Video Promo: Reefer Madness, the musical, Doctuh Mistuh Productions at Spiderhouse Ballroom and Doughtery Arts Center, June 7 - 30, 2013

A two-minute video promo by Paul Koudouris for the

Doctuh Mistuh Productions

staging of

 

REEFER MADNESS THE MUSICAL

directed by Michael McKelvey

June 7-30, 2013 Ticket Information:
$22 Adults & $15 Students/Seniors at the Door
$20 Advance Sales through brownpapertickets.com (800) 838-3006 or click BPTkts logo

Locations in Austin, Texas:
Spider House Ballroom, 2908 Fruth Street, Austin, Tx http://spiderhousecafe.com June 7-16, June 23 - 30
Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Rd., Austin, Tx June 20 - 22
 

 
Reefer Madness is a musical satire of the 1936 cult film classic Reefer Madness that opened in Los Angeles in 1998. The book and lyrics were written by Kevin Murphy and the music by Dan Studney. Directed by Andy Fickman, it was initially shown at the Hudson Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles and then moved to the New York "Off-Broadway" scene. The show opened Off Broadway on September 15, 2001, and closed shortly thereafter. Showtime made a film version in 2005 starring Kristen Bell, Steven Weber, Neve Cambell and Alan Cumming.

ABOUT DOCTUH MISTUH PRODUCTIONS DM Productions made its debut on the Austin Theatre scene in October 2009 with its hit, EVIL DEAD, THE MUSICAL (nominated by the Austin Critics’ Table for Outstanding Production of a Musical). The group has since produced two more productions, COMPANY (a benefit for the Breast Cancer Resource Center) and last summer’s BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON (recipient of three B. Iden Payne Awards). Doctuh Mistuh Productions mission is to produce Off-Broadway works with an edge and landmark musicals which may be unfamiliar to Austin audiences.

REEFER MADNESS, THE MUSICAL, Doctuh Mistuh Productions at Spider House Ballroom and Dougherty Arts Center, June 7 - 30, 2013

presents


REEFER MADNESS THE MUSICAL

June 7-30, 2013

Ticket Information:
$22 Adults & $15
 Students/Seniors at the Door$20 

Advance Sales through brownpapertickets.com (800) 838-3006 or click BPTkts logo (as of May 1)




Locations in Austin, Texas:
Spider House Ballroom, 2908 Fruth Street, Austin, Tx http://spiderhousecafe.com June 7-16, June 23 - 30
Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Rd., Austin, Tx June 20 - 22



Performance Schedule

Friday, June 7 @ 8pm Spider House Ballroom
Saturday, June 8 @ 8pm Spider House Ballroom
Saturday, June 8 @ 12am (Midnight Show) Spider House Ballroom
Sunday, June 9 @ 6pm Spider House Ballroom
Sunday, June 16 @ 6pm Spider House Ballroom
Thursday, June 20 @ 8pm Dougherty Arts Center
Friday, June 21 @ 8pm Dougherty Arts Center
Saturday, June 22 @ 8pm Dougherty Arts Center Sunday, June 23 @ 6pm Spider House Ballroom
Friday, June 28 @ 8pm Spider House Ballroom
Friday, June 28 @ 12am (Midnight Show) Spider House Ballroom
Saturday, June 29 @ 8pm Spider House Ballroom
Saturday, June 29 @ 12am (Midnight Show) Spider House Ballroom
Sunday, June 30 @ 6pm Spider House Ballroom

Reefer Madness is Doctuh Mistuh's 4th production and promises to be the craziest one yet with two venues, an insanely talented cast...and it's about REEFER. We hope you will check it out. To reserve tickets, please click to go to our Purchase Tickets link on the Home Page.

Meet The REEFER MADNESS CAST

Jose Villareal (Lecturer)
Joey Banks (Jimmy)
Sarah Marie Curry (Mary Lane)
Libby Dees-Detling (Mae)
Nathan Brocket (Jack)
Kristi Brawner (Sally)
Chase Brewer (Ralph)
Paul Koudaris (Jesus)
David Ponton (Ensemble)
Brian Loyosa (Ensemble)
Stephen Mercantel (Ensemble)
Sarah Konkel (Ensemble)
Kimberly Wilson (Ensemble)
Kaitlyn Moise (Ensemble)
Lisa Wright (Ensemble)


Meet The Production Team
Michael McKelvey (Stage & Musical Director)
Joe Carpenter (Set Designer)
Glenda Barnes (Costume Designer)
Cameron Allen (Technical Director)
Sam Chesney (Lighting Designer)
Angelica Manez (Production Stage Manager)
Rebecca Robinson (Publicity)
Jennymarie Jemison (Graphics)

The Band
Kyle Sigrest (Keyboard & Conductor)
Trevor Detling (Drums)

Ryan Beavers (Guitar)

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

The Attic Space by Nigel O'Hearn, Palindrome Theatre at the Salvage Vanguard, December 14 - 22

by Michael Meigs


Nigel, this is stupid stuff. There, now I've said it.


You and your friends of Palindrome have made arresting, sometimes astounding art in the three years that you promised yourselves for the experiment after your graduation from the theatre program at St. Ed's. 


You have shown yourself to be an impressive actor and promoter of our dear, beloved and commercially moribund art of live theatre, gathering award nominations and recognition along the way.


You made contacts with some Austin's best in the field, many of them teachers -- Ev Lunning, with whom you worked in the Ar Rude Actors's Equity project of McNeil's A Long Day's Journey into Night directed by Lucien Douglas, and Babs George in that fine Cherry Orchard by Breaking String where appropriately enough you portrayed the eternally yearning and optimistic student Trofimov. 


You were a memorable drifter challenging a stolidly bourgeois Jude Hickey in Albee's At Home at the Zoo, with Robin Grace Thompson as his wife. You crafted a pungent Hedda Gabler last year by reworking someone's literalist pony translation from the original, staged it with Robin successfully here and at the Edinburgh Fringe, and caught the eye of the flattered Norwegians.


Before approaching its three-year expiration date, Palindrome's artists and sometime provocateurs have furnished Austin with fine stagings of classics. I wish I could have seen them all. I missed Babs with Harvey Guion in Arthur Miller's All My Sons last summer, Dario Fo's Accidental Death of An Anarchist, and Sarah Ruhl's Melancholy Play. I did see, and will long remember, Beckett's End Days with Jarrett King, Gabriel Luna and Helyn Rain Messenger.


You've been gracious and forthcoming throughout all of this. I still have a twinge of bad conscience about not recognizing you immediately two years ago when you greeted me in the lobby at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre at the opening night for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, where Babs was Martha and Ev was George. I was glad to get a close-up rehearsal view of the revised Hedda before the departure for Edinburgh last year, and I was flattered to be invited along with other theatre scriveners to last weekend's advance staging for the press of your work The Attic Space, with Babs and Ev. It was a remarkable and unexpected opportunity to mingle briefly before the show with Elizabeth Cobbe of the Austin Chronicle, Jillian Owens and Cate Blouke of the Statesman and newcomer Jeff Davis of www.austin.broadwayworld.com.


The Attic Space seems grossly derivative to me. You've brought your two characters Harold and Harriet together in George Marsolek's claustrophobic and dimly lit attic space that contains the stored detritus of their lives. The dialogue is a similar in style to that of Beckett, full of ellipses and references to shared but unrevealed events and relationships. Harriet is high strung but disconnected; Harold is restrained, patient and long-suffering. She insists on staying in the attic amongst the boxes, trunks and discarded furniture. She's searching for something but doesn't know what that is. Harold urges her to come back downstairs. The dialogue suggests that they feel the suppressed terror of advanced age even though these two actors are plainly in their flourishing middle age.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a rock musical, Doctuh Mistuh Productions, June 7 - July

Doctuh Mistuh Productions

presents

(image via Michael McKelvey)

 Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (a rock musical)

June 7 - July 1, Thursdays - Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m.
special performances on Wed., June 27 at 7:30 pm & Friday, June 29 at 11 pm
at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale (click for map)
Tickets $15-22.  $10 Price Student Rush 30 minutes prior to curtain

Tickets available online via








or by calling (800) 838-3006


From the people who brought you Evil Dead, The Musical -- DM Productions is proud to present the Texas premiere of one of the most talked about musicals in years, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. An exhilarating and white-knuckled look at one of our nation's founding rock stars, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson recreates and reinvents the life of "Old Hickory," from his humble beginnings on the Tennessee frontier to his days as our seventh Commander-in-Chief. It also asks the question, is wanting to have a beer with someone reason enough to elect him? What if he's really, really hot? 


The show portrays Andrew Jackson as an Emo Rock Star and scrutinizes the American politic machine with wit and cynicism.   The theatricality of BBAJ ranges from hard-edge Green Day-like concert to PBS historical recreation to vaudevillian buffoonery.  Nothing is sacred, especially not the rise and fall of the man whom many consider America’s most popular president.  “Populish Yea Yea.” 

The cast features David Gallagher, Haley Smith Montgomery, Jose Villareal, Libby Dees Detling, Aaron Alexander, Rebecca Robinson, Scott Swanson, Sarah Marie Curry, Joey Banks, Eve Sampaga, Stephen Jack, Joel Mercado-See, Nathan Jerkins, David Ponton, Alan Marequiota and Trevor Detling.  

The production staff includes Michael McKelvey (stage & musical director), Ben Wolfe (Assistant Director), Glenda Barnes (costume designer), Joe Carpenter (set designer), Rocker Verastique and Danny Herman (Choreographers) and Erin  Fleming (lighting designer).

About Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson:   Book by Alex Timbers; Music & Lyrics by Michael Friedman. Developed by New York-based experimental company Les Freres Corbusier, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson had workshop productions in August 2006 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and in May 2007 at the New 42nd Street Studios, New York. It premiered in January 2008 in Los Angeles at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, produced by Center Theatre Group. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson made its New York premiere in May 2009 at The Public Theater in New York in a concert version, and returned to run from March through June, 2010.  The show premiered on Broadway at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on October 13, 2010 and ran until January 2, 2011.

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 . . . .

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Zach Scott Theatre, September 17 - October 25

UPDATE: Zach Theatre will hold over The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee through November 8





This show is a charmer. It has the zing of a small scale musical, the familiarity of all those school auditoriums you endured while growing up, the uncertainties of a tournament, the highs of competition, the quips and laughs of improv comedy, and -- unexpectedly -- a second act that resonates with drama and tenderness.

Michael Raiford's set is bright, functional and simple, using the Kleberg Stage's thrust stage as a "cafetorium" in an anonymous middle school in the equally anonymous Putnam County. The unobtrusive background music dates back mostly to the 50's and 60's. Musicians are tucked back in the center alcove and the stage is provided with the appropriately sparse furnishing of folding tables and folding chairs.

The lights don't go down when the show starts. Instead, Jill Blackwood as Rona Lisa Peretti strides around with her impossibly angelic smile and authoritatively friendly manner, speaking in turn to various sections of the audience. We are part of this spectacle. This is a spelling bee finale and we are the friends, family and supporters of a collection of six bright or simply lucky kids. They all have the smarts or at least the unusual mental wiring to be spelling whizzes.

Yes, in the first half of the show four or five audience members will be recruited as contestants to sit with the kids and spell against them. But don't worry -- they've volunteered for the job. You won't be pulled out of your seat and into the spotlight without your consent. Jill Blackwood gives a chirpy introduction each time a speller comes forward and the audience volunteers are subjected to some gentle razzing ("Bill is devoted to the concept that casual Fridays really should be casual!").

Read more and see video at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

The Frog Prince, Scottish Rite Children's Theatre, June 27 - August 2

Concerning children's theatre, let me come clean in the first lines. By the time I was 18 I had performed as a pasha, a pirate and a king for a children's theatre in north Alabama. I was star-struck for life. That particular community children's theatre is entering its 49th season.

The Scottish Rite Children's Theatre (SRCT) is much younger than that but it is much more richly endowed. Established in 2004 through the efforts of the Kelso family, this non-profit institution received from Texas Masons the deed to the historic Turnhalle at 18th and Lavaca. The building was constructed in 1869 for use as a German community center and gymnasium. It served as the site for music events, theatre and opera. The gorgeous scenic backdrops regularly used in today's productions were painted in 1882. An article in the spring, 2007 issue of the magazine of the League of Historic Theatres profiled The SRCT, the history of the Turnhalle, and the Kelsos' approach to children's theatre.

The Frog Prince as adapted by SRCT follows the Kelsos' guidelines. The excited children gather in the wide carpeted space just before the low stage. Andrea Smith as the exuberant Penelope the Party Pooper (a stock character for the SRCT) and Jose Villareal as the King exuberantly greet the audience and tell them what to expect.

"Get up! Get up! Now wave your hands behind you! They're covered with 'bottom glue.," Pat your bottom! Now when you sit down on the floor, you won't be able to move!"

Penelope then instructs parents and other adults to stand, put one hand on the head and the other on the tummy and repeat a pledge. Among other things, we promised to turn off cell phones and not to use flash photography.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .