"Upcoming" items and similar pieces are drawn from material published or distributed by credited arts organizations or individuals and may have been lightly edited by ALT
ALT always credits photos and images from other sources when information is available; ALT acknowledges rights of artists and producing organizations to production images
Received directly in the monthly e-mail newsletter from the City of Austin Cultural Arts division:
Take it to the Next Level on the Web
Several Next Level presentations are now available to watch online! Look for them on the Channel 6 website. Search for them on the "Videos" tab by title and date. [Warning: audio starts immediately!] Now available:
Federal Tax Overview for Individual Artists (presented 2/18/10) Presenter Andrea Beleno of Texas C-BAR explains the tax obligations of self-employed artists, covering tax issues on the local, state, and federal levels, so that individual artists can be in compliance with the applicable laws.
Teaching Artists Webposium (presented 1/29/10) What do teaching artists need to know, understand, and be able to do to achieve success in a self-contained or inclusion classroom? The panel consists of artists and educators dedicated to making the arts accessible to all students. The panelists discuss practical classroom strategies, lesson plan modifications, as well as the necessary questions to ask in order for everyone (artists, students, teachers, para-professionals, and administrators) to be successful. Panelists included Judith Jellison, Allison Orr, Sherry Snowden, with moderator Russell Granet of the Dana Foundation.
Weathering the Economic Storm (10/9/09) How is the Austin economic downturn affecting Austin's nonprofit arts and culture sector and the for-profit creative industry sector? How are Austin individual creatives faring? What has been the impact on fundraising (foundation, private giving, earned income revenues, business investment)? Listen to our four panelists discuss these questions - Victoria Corcoran, Bijoy Goswami, Peter Frumkin, Kevin Patterson, with moderator Robert Faires.
Trouble Puppet presents Glass Half Full's production of
FUP DUCK
March 17 - 20 at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre
Plus don't miss Trouble Puppet's Late Night Puppet Cabaret on Friday March 19 at 10 p.m. featuring the Bric-a-Brac Band and Trouble Puppet company members Aileen Adler, Heather Eakin, Robert Jacques, Parker Dority and Connor Hopkins. Admission to Cabaret free with purchase of tickets to FUP. Cabaret only, $5 at door.
Trouble Puppet Theater Company hosts Glass Half Full Theatre, collaborating with The White Ghost Shivers on a work of American puppet theater.
Trouble Puppet Theater Company launches its Resident Artist Program by hosting Caroline Reck, Artistic Director of Glass Half Full Theatre. Reck is spending a month training local puppeteers to perform FupDuck, her adaptation of a novella by Jim Dodge, using puppets she crafted for a performance in Baltimore. In the future, Trouble Puppet will host other puppet artists from around the country and the world, providing workspace, technical support, and performers for workshops of new pieces, experimentation with puppet design and performance, and exploration of ideas.
University of Texas Lab Theatre Friday, March 12, 5 p.m. Eclectic, diverse, talented, beautiful, inspired, daring, a little eccentric, just a few of the adjectives that come to mind when describing our current crop of emerging artists. Our department is now known for recruiting and training an exciting cohort in beautiful Austin, Texas. We will be introducing them soon to the theatrical/film communities in Los Angeles and New York. You won't want to miss meeting them. Please visit us often for further details on our 2010 showcases and look for “save the date” cards and invitations in the mail in 2010.
Contact: Franchelle Dorn (
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
) 512-232-7097 Free, limited seating at the Lab Theatre (LTH), located between the Jackson Geological Sciences Building (JGB) and the F. Loren Winship Drama Building (WIN) near 24th and San Jacinto. Parking available in the San Jacinto Garage on San Jacinto near Dean Keeton.
Or, as Bogey said to Ingrid, "Here's looking at you, kid."
This is the 1000th post on AustinLiveTheatre since I established it in June, 2008 with a review of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Austin Playhouse. I wound up that 900-word article with the comment, "We had a great time. As Austin newcomers, we were attending our second Austin Playhouse production - - and at the intermission I went out to the foyer and purchased season tickets for 2008 – 2009 from Producing Artistic Director Toner himself, who was happy to talk theatre with me."
Commemorating the milestone, ALT offers readers background on its origins, a summary of Austin media coverage of theatre matters, and a brief portrait of the Austin theatre scene.
Origins
After a diplomatic career of assignments abroad and in Washington, we chose to relocate to the capital of Texas. We found some superlative local theatre -- starting with The Seagull, produced with very little fanfare by Breakin' String Theatre. We were intrigued by the apparent lack of information about theatre doings in Austin. Taking an example from the cooking blog established by my daughter and her guy, I set up on Google's freebie hosting service blogspot.com my own blog: "Austin Live Theatre." The stated aim for the blog was to serve as "a voyage to discover the underreported Austin theatre scene."
Ticket by ticket, trip by trip, ALT has done that. The following profiles emerge from some meticulous crunching of postings, links and information provided by ALT in calendar year 2009.
Media coverage of Austin's Theatre
Austin's free papers and free on-line press cover theatre much more extensively than the daily Austin Statesman and its on-line counterpart www.Austin360.com. The numbers tell the tale:
Austin Chronicle, weekly free newspaper: 80 reviews, averaging about 1.5 per week
Austin Statesman: 46 reviews, averaging almost 1 per week. A number of the reviews appearing on-line do not make it into the daily paper.
Austinist.com: 43 reviews, averaging almost 1 per week
AustinOnStage.com: 24 reviews, about 1 every two weeks
Examiner.com (Ryan E. Johnson, blogging as "Austin theatre examiner"): 26 reviews, averaging 1 every two weeks
Daily Texan, University of Texas: 22, averaging one every 16.5 days
Austin.com: 17 reviews, averaging one every three weeks. Postings on this site are often stale or outdated.
KUT-FM: 17 reviews or features, averaging about one every third week. John Aielli discontinued at mid-year his occasional half-hour programs entitled "Aielli Unleashed." Most coverage is in the form of 2 minute spots done with Mike Lee for KUT's "Arts Eclectic."
KOOP-FM: 18 programs featuring musical theatre productions covered by AustinLiveTheatre. Lisa Schepps hosts the weekly "Off Stage and On the Air" Mondays at 12:30. This program, begun in 30-minute format and extended to 60 minutes, is also posted on-line. Ms Schepps interviews artists and directors; they may perform music live or she will play recordings from Broadway shows or other versions of upcoming presentations.
AustinTheatreReview (now defunct): Sean Fuentes' undertaking reviewed 9 local productions before going inactive in about September, 2009.
INSITE, the free monthly entertainment magazine: 4, averaging one feature article per quarter.
Television coverage is sparse. ALT does not monitor television programming but found and included links to short written or video features: two each from KEYE and News 8, one each from KXAN and KFOX.
Miscellaneous coverage: 10, including 5 postings by San Antonio weekly and daily papers and one each from www.soulciti.com, www.outinamerica.com, RepublicOfAustin.com, the Blanco, Texas newspaper, and a podcast byStage Directions magazine.
Summing all the above, extended media for the Austin region provided 328 features or reviews for approximately 380 theatre productions in 2009 -- an estimate drawn from the fact that ALT posted 387 "upcoming" announcements that year.
Those reviews were not evenly spread. They ranged from nine reviews for Capital T's production of Killer Joe at the Hyde Park Theatre (which ALT reluctantly panned), to a more typical score for well attended shows of two non-ALT reviews (28 productions) or one non-ALT review (57 productions, although this includes some Short Finge elements of Hyde Park Theatre's 100-item Frontera Fest). More typical, however, was no review at all-- the case for 195 productions, or 59.5 percent of those staged in the greater Austin area.
Austin's Live Theatre
The 2009 data paint the picture: Austin is seething with theatre activity. The town deserves its reputation for original work but its theatre companies and groups are producing mainstream comedies, dramas, musicals and narrations as well. Quality is high, variety is striking, and ticket prices are low, often ranging from $10 to $25.
Andy Berkovsky's images of cast of A Raisin in the Sun, received directly:
“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” - Langston Hughes
Recent widow Lena Younger wants to use her husband's insurance money to buy a home for her family, freeing them from the cramped tenement in which they live. Her son Walter Lee Younger is determined to invest the money in a business - an opportunity for him to be his own man. Lena refuses; in her eyes a house is a sturdy thing to build a dream on.
ut when a white representative of the neighborhood "welcoming committee" presents them with an offer to buy them out of their home, the dream quickly becomes a nightmare. The Younger family attempts to find his or her place amidst a number of difficult situations and Walter Lee for the first time begins to value what money can’t buy, and in the process achieves a new level of self respect and pride.
Directed by Kaitlin Hopkins March 17-20 and March 23-27 at 7:30p.m.; March 21, 28 at 2 p.m. Studio Theatre, Texas State University, San Marcos $10 general admission; $7 students
We recently launched our new BFA in musical theatre with a sold-out production of Bat Boy: the Musical directed by the new head of the program, award-winning actress Kaitlin Hopkins. For the evening of Beautiful, Beautiful World Kaitlin and her students will perform a pre-show cabaret beginning at 6:30 p.m. in the lobby of the theatre building. Come join us before the show for dessert, coffee and some songs you can sing along to!
As one of America's finest composer/lyricist teams, Harnick and Boch wrote some of Broadway’s greatest shows including She Loves Me, Fiddler on the Roof, The Apple Tree, and Fiorello. Director Kaitlin Hopkins, head of the Texas State Musical Theatre program, collaborated with Harnick and Boch to create this musical revue that debuted at the William Inge Festival in 2007. Join us for this enchanting evening featuring our students performing songs from these Broadway classics.
Received directly, from Ricki Vincent of the now-defunct Geppetto Dreams Puppet Company:
After losing their beloved Eastside Art Center , Geppetto Dreams returns to Austin with a brand new show funded in part by the COA and The Texas Commission of the Arts, as well as the last donation from long time benefactor Steve Spencer:
The Death Show
Saturday, March 20 at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., Sunday, March 21 at noon and 1:30 p.m. The Off Center, 2211 Hidalgo St.
is GDPC’s first collaboration with Austin’s music scene favorites That Damned Band, and it's unlike anything they’ve presented before. This unique puppet operetta is a mixture of 7 vignettes, some dark and deep, some introspective, and some quite silly. But all of them deal with that most final of curtains. And all of them underscored by the haunting sounds of That Damned Band, an accordion-driven group of multi-talented songsters who pay musical tribute to eastern European, Yiddish, and old-time vaudevillian-era music and styles. Video cameras trained on the stage action will give the audience up-close views of the detail of each puppet as well as the artistry of puppeteers and musicians at work. The show runs 50 minutes, followed by a 10 minute Q and A to satisfy the curiosity of audience members who want a closer look at how the show operates.
The Troupe is performing at their favorite venue, The Off Center located at 2211 Hidalgo Austin 78702. Opening Night is March 20th with 2 shows at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Ticket’s are $12.00 in advance or 1$5.00 the day of the show. Sunday there will be two Pay-What-You-Can Matinees at noon and at1 p.m.
“Pay what you can literally means that,” say’s GDPC Director Ricki (Geppetto) Vincent. “If all you have is a buck and a stick of gum you’re in the door! We want all of Austin to be able to take part in and enjoy our puppety madness!” Seating is limited and advance tickets are suggested.
MFA Playwriting candidate Diana Grisanti as a guest commentator on the blog "The Deportee's Wife" attacks the decision of the Ransom Center to host David Mamet for small session workshops with students on March 9-10. She asserts that during a seminar last year Mamet used "hate speech" against Muslims, Arabs and women. UT faculty commented in reply to messages from her and others that student applications for the seminar outran spaces available by 10 to 1.
Excerpt from Grisanti's four-paragraph article of March 5:
Since we have not been heard at UT, we’d like the greater theatre community to know what’s up. Critics of Mamet’s plays and books often chock up the playwright’s incendiary remarks to a bad boy desire to get a rise out of people. I’d like to take it upon myself to excise the euphemisms. David Mamet is a racist and a misogynist, both in his work and his life. Many have forgiven Mamet because of his talent, but his skills as a dramatist have let him get away with murder–literally, if you take into account that hate speech leads to the normalization of bigotry which leads to the waging of foreign wars.
The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, narrator Tom Wingfield tells us in his opening soliloquy. Director Michael Costello and the gifted actors in this cast treat it as just that, a dream-like sequence of deeply felt events taking place in the shadowed, intimate space of Tex-Arts' Kam and James Morris Theatre out in Lakeway.
For those who don't know or have forgotten this American classic: it's the late 1930s. A mother and her two grown children live in a rented apartment in St. Louis, barely getting by. The son Tom pays the bills with the wages from his menial job in a warehouse; his handicapped younger sister Laura, turning ever inward, has dropped out of secretarial school and devotes herself to her collection of glass animals, the glass menagerie of the title. Their father disappeared long ago -- a telephone man "in love with long distances." Their mother Amanda Wingfield, a faded southern belle, is searching for some way to secure the family's uncertain future.
This 1944 two-act play was Tennessee Williams' first stage success. It has lived over the many years since then because Williams captured with his simple story and quiet imagery the fragility of hope and the enduring call of memory.
Images of A Midsummer Night's Dream, received directly from Chaotic Theatre Company:
February 26 - March 7 by The Chaotic Theatre Company at the Off Center, 2211 Hidalgo Street
Shakespeare's famous story takes place in the days leading up to the wedding of King Theseus and his love Hippolyta. Hermia, daughter of Egeus, is desperately in love with Lysander. But Egeus will only give consent to Demetrius and demands that Hermia be put to death if she refuses. Fearing for her life, Lysander and Hermia decide to run away together.
Helena, desiring the hand of Demetrius, informs him of their departure. Demetrius decides to go after the couple and Helena follows quickly behind. The four lovers find their way into the junkyard outside of the city and are soon completely lost. But there is more in the junkyard than the eye can see.
This particular junkyard is host to Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies. They bring with them a train of fairies and one mischievous sprite named Puck. Soon, the lovers are entangled in a battle of wills between the king and queen that will change their lives forever.
Further complicating matters is a troupe of actors from the city who are rehearsing a play for King Theseus' wedding celebration. It isn't long before they too fall prey to Puck's mischievous magic.
Shake off that winter chill by bringing someone you love down to The Off Center and let yourselves get lost in A Midsummer Night's Dream. With live music from rock band 11 Cent Confidence, the experience is sure to be unique.
Further complicating matters is a troupe of actors from the city who are rehearsing a play for King Theseus' wedding celebration. It isn't long before they too fall prey to Puck's mischievous magic.
