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In a salute to its seventh professional season -- "A Season of Laughter" -- and to its growing audiences, the Salado Silver Spur Theatre will serve up
A Free Preview of the 2010 Season
at 7 p.m., Saturday, March 13.
Along with scenes, routines, live music and refreshments, the Spur also will introduce its first Season Membership Program and its member benefits. Reservations are strongly requested for the 150-seat venue, which got the year underway recently with a Kinky Friedman show featuring Cleve and Mary Hattersley. The Wine Seller in Salado will provide beverages. RSVP to the box office, 254-947-3456, or e-mail
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. For directions or more info www.saladosilverspur.com .
Nelda Milligan of Harker Heights, an accomplished pianist and long-time accompanist for Spur shows, will enliven the program with old standards and original music. Meanwhile, the Spur-radical Players will make merry with selected play scenes, singing, vaudeville routines and antics to delight all ages.
The new season formally rolls out with a return of the popular production The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), March 26-April 10, followed by several original productions new to the Spur stage.
Counter Girls, April 30-May 22; a baseball-themed variety show, -- Play Ball, June 4-26; Barefoot in the Park, Aug. 27-Sept. 18; You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, Oct. 1-15 and Oct.22, 23; Lights, Camera, Christmas! Nov. 26-Dec. 18. The Spur's Sixth Annual Summer Melodrama, titled Fool's Gold or The Pernicious Prospector's Prevaricating Ploy, will run July 9-Aug. 14.
Open Auditions for Austin Shakespeare: SHAKESPEARE’S A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM with 1960’s inspired music, directed by Ann Ciccolella
Friday, March 13, 6 -7 p.m. Studio (formerly ACoT) 701 Tillery St. Some roles are still open Actors Equity contracts under SPT 1
Rehearsals begin Sunday, March 28
Performances Thursday, April 29 - Sunday, May 30
BY APPOINTMENT ONLY! TO SCHEDULE AN APPOINTMENT TIME CONTACT:
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Austin Shakespeare warmly encourages actors of all ethnic/racial backgrounds to audition.
Auditioners are asked to prepare a 1- 2 minute speech from any classic or Shakespeare play, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The piece may be memorized or read, but actors should be thoroughly familiar with the text. Auditioners in callbacks will also be sent 36 bars for a Beatles song to sing for audition.
Southwestern University students had a joyful frolic with Rick Roemer's vigorous production of the smart-alecky musical Urinetown last week. This show won the 2002 Tony awards for best original score for a musical and for best book of a musical.
The show gives us a cheeky, animated cartoon story of a bleak, bleak future world when water has run out. The common folk are obliged to cross their legs and hold their own water until they can scrimp up the outrageous prices of admission to public toilets. Wicked, wicked Big Businessman Mr. Caldwell B. Cladwell in his pinstripe suit exercises the power of life and death as he reaps in the profits.
Authors Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis are cribbing bits from Bertolt Brecht, assigning cynical commentary about stage business and about the expectations of musical comedy to the imperturbably corrupt policeman Officer Lockstock (Matthew Harper, who has the smiling presence, sonority and shameless confidence of a real rascal). Lauren Knutti as his foil the indignant young idealist Little Sally represents all of the deluded who hope for a better day, and she is adorable at it.
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 (
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) 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.
Nelda Milligan of Harker Heights, an accomplished pianist and long-time accompanist for Spur shows, will enliven the program with old standards and original music. Meanwhile, the Spur-radical Players will make merry with selected play scenes, singing, vaudeville routines and antics to delight all ages.
