New images for Upcoming: That Time of Year, Sam Bass Community Theatre, Round Rock, November 27 - December 19

Rehearsal photos for That Time of Year, received directly from the Sam Bass Community Theatre.

A musical revue of 25 all-original Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year's songs that captures the warmth and humor of this unique interfaith holiday season. The show offers a wide variety of material, running the musical gamut from show tunes to rock, blues and jazz. The songs, with lyrics by the ASCAP award-winning team of Laurence Holzman & Felicia Needleman, and music by seven different composers, range from funny, upbeat group numbers, highlighting the joys and anxieties of the holiday season, to beautiful, touching ballads about the meaning behind both holidays.

See "upcoming" announcement for performance times and more information.

View more images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: That Time of Year, Sam Bass Community Theatre, Round Rock, November 27 - December 19

Received directly:

That Time of the Year
Directed by David Dunlap
Sam Bass Community Theatre, Round Rock

Friday November 27 through Saturday, December 19. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings at 8:00 p.m.
Sunday matinees at 2:00 pm.
Champagne gala follows the opening night performance on November 27.

A musical revue of 25 all-original Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year's songs that captures the warmth and humor of this unique interfaith holiday season. The show offers a wide variety of material, running the musical gamut from show tunes to rock, blues and jazz. The songs, with lyrics by the ASCAP award-winning team of Laurence Holzman & Felicia Needleman, and music by seven different composers, range from funny, upbeat group numbers, highlighting the joys and anxieties of the holiday season, to beautiful, touching ballads about the meaning behind both holidays.

Read more and view images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Murdered to Death, Sam Bass Community Theatre, Round Rock, September 18 - October 10

Peter Gordon's script of Murdered to Death is a loving send-up of the British "whodunit" and in particular of Agatha Christie's drawing room murder mysteries.

Dame Agatha's novels still sell vigorously today. Not so much in the United States, where we're more likely to encounter them at the public library or at used book sales along with discarded piles of Readers' Digest condensed books. But the French, the Germans, and -- presumably -- the British consume lots of Christie.

That tiny authoress, born in 1890 and died in 1976, has sold four billion copies of her novels to date, according to Wikipedia. Only the Bible has outsold her. She's the most translated author of all time, according to UNESCO, outsold only by the collective corporate output of Walt Disney. Her novels have appeared in 56 languages.

Perhaps because she constructed her tidy little puzzles in imagined comfortable settings stereotypical of the British landed gentry and bourgeoisie. Perhaps because she contrasted the elaborate politeness and bloodless deference of the educated English with their secret, bloody passions. Perhaps because in that world,crimes and mysteries were generally elucidated and the guilty were ususally apprehended by the equally polite and deferential forces of order, guided almost always by an inspired amateur.

It's a familiar scene, that 1930s tranquility sealed up in our imaginations, safe from the depredations of the wider world. The tidy universe of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot is such a part of English literary tradition that it's ripe for ribbing and interpretation.

Playwright Peter Morgan happily employs Christie's devices and character types, and the cast at the Sam Bass Community Theatre plays them with due respect -- in fact, the more absurd the goings on, the more deadpan is the humor. And it's very amusing, indeed.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Sordid Lives, Sam Bass Community Theatre, May 15 - June 6

Round Rock's Sam Bass Community Theatre isn't a formal repertory company. It's a circle of players, techs and supporters who gather for six or seven productions a year in the plain playing space that was formerly a Union Pacific depot.

As you follow the Sam Bass season, you have the pleasure of seeing familiar faces reappear in new guises and disguises. They're friendly folk; the cast always gathers outside the theatre to greet their departing public. As I was driving home afterwards, there popped into my mind all unbidden the scene in which Hamlet expresses his pleasure at re-encountering the band of traveling players.

The final production of the season is set in Winters, Texas. That's a town so small that when I found it on Google Maps I had to back out twice before I could orient myself. Winters is smack dab in the middle of the state, in a largely blank area about 20 miles south of Abilene. The inhabitants of Winters might well be considered "people of the land." That is, echoing Mel Brooks' dialogue for Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles: "You know -- morons."

The characters and incidents in Sordid Lives are ridiculous but very funny. We in the audience laugh with good heart at small-town dumbness, morality and immorality -- in fact, with a certain proprietary affection. We're in Texas and we know those stereotypes, folks who are the focus of many a joke.

This is a revenge play. Shores acknowledges that he grew up in the mercilessly parodied town of Winters.

Click to read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Acting Up and Speaking Out, CiCi Barone at Sam Bass Community Theatre, May 1 - 2

Received April 21:

Acting Up and Speaking Out

A One-Woman Show Benefiting the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America

Round Rock, Texas. Alexandra Edgell and Alicia “CiCi” Barone announce Acting Up and Speaking Out, to be performed at Sam Bass Community Theatre on Friday May 1st and Saturday May 2nd. This one-woman show benefits the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA).

Alex tells her story and that of her longtime friend CiCi on her blog website http://www.my13miles.com.

There is no cure for Crohn’s. A cure requires research and research requires funding. On July 19th, Alex will join her team to run the Napa to Sonoma Wine Country Half Marathon to raise awareness. Her goal for the run is $5000.

As a part of the fund-raising effort, the Sam Bass Community Theatre in Round Rock, Texas has scheduled a two-night special performance of Acting Up and Speaking Out featuring CiCi Barone, who has lived with the realities of Crohn’s for the last 11 years. This will be a night of scenes, monologues, and frank conversation about the realities of living with Crohn's and related diseases. All proceeds (100%) from the night will go to benefit the CCFA.

This show will be two nights only with all seats $15.00 at the door. Seating is limited, so please email my13miles@gmail.com to make your reservations.

- - Friday May 1, 2009 - 8:00pm-10:00pm

- - Saturday May 2, 2009 - 8:00pm-10:00pm

Payment can be made at the door with cash or checks (made payable to CCFA). We are also able to accept most major credit cards via a donation form that will be sent in to CCFA for processing after the event.

The Shadow Box, North by Northwest Theatre Company at City Theatre, February 6 - 22

Now, here is a very frightening place -- a hospice somewhere in California, in which a disembodied therapist with a warm but neutral voice projects himself into your cottage once a day. "How are you feeling? Would you like to tell me about it?" That voice is kind, as calmly reflective and enigmatic as a mirror, and it offers not the slightest shred of hope or counsel.

You look good, you might have a few physical twinges but you're not bed-ridden, everything is provided for your comfort. And you're left to get on with your dying. Reconciling yourself with the end of the road and with anger, consternation, or despair.

Michael Christofer's 1977 play is three in one, cutting together stories of Joe the middle class family man (David Dunlap), Brian the wordy, distracted professor (Robert Salas) and Felicity, an ancient woman who refuses to die because she imagines that a dead daughter will be returning soon (Anne Putnam). This choice of characters by Christofer might seem formulaic, a sort of diversity in a platoon on its way to an encounter with Death the enemy, but the impressive quality of the acting by this cast gives life and substance to them.

Director Kyle Evans and the North by Northwest cast move the action smoothly through an abstract set. We accept the eerie situation of small but well-furnished cottages wired up for surveillance, the inexplicable absence of concern about the justification, administration or finances of it all, and the inhabitants' complete blindness to one another. This is death by stare-down in a bare arena, with each inhabitant and companions face to face with the void.

For Christofer it is indeed the void, or at least the unknown. None of these characters has the help or crutch of faith or philosophy. Middle class Joe is fretful about the failure of wife Maggie (Aleta Garcia) to inform son Steve (Kenton Miscoe) of the unnamed disease, and he obsessively relives lost family life. Professor Brian churns out poetry and novels that he cheerfully acknowledges as completely without merit, and he embraces both his visiting wanton ex-wife (Michelle Cheney) and his attendant friend Mark, a male hustler whom he befriended in San Francisco (David Butts). Ancient Felicity is sour and angry when coherent but asleep or in a dream world most of the time, accompanied by her despairing daughter Agnes (Miriam Rubin).

The women companions of this piece are even more striking than the dying principals. Aleta Garcia as Joe's wife Maggie vibrates with anxiety and naked concern for him. Michelle Cheney is raucously self-dismissive, an unapologetic, bejewelled and bespangled devotee of impulse.








As Agnes, the dutiful daughter, Miriam Rubin (right) delivers a devastating performance, one of range and subtle intensity. Though she is largely silent in the early scenes, Agnes is the pivot of the play. She is the only family member to dialogue with the ghostly administration of this padded hell. For the first and only time the Interviewer (Philip Cole) appears, seated with her, courteous and attentive. He pulls out of Agnes a confession: in response to her mother's dementia, Agnes has for almost two years been trying to make Felicity happy by fabricating letters from Clare, the dead daughter.

The Interviewer suggests that this charade has kept Felicity clinging to life when she might be expected to let death take its course. Rubin shows Agnes's struggle to understand. Her indecision and her pained emotion in this confrontation and subsequently with her distracted, strong willed mother are elements of a performance to tear your heart out.

The piece rises to an enigmatic finale, as characters situated across the stage transcend their identities, very like a Greek chorus, to speak of losses and of the pains of facing death.

The program says that this piece was "representative of a breakthrough in both matter and subject form" (sic), a comment substantiated to some extent by the Tony and Pulitzer prizes awarded to it. It is not an easy evening and it provides no reassuring answers. It's poignant, disturbing, and ultimately poetic.

Barry Pineo's review in the Austin Chronicle of February 12: "Rubin quietly and believably makes Agnes' agony palpable. Rubin made me feel her pain, and you can't ask for more from an actor than that."