(*) San Antonio Current Theatre Reviewers Pick Top 5 for 2013

San Antonio

 

5 Top Local Plays and Musicals This Year 

By Joy-Marie Scott December 29, 2013

Paige Blend, Roy Bumgarner, Twyla Lamont in Roads Courageous (photo: Siggi Ragnar)

We asked our theater critics, Thomas Jenkins and Steven G. Kellman, for their top picks from the theater scene in 2013. Beyond the productions, Jenkins also noted the considerable movement—both physical and conceptual—at some of the city’s top companies, which started this year and will continue into 2014.


“The Playhouse mounted its first original main stage musical in recent memory—Roads Courageous—while populating its Cellar with recent New York hits (Red, Wittenberg),” said Jenkins, “and big changes are afoot at three of the city’s most established theaters: the Jump-Start and the Classic Theatre have found new homes—in Beacon Hill and the Deco District, respectively—while the AtticRep joins the new Tobin Center as its resident theater company in 2014.”


Click each image below for comments from a reviewer and link to the review in the San Antonio Current. 

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, Klose/Seal Productions
(photo: Siggi Ragnar)

Sam Mandelbaum as Hamlet in Wittenberg by David G. Davalos, Playhouse San Antonio
(photo: Siggi Ragnar)

(link to Steven G. Kellerman's review)

The Book of Mormon touring company

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, adapted by Sophia Bolles, Overtime Theatre
(photo: Siggi Ragnar)

Hellcab by Will Kern, Attic Rep at Trinity University
(photo: Siggi Ragnar)

SA Current Feature: David Davalos Sends 'Hamlet' Back to School, October 30, 2013

Arts & Culture

David Davalos Sends 'Hamlet' Back to School

By Steven G. Kellman October 30, 2013 

David Davalos (via San Antonio Current)

David Davalos says that his goal in writing Wittenberg, which opens November 1 at the Cellar Theater, was “to ruin Hamlet for anyone who sees it after this.” Davalos’ witty and wise theatrical mash-up, subtitled A Tragical-Comical-Historical in Two Acts, imagines the Prince of Denmark in college before the tragic denouement in Elsinore—not only torn between to be or not to be, but unable to decide on a major. Two famous professors, pious Martin Luther and skeptical John Faustus, contend for his allegiance.


Wittenberg received its world premiere in Philadelphia in 2008 and has been staged in 19 other cities, including New York, London, Berlin, Vancouver and Melbourne. The playwright—who is pleased that, as he says, “There have been no dog productions yet”—is in San Antonio not to intimidate director Bill Gundry and his cast during two weeks of rehearsal, but to play the part of Doctor Faustus. It is also a homecoming for Davalos, who caught the acting bug at Eisenhower Middle School and Churchill High School. He received a BFA in theater from University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in theater from Ohio University. He’ll be joined onstage by high-school chum Andrew Thornton, playing Martin Luther, in the Playhouse’s production.

Born in Alabama, where his father, Rudy, was assistant coach of the Auburn University basketball team, Davalos moved to Texas when Rudy was hired to be assistant coach of an ABA team that had just moved from Dallas—the San Antonio Spurs. In a career that earned him a place in the San Antonio Sports Hall of Fame, Rudy took over as UTSA’s first athletic director in 1976. Paternal legacy might have influenced a scene in Wittenberg in which Hamlet and Laertes face off in tennis.


Davalos had plenty of practice plundering literature and history for theatrical concoctions before crafting Wittenberg. He conflated Hamlet and Death of a Salesman for a piece titled New Yorick, New Yorick and had Leonardo da Vinci conversing with Lucrezia Borgia and Niccoló Machiavelli in Daedalus. Darkfall was written as a modern sequel to Paradise Lost. Over lunch at Green, he recalled playing Rosencrantz in a production of Hamlet and, during the long intervals offstage, pondering Shakespeare’s play in new ways. A couple of questions tantalized him: “What was Hamlet doing in school before Hamlet?” and “How did Hamlet get to the scene in which he spies on Claudius praying?” Davalos became convinced by Stephen Greenblatt’s contention, in his 2001 book Hamlet in Purgatory, that: “Hamlet is a Protestant play haunted by a Catholic ghost.”

Read more at the San Antonio Current on-line. . . .

Opening This Week in Central Texas, June 3 - 8, 2013

Opening This Week

in Central Texas

Click images for additional information

Click HERE for a list of all productions  
CONTINUING on stage

Opening around Austin . . .

Way Off Broadway Community Players, Leander, June 7 - 28

Penfold Theatre at Round Rock Amphitheatre, June 7 - 29

=================================
IN SAN ANTONIO
=================================

an original play series by Scott McDowell at the Overtime Theatre, June 7 - July 27

Reviews from Elsewhere: Thomas Jenkins on Current NYC Productions, San Antonio Current, January 2, 2013

Thomas Jenkins aka 'The Wicked Stage' at the San Antonio Current weekly does a portmanteau account of six current productions: Odets' Golden Boy, the musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Durang's Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike, a revival of Inge's Picnic, Grace by Craig Wright, and The Other Place by Sharr White.







The Wicked Stage in NYC

January 2, 2013
By Thomas Jenkins

Well, The Wicked Stage has fallen woefully behind. Yes, I still have theater reports on Madrid and Los Angeles in my hopper, but I plead (as my friends and colleagues know too well) that I really should be writing my #@$#* book. But as the year winds down, I find that I simply have to report on a weekend of binge theater-going in NYC: because of Broadway’s special holiday schedule, I was able to take in six shows in three days–which is insane, even for me!


The upside, though, is that my theater-reportage falls neatly into groups of three. Hands down the best things I saw in NYC were handsome, gorgeously-mounted revivals of Golden Boy and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. While they couldn’t be more different in form—the one, a ’30s drama of disillusion, the other a musical-hall spoof of detective novellas—they were similar in their principal virtue: each nailed exactly the required style for the show. In Golden Boy, Clifford Odets dissects the American Dream through heightened, poetic language that nevertheless captures the grittiness of immigrant America: the plot centers on a second-generation Italian who can either pursue a career as a concert violinist or—somewhat improbably—as a welterweight prizefighter. Yes, the play is schematic: does our hero choose the Old World-ish, vaguely socialist values of harmony and concord or the New World imperative of cutthroat competition—of literally pummeling one’s way to the top? And yes, it’s old-fashioned: three sprawling acts, plenty of secondary characters, and a color palette that runs the gamut from grey to, er, brown. But in Bartlett Sher’s smashing production, it’s also beautiful and sincere and moving.


There’s not much hope that Golden Boy will ever tour: too big, too old-fashioned. But I feel fairly confident that Drood, by triple-threat composer, lyricist, and book-writer Rupert Holmes, will eventually hit the road. Adapted in tongue-in-cheek style from Dickens’ last, unfinished novel, Scott Ellis’ Drood is a delight: a full-out music hall farce with plenty of mugging, terrible puns, glorious singing, and excellent performances by Stephanie J. Block, Will Chase, and even—there is a god in Heaven—Chita Rivera. (In addition, a ridiculous sound gag in the first act extracted from me the heartiest laugh I’ve had in a theater in months.) I suspect this will be the hottest new ticket in NYC until Matilda opens this spring.

Read more at the San Antonio Current on-line . . . .