneath the moonlight.

Oct. 17, 2025 | Jacksonville, Fla. — Douglas Anderson School of the Arts has opened the Betsy Lovett Amphitheatre, a 5,000-square-foot outdoor venue at the center of its Southbank campus. The space will serve all 10 arts programs for performances, rehearsals and events, with seating for up to 300, a covered roof, lights and rigging for additional stage lighting and speakers.

The Alhambra Theatre & Dining’s production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood begins not with a curtain rise but with a delightful invasion of the audience’s reality. Performers spill into the aisles, chatting, jesting and instructing patrons on how the evening’s intrigue will unfold. It’s instantly clear that this isn’t a typical musical but a metatheatrical romp that knows it’s a show within a show. The conceit is that we’re watching a Victorian music hall troupe perform the unfinished Dickens tale, and the fourth wall is more suggestion than structure.

In its dazzling world premiere at Lumen Repertory Theatre, Harlan and Bronna Jump Out the Window proves itself to be a wildly funny, thought-provoking and utterly original theatrical experience. Written and directed by Michael Jacobs, the play takes the familiar story of the wealthy elite brought low by their own excess and reinvents it as a fast-moving, absurdist romp layered with bite and brilliance.