April 11 - 21, 2013, 7:30 p.m. (Sunday matinee at 2 p.m.)
Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, 3001 S. Congress Avenue (click for map)
Tickets: $20 Adults Advance ($15 Students, Seniors, SEU Community), $20 at the door; STUDENT DISCOUNT NIGHT: Friday, April 12: Student tickets $8 with ID. Available through the MMNT Box Office, 512.448.8484; Available online athttp://www.stedwards.edu/theatre. Box Office Hours are M-F 1-5 p.m.
ZACH is thrilled to announce our second season in the intimate, new Topfer Theatre, which includes a spectacular selection of plays and musicals selected specifically to build on the dynamic and intimate experiences we are enjoying now during our first season. Austin’s finest professional actors will join extraordinary guest artists and nationally acclaimed playwrights for an unforgettable year!
All 6 productions in the 2013-14 subscription series will be staged in the intimate new Topfer Theatre!
LES MISERABLES – The international musical phenomenon re-envisioned for Austin audiences! Filled with soaring anthems, youthful patriotism and the quest for redemption, revealing the heart of a man who must leave his past behind to fight for life, love and liberty. A CHRISTMAS STORY, based on the classic 1983 hit film, comes to brilliant life at ZACH in an all new production. Rights are pending for this title and in the event they are not available, ZACH will present an all new musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL. Both of these productions are a great treat for the whole family to celebrate. IN THE NEXT ROOMor the vibrator play – The delightful and provocative new comedy by Sarah Ruhl (The Clean House) makes its Austin premiere at ZACH. This funny, intimate and beautiful story has audiences buzzing from coast to coast. THE GOSPEL AT COLONUS – My favorite theatre experience of all time! A dynamic musical telling the ancient Greek story of Oedipus The King set in a modern day African American church starring your favorite ZACH artists and a 50 member gospel choir. Astonishing! THE WHO'S TOMMY begins with young Tommy falling down the rabbit hole into a fantasy rock-n-roll landscape where the deaf, dumb and blind kid encounters Uncle Ernie as the Mad Hatter, his mother as the White Queen, Cousin Kevin as the Cheshire Cat, the Acid Queen as the Red Queen, and his doctors Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum. The 6th subscription play will be announced later this year. Exciting, new developments are in the works for this comedy on our season.
featuring Steven Dietz, Kevin Kautzman, Sarah Saltwick, with rehearsal scenes
The University of Texas at Austin Department of Theatre and Dance presents UTNT (UT New Theatre), April 18-28, 2013 at the Lab Theatre. This annual showcase presents new plays from the M.F.A. Playwriting Program.
Now in its sixth iteration, UTNT brings to stage dynamic works by Andrew Hinderaker, Kevin Kautzman, Gabrielle Reisman, and Sarah Saltwick. Curated by Steven Dietz and Brian Kettler, the four stories delve into family, desires, hauntings, faith, and miracles.
An appeal to help raise $500 for the next production, a slightly surrealist play where nothing is quite what it seems. The fourth experiment from Bottle Alley Theatre Company
Launched: Apr 4, 2013 Funding ends: Apr 19, 2013
Make-Believe is an experiment, but all we produce is experiments. This staging marks Bottle Alley Theatre Company's fourth completely independent production following their two show stay at the infamous Broken Neck (Stage followed by Autumn) as well as their sold-out run of The Ivy House at the historic Eponymous Garden, followed by a small tour to the Actor's Preparatory Exchange in Tyler, Texas. Make-Believe (written by Chris Fontanes)weaves a surrealistic tale of a girl, dying in a hospital with no memories. Surrounded by medical personnel and friends that she does not recognize, she comes to believe that this world is not real, and nothing is truly what it seems to be. This marks the fourth, and final (for a time) production under the direction of Chris Fontanes.
School group weekday shows on May 8-10 @ 10:30am Tickets $12.50 available through
Contact Erin Gentry, Education Director, at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
for Title 1 and school/group discounts
Join Emmy- Award- nominated "Sesame Street" performer Leslie Carrara- Rudolph, for Wake up Your Weird!, a whimsical live theatrical experience. Told ina two-act show and tell, this family-friendly show addresses bullying and selfesteem issues while giving children the tools to navigate life creatively.
Wake Up Your Weird! is an energetic, hilarious show full of original songs, video shorts, puppetry, pink monkeys, and a Sasquatch followed by an interactive joy ride where you get to move, sing, and laugh your way through more of Leslieʼs stories and songs.
The first act tells the story of the puppet Lolly and the bullies, and the second act is an interactive workshop where Leslie and Lolly work with the kids on how to navigate through these situations. Wake Up Your Weird aligns with AISDʼs No Place for Hate initiative, and is appropriate for ages 6 and up.
For the committed theatergoer, this was a long-awaited premiere. The blended live-action and puppet play previewed at the 2012 Fusebox Festival. The preview tantalized audiences with its potential for taking many different directions.
The premiere at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre on March 28 satisfied our aroused curiosity with a long sequence of wise story choices. They took us through some surprising ways yet never strayed from its emotional heart. Sure, it was about death, and innovative puppetry sustained all its moods and action; at the same time the production remained light, humor-filled and entertaining. A demanding ticket buyer couldn’t ask for much more.
The play follows the character of Adam Sultan, played by the artist Adam Sultan, through to the far distant future of A.D. 2052 (not quite forty years from now). Aged and infirm, Sultan sees and feels the loss of his artist friends all around him. Seemingly despairing, he collects mementos of their lives and seals those objects into glass jars. His bookshelf fills with the jars. Then one day a half-scale doppelganger puppet enters his apartment, drinks heavily and passes out. Sultan doesn’t know what to make of it; he never does know what to make of it. What’s sure is only that from this point forward puppets carry equal weight with human actors in conveying the story and its meanings.
The Physical Plant team of Steve Moore and Zeb L. West wrote and crafted the show. In addition to makiing unerring choices in a mature story revolving around death, they incorporated advanced concepts of new puppetry that took Adam Sultan to the edge of theatre and puppetry. Completely black-garbed puppeteers were visible onstage. In conventional theatre, anyone wearing black is a technician and therefore invisible in the sense of operating the play and not figuring in the scripted action; technicians are merely making it happen.
The Adam Sultan puppeteers pushed this envelope or bent this frame in several ways. First and most fundamentally, the puppeteers manipulated and changed the human actors throughout the play; they did so subtly and tellingly when they reshaped the postures and stances of the living to reflect advancing age, as for example in the touching moment when they placed wedding rings on the fingers of the lead characters. In addition, the puppeteers removed their black headgear to speak narrative voice-overs at a microphone stand at stage left. With this, the audience no longer held the puppeteers comfortably framed in invisibility as helpers for the story. Attention, audience: they might do other things, so be ready.
Tackling Football’s Dark Side Cohen New Works Festival: ‘Colossal’ reviewed
by Jillian Owens, 12:02PM, Wed. Mar. 27
If baseball is America’s pastime, then football is her guilty pleasure. Sure, it’s thrilling. But it’s also really fucking violent. It encourages players to muscle through concussions, and it encourages them to hate. Colossal, the spectacular play premiering at the Cohen New Works Festival, tackles these skeletons head-on.
It’s more of an event, really. As playwright Andrew Hinderaker said in a talkback after last night’s performance, Colossal is “intimate and epic at the same time.” He’s not exaggerating. Upon entering the performance space – a vast echoing studio in the prewar Anna Hiss Gym – audience members looked at one another and mouthed, “Damn, this is exciting.” Actors who look more like skinny football players ran the length of the room and caught balls and yelled and whistled and did push-ups, performing choreographed drills to the beat of a miniature drum line. We might have forgotten that we were at a play, not a football practice, save for one man dancing slowly, , through the glistening players.
Suddenly, as the team ran a play, they froze in mid-tackle, and a man in a wheelchair rolled through. This is Mike, played by Michael Patrick Thornton, a terrific Chicago-based actor who is disabled in real life, too. We learned that he’s constantly replaying an image of his younger self (Will Brittain) perform the act of recklessness that crippled him for life. Football was his passion – and a plague: Not only did he get hurt, but his dancer father (Steve Ochoa, the lone figure from the opening) disapproved. “I was the only son in the history of the United States,” Mike declared, “to disappoint his father by choosing football over dance.”
And so the story goes, in 15-minute quarters and a halftime show almost as good as Beyoncé’s. With direction from Will Davis, choreography by Andrea Beckham, and additional movement by Jeff Simon, Colossal is a shining example of the excellence that a department of theatre and dance can create when everyone works together. By far the most physically demanding play I’ve ever seen, it’s also a deeply character-driven work, especially when it comes to the cocky, impulsive younger Mike, impressively played by Brittain. (Where did this guy come from, a PacSun ad? Those abs belong in a magazine.) Hinderaker brings his love-hate relationship with football into conversation with other themes: repressed homosexuality, the narrow macho mindset, the danger of living in the past, the emotional and physical difficulty of rehabilitation. Colossal doesn’t denounce football – far from it. “Everybody loves football, even if they don’t know it yet,” says young Mike. The characters describe being hit as a blinding white light, searing pain, and then pleasure: “I’m not dead.” But football is complicated. It’s a compulsion, a joy, and, as Colossal makes us vividly aware, it’s also a game that hurts people.
Colossal will be performed Wednesday, March 27, 8:30pm, and Thursday, March 28, 8pm, in Anna Hiss Gym 134, UT campus. For more information, visit www.coopnwf.org.
Vicky Grise's Play 'Blu' at Guadalupe Theatre Speaks with True Voices of the Barrio
by Gregg Barrios Published: March 27, 2013
Vicki Grise’s play blu depicts the struggles of barrio life through voices seldom heard in American theater. It has been performed in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to critical acclaim, but though the New York-based writer claims San Antonio as her home, the 2010 Yale Drama Award-winning play — chosen by playwright David Hare from over 950 submissions — has yet to receive a full production in this town.
Last Friday, March 22, blu was given the stage in San Antonio in a concert reading (a staged reading accompanied by live music). It was only a one-night stand, but hopefully our local theaters will take notice and give this important piece its due. Author and Current reviewer Gregg Barrios was on hand to see the performance. – Scott Andrews
** Blu is vital theater.
A full house at the Guadalupe Theatre greeted a late night concert reading of blu directed by its playwright, Virginia Grise. The audience watched and listened as a cast of local actors and ¡Aparato!, a trio of L. A. musicians, kept them under the spell of a powerful performance.
It is rare when a theater/teatro piece addresses the concerns and stories of the Latino-majority population here or in our sister city of Los Angeles, aka the capital of the third world. The play is set in a “Barrio U.S.A,” a place where residents nightly endure police helicopters with their invasive searchlights patrolling the area as if it were a city under siege.
The play focuses on a Mexican American family that lives there. We quickly learn that the father Eme is doing hard time, while the hard-working mother Soledad has in his absence taken on a lesbian lover, Hailstorm. The three siblings from her marriage are Blu, a Marine serving in Iraq; Lunatico, a conflicted young gang member; and Gemini, the young daughter with a secret and a dream.
ZACH
