Alice in Wonderland, Scottish Rite Children's Theatre, February 5 - 28

Macey Mayfield with her china doll good looks and silvery little voice is a lovely match for the imaginary Alice whom Lewis Carroll sent off to Wonderland.

Children's theatre in the style of the Scottish Rite Children's Theatre requires of actors a special willingness and ability. The actors have their audience just two steps away, on mats spread in the wide open space at the center of the theatre.

SRCT scripts pretty much banish the fourth wall, as well, and engage the kids in question and answer. Despite the imaginary "bottom glue" applied pre-show at the chirpy urging of a couple of cast members, the 4 - 8 year-old-crowd is a pretty unpredictable bunch. The little ones might get up and wander around and the older ones might think it's cute to sass back to the actors.

I enjoyed a preview show of Alice in Wonderland, even though the young audience wasn't really numerous enough to spark the participatory dynamic the actors were promoting. Once those bottoms were in place, Macey came forward unobtrusively and knelt primly at the front of the kid's area, starting as a member of the audience. Mrs Crabby-Pants the teacher (Corley Pillsbury) came on with the officious strut and patronizing sweetness of a rotten elementary school teacher, and suddenly we were all back in grade school. After some admonitory dialogue, she told Alice to come up and tell us the story of the dream that she'd had. And we were off to Wonderland.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Kill Will at Blue Theatre, January 20, 24, 29, Februay 1

There's no Shakespeare in it, but it's certainly full of sound and fury. Signifying. . . .?

Think of a crime caper that takes place in the sleazy east London, with a dose of pulp detective attitude, nasty obsession with lowlife violence, guns and Irish prolixity.

Austin Alexander plays the lead in his own creation. Mickey Nichols is a guy in a bad way, roughed up in turn by black-leather gangster William Slate, by American cocaine middleman Sid the Sailor, and by Boris "McBoo," a fixer for the invisible aristocrat from whom Mickey has stolen lots of old stuff, including a diary that a museum curator has authenticated as dating from Shakespeare's time. His not-too-bright buddy Rory Townes (Andrew Butler) tries to carry out instructions but keeps screwing up.

Barman Patty O'Reilly is Mickey's only friend. I kept waiting for Patty to turn up and save the day for our boy Mickey, but co-director Nathan Osborne, who played Patty, was too busy elsewhere in the plot. Osborne had three of the prime roles -- he also played tough guy Sid and the lonely, loquacious security officer at the railroad station who greeted and engaged the bad guys swarming around the empty locker supposed to hold the diary. He differentiated nicely among the characters he played.

One demonstrable disadvantage of playing the lead and directing oneself: in his scenes with barman O'Reilly, Austin Alexander spent a lot of time upstaging himself -- standing turned away from the audience and speaking upstage toward the bar.

Black-hatted Justin Scalise does a nice foul-mouthed snarl as William Slate.

That Russian gangster in sunglasses, Boris, and his lady Nikita (played by Devyn Ray, above) were about as nutty in this plot as their counterparts in the old Rocky and Bulwinkle show. Sesar Sandoval was scary, though. He's credited for the fight choreography, and he had a lot to do. Mickey gets his butt, sides, face and other parts kicked and beaten again and again. Toward the end there's even an improbable sword fight between Mickey and museum curator Ophelia Flinn (played by Kathleen Fletcher). This is pretty impressive stage violence, but the effect is lessened by the ability of these fantasy characters to bounce back from beatings fast enough to fast talk.

Expect lots of gun shots and lots of smoking (watching those blue clouds swirl against the black backdrop at the Blue Theatre, I became keenly aware of the expression "second hand smoke").

The finale? Think Jacobean revenge tragedy. I counted five corpses onstage at the last scene with two more characters rapidly approaching extinction.

The company plays it all with sufficient seriousness for us to go along. If you get a guilty thrill out of Quentin Tarrantino, James Ellroy or Mickey Spillane, here you go!

Review by Joey Seiler on Statesman's Austin360, January 27

Review by Elizabeth Cobbe, Austin Chronicle of January 30