Waylon and Willie scored a big hit back in 1978 with the ballad "Mommas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys, " with the mournful advice, "Make 'em be doctors and lawyers and such."

It's tempting to add, "Don't let 'em grow up to be actors, either," but that would be foolish, because it would go unheeded. There's a huge and ever renewing pool of talent out there, young persons of all ages with stars in their eyes, and we can only be grateful for the opportunities to watch them learn and grow.

Of all those theatre students in the universities, colleges, and high schools in and near Austin, perhaps one in a thousand will eventually be able to work full time in performance.   Others will slide into different employment where from time to time they can astound with the assurance and the eloquence from theatre training.  Some will choose education, either from the beginning or later on, with the recompense of regular if not spectacular earnings and a coterie of youngsters who want to understand what it's really like "out there."

Young persons in Central Texas have plenty of opportunities for quality theatre education, even outside the familiar paths of schoolwork.  This past week I visited three of the best -- Lee Colée Atnip's annual "Broadway Bound" workshops, Austin Theatre's youth production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the reduced-scale Globe replica the Curtain Theatre, and Tex-Arts' three-week intensive academy production of Fame, the Musical. 

A Long-Running Show in Wimberley

 In 2000 Lee Colée settled in Wimberley, out in the hill country 40 minutes southwest of Austin.  A professional singer, teacher and director, she is celebrating the 10th annual session of  her "boot camp" for young performers, almost 50 of them in all.  Her younger crew presented scenes from Annie and from Oliver, while performers aged 15 to 22 did highlights from West Side Story and from The Phantom of the Opera.  Performances were at the Wimberley Player's comfortable, well appointed playhouse, open since 2006.  Colée had directed 1776 there, the musical production of the first season in that facility.

The summer performance camp thrives in part because of strong support from Wimberley residents and firms. This year 46 donors provided full or partial scholarships for participants.  Colée invited them -- and ALT -- to a Wednesday thank-you performance of the shows done by younger participants, with an intermezzo presentation of "The Music of The Night" from Phantom of the Opera.

 Both Annie and Oliver teem with orphans, but Lee Colée and assistant director Rachel McGinnis had that stageful of young persons moving smartly, with discipline and with evident joy in performance.  Stars were the 12-year-old young women Samantha Sullivan as Annie and a sparkling Rachel Wyatt as the Artful Dodger, but talent was generously distributed across the stage.  Those performers were of all shapes and sizes, beaming with the delight of youthful play, a testimonial to the advantages of an amateur cast over a bland, neatly matched adult professional troupe.

From the older cast, Justin Finch sang the Phantom with steely assurance, and he stalked and threatened Oliver and the gang in the role of ruffian Bill Sykes in the menacing number "My Name."

The Curtain Theatre, a Globe-like structure, is unique.  If this is your first visit and you're catching the second weekend of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Austin Shakespeare's second staging of a summer youth production,  you might have to study your Google map.  Cold Water Canyon Road leads down a steep hillside to the meadow with a play town and a theatre on Richard Garriott's land just west of the 360 bridge over the Colorado.  

Ann Ciccolella and Austin Shakespeare recruited two of their own for this second summer youth production of Shakespeare.  Gwen Kelso has performed trippingly in this town as Rosalind, Juliet, Kate and Hero, among others, and she is about to enter the classical theatre program in Washington DC jointly administered by Georgetown University and Michael Kahn's Washington Shakespeare Company.  Assistant directorJustin Scalise is the thin, energetic blade who has portrayed Feste the Clown, Mercutio, Lucio in Measure for Measure and Hamlet (in the "Fastest Hamlet Ever Performed" version).  Scalise will appear as Hamlet this fall, in earnest, with the Scottish Rite Theatre.

The Merry Wives of Windsor is an oddity, the only Shakespeare work set in a contemporary London, and tradition says that Queen Elizabeth I had asked for a comedy featuring Sir Jack Falstaff, the "greasy knight" of the Henry IV plays.  Poor fat Jack goes a-courting two married women and is deceived and humiliated for his dishonest pains -- not once, not twice, but three times.  Kelso comments that this episodic structure and the broad nature of the farce put her in mind of American television's situation comedies of the 1950s.  She encouraged her teenage actors to go to YouTube to look up folks like Lucy and Ricki and  to go big with their acting styles.  

The company provides a jingly overture medley of familiar TV sitcom music as the audience gathers.  It would be hard to overdo a farce as broad as Merry Wives, and performers have a good time with the style.  Particularly well spoken and adept onstage were Ciara Flynn as Mistress Ford and Solveij Praxis as Mistress Page, the objects of Sir Jack's affections.  They perform with an amusing Lucy-and-Ethel complicity. 

The TV connections are not overdone.  Show and the young cast stand well on their own without needing to resort to direct parody.    On opening night during the traditional post-show talk-back, audience members noted that the amusing but hectic TV themes played between scenes sometimes drowned out players' opening lines -- suggesting a need for both sound tech and actors to adjust levels and timing.

This company of students enjoyed great performance advantages -- informed teachers, a concept, freedom to explore comic business, public relations support and the opportunity to perform in open air for two extended weekends on a classic thrust stage.  They responded strongly and with imagination. Matthew Stellato gave his all to Falstaff's foolishness and just about but bent in half, backwards, to support his immense, presumably false Falstaffian belly.

More women sought places in this cast than did men.  Nothing perplex'd, the Austin Shakespeare put together a mostly female cast, assigning the women some juicy roles -- for example, Kelsey Hockmuller as the self-confident Page, Georgia McLeland as Fenton, suitor to the Page daughter, and Abi Trent as abashed master Slender, Fenton's rival.  Their participation made the play's send-up of masculine vanity and venality all the more pointed.

"Gonna live forever" -- Fame, the musical, at Tex-Arts

Todd Dellinger and Robin Lewis set up the non-profit Tex-Arts in 2007-2008, out in the fast-growing, generally affluent western reaches of Travis County.   The company's Keller-Williams Dance Studios and Kam & James Morris theatre are situated in a modest shopping center at the western-most bend of  RM 620 in Lakeway, Texas.   Though central Austin isn't far away -- half an hour to 45 minutes -- the only nearby competition to Tex-Arts is offered by movie theatres.

Dellinger and Lewis relocated to Texas after some seriously high level performing and teaching across the United States, so they know the ropes.  Tex-Arts has ten more individuals on its teaching staff for regular courses and for intensive projects such as this three-week musical theatre academy. In addition, guest instructors included recent Broadway performers Keenah Armitage, Paul McGill (who appeared in the 2009 movie version) and Kaitlin Hopkins (heading up the Texas State musical theatre program since last year), as well as Anu Naimpaly of Tanjore Performing Arts in Austin, Allen Robertson, Irene White and David Yeakle (director and originator of Tongue and Groove Theatre's stunning version of The Red Balloon, 2008 and 2010).

This Fame is the musical play based on the film about aspiring NY arts high school students and is done by high school arts students eager to sing and dance.   The plot is just as thin as it ever was but it features some nice cameos and a whole lot of singing and dancing your heart out.  Tex-Arts put this cast of 33 fit young persons through 60 hours of intensive training, guiding them into whizzing, confident performance.  Some of those dancers, male and female, clearly have spent years at the ballet bar or in gymnastics, but each one in the cast knew what to do, where to go, and how to deliver the characters.

An additional encouragement at the performance at noon on Saturday was the fact that the rear row in the theatre was occupied by cast members from Zach's The Drowsy Chaperone, scheduled to open that very evening.

Dellinger intended this not only as a performance but also as an ensemble creation.  The program gives the names of all cast members in alphabetical order (Aleksej Aarsaether to Katya Welch) but doesn't identify any of the named roles. Despite that anonymity, ALT bouquets go to cast members who played Carmen the eventual drop-out, Mable the hungry dancer, geeky Shlomo the musician, dyslexic Tyrone and those three or so principal women dancers. 

There's no list of scenes or titles, either.   I trolled through the Wikipedia information about this script and libretto, which originated at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, and I recognized the titles of some of the numbers ("Hard Work" and "Fame," for instance). For the Carmen/Shlomo theme in Act I that comes back in the final scene, Tex-Arts substitutes Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" -- eerily dramatic, yes, but a piece that has been covered to death elsewhere.

EXTRA

Click to view article on Paul McGill's master class, with quotes from Tex-Arts students, Lake Travis View, June 17

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