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Working with Michael McKelvey of St. Edward's University, the budding Penfold Theatre has occupied relatively unexploited theatre territory in Austin: the contemporary intimate musical. John & Jen has a genre resemblance to their pioneer show The Last Five Years. Two actors in an intimate space, with most of the story told in song. On his website, composer Andrew Lippa calls it a "chamber musical."
The music is scored for keyboard, cello and percussion. That ensemble constituted by Steve Saugey, Jeanette Cannata and Trevor Detling remains unseen. Their melodic, jumpy, at times yearning lines establish the moods that carry the action, while the actors' voices are primary throughout. MTI, the firm that licenses the rights, offers you at its website a sampler of 30-second nuggets from the principal numbers.
The unnamed singers in those samples have a considerable amount of Broadway smarm in their voices, that vocal attitude that suggests look at me, I'm so cute/adorable/funny/talented.
Sarah Gay and Andrew Cannata don't have that prissy attitude. They don't need it. In Penfold's John & Jen they are, instead, projecting the title characters. All three of them.
This 1995 show tells Jen's story, from the early 1960s through the late 1980s. In each act she is dealing with a young man named John --initially, her kid brother, five years younger than she, and in the second act, her son. Jen fits directly into the baby boomer cohort, fleeing home for college in New York City, glorying in the freedoms and fashions of the Age of Aquarius. Her baby brother struggles on at home under the disciplinarian father whom Jen despises. In the second act Jen is older, marginally wiser, more fearful and fixated in suffocating fashion upon the boy who carries his uncle's name.
The@re Ranch announces its inaugural theatre event Silent Stage, A Live Action Silent Film
Episode One: Little Girl, Big City
at an undisclosed location Thursdays-Saturdays, February 19 - 28, 8 p.m.
Quietly – no, silently - creep down the narrow alleyways of nowhere into a midnight party, something illicit and illegal, something magical and macabre. Silently sneak through the back of a 1920’s silent movie house – through the window, the chimney, the basement – get in at any cost.
Silent Stage's full length episode “Little Girl, Big City” follows the small town Dakota darling from the tumbleweed train platform to the seedy underbelly of Little Italy, NYC. Once in the city’s clutches: a mix up, a switch, a change of clothes, a handgun, a dream, a con artist, a flood, a big love.
Silent Stage features Dustin Wills, Westen Borghesi, Adriene Mishler, Sam Webber, Mark Stewart, Kyle Lagunas, Hilah Johnson, Chase Crossno, Francisco Rodriguez, Keri Boyd, Sonnet Blanton, and David Yeakle. Musical Accompaniment by Ashville, North Carolina's Reese Gray (Firecracker Jazz Band, Squirrel Nut Zippers)
Silent Stage runs Thursdays – Sundays, February 19 – 28, nightly at 8 p.m. Location and additional information will be disclosed upon ticket purchase. Advance ticket purchase or reservation is required! Seating is limited to 21 spectators per performance. Tickets may be purchased at www.silentstage.eventbright.com.
Peer Gynt is one of those great, impossible works of literature. It's a masterwork of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, one that is totally different from the new 19th century realistic dramas of social concern that we remember today. This is the playwright who later gave us A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts, An Enemy of the People and Hedda Gabler.
Well before that, after a penurious career as a creative director and producer at Norwegian state theatres in Bergen and in Cristiana (Oslo), in 1864 while in his mid-thirties this self-taught artist left Norway with his wife and child for self-exile in sunny Italy. He continued to write. A five-act verse play Brand succeeded in Stockholm in 1866. The following year Ibsen had his five-act verse play Peer Gynt published in Copenhagen.
Almost ten years passed before the piece appeared on stage, in the Norwegian capital. And no wonder -- Ibsen himself wrote without a thought for the constraints of conventional staging, which he knew well. Peer Gynt is an exalted narrative of Peer's whole life, leaping in space and time. Peer seduces and runs off with the intended bride of a rival, then abandons her. Act II places the cheeky young Peer in a troll world, contemplating marriage to the daughter of the troll who rules the mountain (the scene for which composer Edvard Grieg wrote the comic but menacing incidental music "In The Hall of the Mountain King"). The action moves from upcountry Norway to Morocco to the Saharan wastes to a lunatic asylum in Egypt to a storm-wracked sailing ship and, finally, back to rural Norway. Upon his return Peer encounters his former neighbors, the devil in the shape of a parson, and the grim reaper in the guise of a button maker.
Because of the unrestrained length of the piece, a conventional static reading from a lectern would take more than six hours. In rhymed couplets. In Norwegian.
The first American production of this epic was in 1907. I had the good fortune to see a 1998 production by the Washington DC Shakespeare Theatre. In the early 1980's the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis did a five-hour version; in 2008 they again produced Peer Gynt, using a new stage-version translation by Minnesota poet Robert Bly, starring Shakespeare veteran Mark Rylance. Bly had the Minnesota Norwegian whimsy to mimic Ibsen by crafting about half of his text in rhyming verse, especially for comic scenes such as the dialogue in which the King of the Trolls seeks to convince Peer to stay in his kingdom. Bly cut and tailored the action so that the play ran about three hours.
St. Ed's assistant professor of theatre Ev Lunning, Jr., is using Bly's translation and has cut it further. He cast St. Ed's senior Jacob Trussell as Peer. You've had plenty of opportunities to see Trussell over the last couple of years. He was nominated for the B. Iden Payne awards each of the last two years for Summer Stock Austin musical theatre leads in Bat-Boy, The Musical and Sweeney Todd. Last season at St. Ed's Mary Moody Northern Theatre he was in Cloud 9, Cyrano de Bergerac and Pajama Game. He appeared in The Fantasticks for Austin Playhouse and Leave It To Beverley for the DA! Theatre Collective.
Continuing its long tradition of casting Equity actors alongside its students, St. Ed's has Sheila Gordon in the key role of Peer's mother and Ben Wolfe in a variety of roles, including that of the big puppet-headed Troll King.
Peer Gynt is a remarkable work. Ibsen's source was a collection of Norwegian folktales with the opening legends of Peer's conquest of a magic flying stag and his striving against an unseen monster known as the Bøyg. Add to those Paul Bunyan exaggerations the fact that Peer's a bouncing, bounding braggart and flirt, obliged to abandon his true love Solveig because of his entanglements with the trolls. The story has elements of a Bildungsroman (a tale of growing up), a resemblance to the picaresque novel (a rascal's adventures), and withering portrayals of 19th century mercantilism and capitalism. Peer wants to become the Emperor of the World.
All in all, and throughout, Peer is on a search to find his Self: "One must be oneself; for oneself and one’s own/one must do one’s best, both in great and in small things./If the luck goes against you, at least you’ve the honour/of a life carried through in accordance with principle."
Yet for all his inventiveness and egotism he has no concept of that Self. In the Egyptian lunatic asylum, confronted by a desperate madman who imagines himself to be a Pen, Peer calls himself "a blank sheet of paper." In the fifth and final act as Peer is facing imminent death he peels an onion, imagining it to represent himself -- peeling away his many roles and adventures, eventually to find nothing in the middle. Because Death threatens to melt down Peer's soul with other imperfectly realized lives, Peer seeks frantically for some witness, any witness, to assert that his life was not entirely futile.
This is a huge, demanding text. Last Monday, the final full run through at the Mary Moody Northern Theatre before tech sessions went smoothly and swiftly, giving promise of a dramatic, gripping evening of theatre. Jacob Trussell was self assured, emphatic and energetic in all of Peer's many permutations.
This is Peer's life story, from adolescence to near the grave, and Trussell's appearance and makeup will reflect that. The 2008 Guthrie version, according to the 48-year-old Mark Rylance while playing Peer, was a survey of Gynt's life retro and avant from the perspective of middle age. The St Ed's production, inevitably, because of the university setting and the predominantly young cast, will imply a young man's look forward into that feckless adventurer's life.
Trussell with his rough good looks and devotion to the thespian calling is mounting that legendary stag, about to ride forward into his future. Director Ev Lunning, Jr., both an academic and a seasoned member of Actor's Equity, could be a Peer who's somewhere along about the end of Act III in his own five-act Gyntian adventure. That combination, along with Gordon, Wolfe, Lainey Murphy as Peer's beloved but abandoned Solveig, Nathan Brockett and other talented company members, promises a full and challenging evening of classic theatre.
Just posted by Hyde Park Theatre: jury's picks for Best of FronteraFest 2010, to play in two bills, plus a Wild Card Night:
Bill A -- Tuesday, February 9 and Friday, February 12
Consultant for Hire, by Max Langert (ASW Commission). Hire me!
ms, by Molly Fonseca. A one-person play that explores the journey of accepting a diagnosis and offers a turn towards hope.
Excerpts from Things in Life, by Ben Prager. Three time Best-of-Fest winner Ben Prager performs comic monologues that portray with unblinking realism “ordinary” Americans, excerpted from his 2010 Long Fringe show. In 2009, Things in Life was nominated for three Austin Critics Table Awards. Directed by Wynne West.
The Mommy Confessions: An Excerpt, by Rhonda Kulhanek . Three mommies confess their stories of motherhood revealing the truth about what it takes to be a mommy --- an excerpt from the hilarious one-woman show playing at FronteraFest Long Fringe.
Saint Matilde’s Malady, by Kyle John Schmidt. A swashbuckling new play about rage, love, and other sexually transmitted diseases. Directed by Elizabeth C. Lay.
Bill B - Wednesday, February 10 and Saturday February 13
Seamstress, by Kenneth Wayne Bradley (ASW Commission). A one woman show featuring Melanie Dean, directed by Ellie McBride.
Here, Nigger, by Roger Reeves. A short play that begins with a prank: one seventeen-year-old boy finds a Ku Klux Klan robe in a wood while hunting and wears it to spook his best friend. However, the robe has a mind and will of its own. In this play, the American legacy of race holds hostage even the most sacred of friendships. Directed by Kyle John Schmidt.
The Wussy Boy Manifesto: Episode Five: The Wussy Boy Strikes Back, by Big Poppa E. Three-time HBO "Def Poetry" veteran and National Poetry Slam Champion Big Poppa E performs new works about growing beards, making sweet love, and the joys of pubic hair. His hilarious poetry has garnered eight Best of Fest finishes in seven years, and this time, he's bringing presents for everyone.
I'm not a writer . . .but I got a story to tell, by La Tasha Stephens. You see these people every day. They make you laugh, grab your wallet, drop your eyes…. To you, they’re part of the landscape. But what if one day, the landscape talked back? Ain't that some shit?!?! Co-directed by Wendy Bable.
The Bitter Poet's "Looking For Love In All The Wrong Cafes, Strip Clubs and Black Box Performance Spaces," by Kevin Draine. The Bitter Poet performs an excerpt from his Long Fringe show of the same name - a collection of darkly humorous satirical guitar-driven poems about searching for True Love and the contortionists you meet along the way!
Wild Card Night, Wednesday, February 11
Parents/Kids Dance Party, by Michelle Flanagan in assoc. w/ Rubber Rep. 3 sisters, 4 daughters, 2 moms, and a grandma GET DOWN!
Spit, by Evie Worsham aka June Doe. Short stories that are rare, incorruptible, striptease views of the inner workings of my heart, after all the therapy.
Growth (Danny Strack) will showcase a set of poems on the topics of time, space, sex, relationships, and how they all fit together.
Cathy Dresden Sings for Her Supper, by Joe Hartman. Join Cathy Dresden, that singer with a heart of gold and pipes to match, as she gamely makes her way through the mid-west of 1959 with pianist Jerome Tolliver in tow. It's "Swellegant"!
Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints, by Annie La Ganga. Spoken word artist and writer Annie La Ganga performs a collage of monologues and poems about awkward grieving, bad judgment, and important stoners. A range of voices that are funny, depressed, deluded, idealistic, cynical, wise, compassionate, and warmly bitchy tell the story of a person determined to make a good life out of her creative mistakes, family traumas, and clumsy relationships.
Photos by Chris Shea for A Brief Narrative of an Extraordinary Birth of Rabbits by C. Denby Swanson, which features puppetry by Connor Hopkins and is based on the narrative of an 18th century English physician to the king who after investigating the matter believed that countrywoman Mary Toft had given birth to a stillborn rabbit.
It's directed by Jenny Larson with music by Graham Reynolds. The cast includes Robin Grace Thompson, Nitra Gutierrez, Halena Kays, Shaun Patrick Tubbs, Connor Hopkins, and Matt Hislope - with Josh Meyer as "The Stork."
Video design is by Lee Webster, light designs by Megan Rielly, sound design by Buzz Moran, and costumes by Jessica Gilzow.
They juggled and joked together for 20 years, and now they're back, while they can still do it. In his program note, Rob Williams -- the beaming little guy in the yellow shirt -- says that the Zach gave them the step up from renaissance fairs and comedy clubs to the world of regional theatres, network television and off-Broadway. They disbanded in 2004 but last year resurrected the act, playing in Edmonton, Canada, then moving to the New Victory theatre in New York City, and now back home to Austin.
Well, maybe "home" in a sentimental sense. Williams lives in Los Angeles and tours internationally; Jon O'Connor, the big guy, coaches a Minneapolis-based juggling group, the Jugheads; and Kevin Hunt, he of the now-gray frizzy hair, lives in Louisiana on the north side of Lake Ponchartrain.
It's a highly polished show. Bright, fast and funny with the patter and the surprises. They love this stuff. They must, because they've been doing it for so long. . . .you can catch them on YouTube in a 1991 video from television, doing the same clever variations.
Director Bridget Farias and the EmilyAnn Theatre crew in Wimberley are running The Elephant Man Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays for four weekends in January and February, an intrepid undertaking for a community-based arts group in a town with a population of only about 4,000.
More impressive than their raw courage in taking on a tough script and slow-motion tragedy is the fact that they carry it out with grace and depth. The company creates a protected time and space in which we can muse about arbitrary fate, human connection and our responsibility for one another.
Audiences may be familiar with the story, based on historical fact as recorded by Dr. Frederick Treves, the physician who took in the disfigured young Joseph Carey Merrick. Writing many years after the events, Treves recalled his patient as "John Merrick," the name used by Bernard Pomerance for the Tony-nominated play in 1979. David Lynch made the movie in 1980 with Anthony Hopkins as Treves, John Hurt as Merrick, John Gielgud as chief physician Carr Gomm and Ann Bancroft as the actress Madge Kendal.
I haven't seen that version, though, and I encourage you simply to ignore it. Farias has assembled a capable and convincing cast for this quiet morality play, and they make the story their own.
Carl Galante as Treves and Patrick Byers as Merrick establish the key link and relationship in the story. Galante, playing the physician and man of science, is a protector and ultimately a father figure of conflicted emotions. Byers as the patiently suffering, attentive and sweet-tempered Merrick becomes a mirror to his visitors, once they learn to look past his disfigurement.
Currently included in Zach Theatre programs is this offer of $5 discounts on tickets to the nearly concurrent productions of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, staged in traditional fashion at UT April 2 - 11 and in a modern adaptation by Zach Theatre April 15- May 23 with Marc Pouhé.
Use the coupon code "stage manager" at either box office.
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Is it only coincidence that Austin theatre is staging a rolling centenary celebration of George Bernard Shaw? Not of his birth or death -- we'd have to wait another forty or so years for either of those, since the man lived well into his 90's --but of his plays exploring matrimony.
In late 2008 Different Stages gave us a twinkling production of Shaw's 1908 comedy Getting Marriedand now Austin Playhouse is offering Misalliance, first staged in 1910. Despite their talky amusements, in the canon of Shaw's 63 full-length dramas they are relatively unknown. You can browse the length of the shelves at Half-Price Books or consult the catalog at the Austin Public Library, and neither will appear.
So we have all the more reason to thank Austin stages for blowing the dust off GBS's mischievous social commentary. Getting Married looked at the dilemmas and disadvantages for the Edwardian chattering classes of the marriage contract; Misalliance pushes the boundries a bit further, as the rascally Fabian looks at the delusions of romantic love and the practicalities of extramarital liaisons. He advocates a degree of female sexual liberation that must have left those proper Edwardians agog.
And that's certainly what he intended to do, for the London playgoing audiences inevitably resembled the household and acquaintances shown onstage. The Tarletons live in a well-appointed country manor, enjoying the fortune that John Tarleton (David Stahl) acquired by turning his simple tailor shop into a wholesale manufacturer of fine underwear. His wife (the humorous and subtle Bernadette Nason) is practical and without airs, a former shop girl quite unaffected by good fortune. Son John (Chris Gibson) runs the business in no-nonsense fashion while 23-year-old daughter Hypatia (Lara Toner), a cheerful scoffer at convention, wishes that something extraordinary would happen to interrupt the tedium of entertaining and turning down the earnest young men who wish to marry her.
presents as part of its "Whole Mind" Common Experience
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard directed by Richard Sodders February 16-20 at 7:30 p.m., February 21 at 2 p.m. $10 general admission, $7 for students Considered by many to be Tom Stoppard’s finest play, Arcadia is a mix of comedy, drama, and literary detective story as it bounces between two different time periods. The alternating scenes allow the audience to see what actually happened in the early 1800s versus the modern-day scholars' attempts to interpret the events.
Winner of the 1994 Olivier Award and the 1995 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play, Arcadia has been called by the New York Post: "Pure entertainment for the heart, mind, soul.... It is a work shot through with fun, passion and, yes, genius."
based on the book by Munro Leaf Saturday, February 20, 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.
The Hudson Vagabond Puppets presents Ferdinand the Bull, the gentle tale of a big, strong peace loving bull who would rather smell the flowers than fight- much to the annoyance of the proud bullfighter! This narrated ballet, told with delightful larger-than-life characters and captivating masked dancers, brings a message of non-violence that is as joyful for the eyes as it is the soul.
Hudson Vagabond Puppets, incorporated in 1980 as a not-for-profit company, creates larger-than-life puppetry and mask programs designed to fit into the school curriculum as well as to entertain children and their families. Our performers are professional dancers and actors. Clad in black, the puppeteers borrow from the traditional Japanese Bunraku style of puppetry, becoming mere shadows of the enormous figures they bring to life.
HVP tours nationally throughout the year and has performed in concert halls, theater, colleges, and major performing arts centers, including Brooklyn Academy of Music, The California Institute of Technology, Empire Center at the Egg, The Tilles Center for the Arts, Centre East Presents, the Luther Burbank Center, and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
Narrated ballets are a specialty of the company. Our puppets have danced with symphony orchestras including The Little Orchestra Society at Avery Fischer Hall, the Phoenix Arizona Symphony, the Wheeling W. VA Symphony (conducted by Rachel Warby), the St. Louis Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, and the United States Military Concert Band at Eisenhower Hall at West Point.
