Boeing Boeing by Marc Camoletti, Austin Playhouse, January 27 - February 26

by Catherine Dribb

Prepare For Takeoff! Austin Playhouse Is Flying Farce Class!

Boeing Boeing, or boing boing as the case may be, with actors bouncing all over the stage and in and out of doors, is a modern farce written by Marc Camoletti in the classic French style. Directed by Don Toner, it is running now until February 26 in the tent at Mueller that is Austin Playhouse’s temporary home.

Boeing Boeing is an uplifting tale of love, but not just because it features three airline stewardesses. Camoletti and British translator Beverly Cross were careful to balance the chauvinistic egoism that rules leading man Bernard’s carefully calculated love life with the Parisian mantra of love. There’s no Prufrock in Paris with Bernard who is played by David Stokey. His abundant confidence is communicated in the first scene as he records in his timetables when fiancée number one (the American) will leave (in just a few minutes) and return (on Monday).

Janet, is from the So-uth (yes, that’s two syllables) and Lara Toner does the character with her suitably Southern drawl and hair-do. Janet wants only the best of the best in life: a millionaire husband. Unbeknownst to Bernard, Janet matches him in her frivolous attitude toward marriage. She prefers practising kissing on the couch with Bernard’s old school pal Robert, just arrived in Paris, to monogamy or marriage.

Robert, played by Zach Thompson has accepted Bernard’s invitation to stay with him until he finds his own place. He quickly learns of his old school chum’s unique lifestyle. Juggling three airline stewardesses who will never run into each other thanks to that handy dandy airline log, sets Bernard, and now Robert who’s in on the secret, up for a big… well… farce.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

A Costume Portfolio by Buffy Manners for Boeing Boeing by Marc Camoletti at Austin Playhouse, January 17 - February 26

A selection: posted by Austin Playhouse on Facebook, Christopher Loveless's album of portraits of the cast in costumes by Buffy Manners:

Boeing, Boeing

by Marc Camoletti adapted by Beverley Cross

directed by Don Toner

January 27 - February 26, Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m.

Special Performance: Valentine’s Day, February 14th at 8pm, $40 tickets, $70 for couples, includes dessert reception

Austin Playhouse at Mueller, Temporary facility at 1800 ½ Simond Ave. (click for map)
www.austinplayhouse.com and on Facebook and Twitter
Tickets $26 Thursdays and Fridays, $28 Saturdays and Sundays, $35 Opening Night
Box office phone 512.476.0084 - tickets available online at: www.austinplayhouse.com; e-mail austinplayhouse@aol.com

All student tickets are half-price for regular performances.

Shown: Lara Toner as Janet, the American (above) and Laura Walberg as Judith, the German (left)

Click to view additional portraits of costumed cast members from Boeing Boeing at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, September 29 - October 9

by Michael Meigs

The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler by Jeff Whitty has an abundance of clever and not much of depth or heart. Director David M. Long does a bang-up job of making it a whizzing entertainment, having recruited three gifted Equity professionals to work with the six St. Ed's Equity-candidate actors relegated to secondary roles.

Playwright Whitty starts with an intriguing hypothetical: what happens to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler after she so famously commits suicide in the last scene of the 1890 play of the same name? We watch Hedda awake in an afterlife, confused, looking around to decipher the only partly familiar world around her. She rises from the 19th century sofa and discovers that her pillow is drenched with blood but she is apparently unharmed. Then her worst nightmare appears: her husband George Tesman, pained and concerned for her. Won't that man ever go away? Not even beyond the grave?

Whitty gives us a literary limbo, populated with an arbitrary assortment of fictional characters embraced by the popular imagination. Hedda learns that she has been committing suicide over and over again for more that a century. She and others in this limbo survive, deathless and ever the same -- until the moment in which they disappear from living memory.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Neil Simon, Austin Playhouse, February 25 - March 27

Neil Simon's set-up for Laughter on the 23rd Floor is simple and classic, if you can abstract from the biographic aspects of it. A newcomer enthusing about his new job discovers that his work colleagues are eccentrics, each more bizarre and devastatingly verbal than the previous one. Their employer, initially unseen, has enormous stature with the public, but they all know that he is a generous, distracted borderline psycho. Set 'em ricocheting off one another, bring the boss in, interrupt it from time to time as the newcomer addresses the audience with a rueful smile. Eventually, toward the middle of the second half, pressures from craven commercialism and the indifference to genius of the unwashed bring about the disbanding of the work unit, with much sentiment among its members and the megalomaniac disbelief of the boss.

With slight adjustments and a naval theme, you could be on board ship with Mr. Roberts or with Captain Queeg or with William Bligh. Or before Agincourt with Henry V. These few, this band of brothers, they bind together and then disappear into memory, greater and even more eccentric than they really were. This particular ship is an office in a New York skyscraper where the eccentrics are comedy sketch writers, the boss is a neurotic comedy star on live television in the early 1950's, and the newcomer is a surrogate for the playwright, Neil Simon.

Simon and his brother Danny did indeed write for live television before Simon embarked on his series of sweet and often nostalgic comedies. Sid Caesar saw a review they'd put together in a Catskills resort and hired them to write for his Show of Shows with a team that included the most successful writers, comedians and writer-comedians of the time. The Wikipedia article on this piece offers a table linking Simon's eccentrics with the real live eccentrics who probably inspired them, including Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbard, Carl Reiner and more.

Images by Christopher Loveless: Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Neil Simon, Austin Playhouse, February 25 - March 27

Images by Christopher Loveless, received directly:

Laughter on the 23rd Floor

by Neil Simon

directed by Don Toner

Feb. 25 - March 27

Austin Playhouse Main Stage, Penn Field, 3601 S. Congress (click for map)

Tickets are $26 Thursday and Friday and $28 Saturday and Sunday.

All student tickets are half price!

For Tickets, Call (512) 476-0084 or click here to order tickets online.

Hot on the heels of our most successful show ever, we're thrilled to bring theatrical legend Neil Simon's nostalgic comedy Laughter on the 23rd Floor to the stage! Set in 1953, Laughter recalls Simon's days as a young writer on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. The play is a fast-paced and very fun comic romp through the behind-the-scenes antics in the writers' room.

Laughter features an all star cast including Kimberly Barrow, Brian Coughlin,Huck Huckaby, Jenny Larson, Jason Newman, Steve Shearer, Blake Adam Smith, David Stahl, and David Stokey!

Directed by Don Toner, Costume Design by Buffy Manners, Lighting Design by Don Day, and Sound Design by the Gunn Brothers.

Click to view additional images by Christopher Loveless at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

The Life of Galileo, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, November 12 -22

A lot is going on in Brecht's The Life of Galileo, and not just onstage. The program notes at the Mary Moody Northern Theatre will help you some, with a tidy summary of the historical figures, the heliocentric Ptolemaic model of the universe, and the heretical but accurate Copernican revision of it, and some of the elements of the plot.

With that crib sheet you can comfortably follow the depiction of that impatient and skeptical scientist's lifetime tussle with the Catholic Church. Director Michelle Polgar, three Actors' Equity members and the student cast and crew will give you the story, unrolling it much of the time in a design of curiously reduced lighting, as if the dark ages were lingering, literally, in the period 1610 - 1634.

You will not get much of a sense of the intensely brainy Bertolt Brecht or his reasons for fastening upon those 400-year-old events. Study of any of the several texts that Brecht crafted between 1938 and 1955 would show you that ideas and apprehension -- Angst -- are fundamental to the work.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, November 12 - 22

UPDATE: Click for ALT review, November 16

Found on-line:

The Life of Galileo

by Bertolt Brecht, translated by David Hare
Directed by Michelle Polgar
November 12-November 22, 2009
Mary Moody Northern Theatre
St Edward's University, 3001 South Congress Avenue

In 1609, in a small study in Padua, Galileo Galilei raises a telescope to the skies. What he finds there reverberates from the streets of Padua to the Vatican palace in Rome, sparking a debate that threatens his very survival. From master playwright Bertolt Brecht comes a theatrical discourse on reason, faith, power and the tension arising from scientific progress running headlong into age-old assumptions.

Featuring Equity guest artists David Stahl and David Stokey.

Tickets: Season and Flex passes go on sale August 26 through the MMNT box office. Passes start as low as $40 for four shows.
Box office hours are Monday–Friday from 1–5 p.m. Info phone: 512.448.8484

Map to St. Edward's University (theatre is at eastern end of campus)

[image is taken from the article Galileo and The Telescope, 1609 published by American Physical Society]

Wikipedia on Brecht's The Life of Galileo

A Flea in Her Ear, Austin Playhouse, March 27 - May 3

In the madcap 19th century world of French playwright Georges Feydeau, two qualities in farce are certain to produce merriment: man's unfulfilled desire and woman's unsatisfied curiosity.

No one ever says that, of course. This is not Oscar Wilde, his contemporary from across the channel.

The ample, delighted laughter at Austin Playhouse's production of A Flea in Her Ear is provoked by antics, deceptions and astonishing coincidences that bring respectable bourgeois folk sneaking into the shady world of the rent-by-the-hour Hotel Coq d'Or. That's the"Golden Rooster Hotel," with the bonus of the sly phallic reference for us English speakers -- in fact, Étienne the prissy butler to the Chandebise family disparages the institution as the "Hotel Cock de Whore!"

The centerpiece of the play is the voluminous bed at center stage in Act II -- focus of man's desire and woman's curiosity, and locale for wildly funny shifting and scrambling by the various characters. This being comedy, the bed never actually serves for seduction and recreation. It's variously a temptation, a hiding place, and, with the click of a strategically placed button, a turntable subterfuge that offers pretend respectability, complete with an arthritic, indignant old codger in a nightcap and nightshirt.

Read More at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .