Upcoming: Salome, Wondrous Strange Players at Renaissance Community Market, May 13 - June

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Wondrous Strange Players proudly present

Oscar Wilde's

Salomé

a story of decadence and obsession on a biblical scale: THE DANCE WORTH HALF A KINGDOM

May 13 - 22, June 10 - 19, Fridays- Sundays, 8 p.m.

6800 WestGate Blvd at William Cannon

Tickets $12 at the door

For any questions call 832-492-8031. www.wondrousstrange.org

Wondrous Strange invites you to a night of debauchery, madness, and doom, served with coffee and dessert. Have a seat on the stage as the Wondrous Strange players enact Oscar Wilde's Salomé, a story of decadence and obsession. Witness the macabre tale of Salomé and Iokannon unfold, and behold the infamous Dance of the Seven Veils, with its monstrous consequences!

I WILL KISS THY MOUTH, IOKANNON

Director Casey Allen, a laid-back poet with charm that borders on the supernatural, calmly steers his actors through beautifully chaotic moments of the story while playing an intimidating Iokanaan. Cristl Climans returns in the title role of the beautiful and dangerous Salomé herself. Christopher Harris takes on the role of the loathsome and slimy King Herod while Sabrina Tarbutton rolls her eyes at him as his wife Herodias. A charmingly drunken Tigellinas is played by Julio Mella while Steven Brandt brings a dry humor and dapper air to King Herod’s bodyguard. Travis Doherty, playing the Young Syrian, and Ksynia Hoover, playing the Page, joined the cast for Richard III and proudly returns in Wondrous Strange’s production of Salomé.

Upcoming: Richard III, Wondrous Strange Players, extended at Community Renaissance Market, April 8 - 17

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“Getcha hat, we’re goin to da theater” Come and join us in a world of murder and mayhem.

The Wondrous Strange Players

present

William Shakespeare’s

Richard III

April 8th, 9th, 10th, and 15th, 16th, & 17th. Show times are at 8:00 pm, seating begins 7:30.

presented at The Community Renaissance Marketplace Theater

6800 Westgate Blvd. at the corner of William Cannon (click for map)

Julio Mella directs this infamous play in the style of ‘Film Noir’. Where mobsters are the lords of the city. When guns were heaters and women were dames.

Christopher Harris portrays the treacherous Buckingham. Casey Allan as the newly delivered Hastings. Sabrina Tarbutton takes on the role of Elizabeth, the Don’s wife. Steven Brandt is double cast as Don Edward and Stanley. Christl Climans as the beautiful Lady Anne, and Ksynia Hoover as Margaret the prophetess.

Come and find out what happens when William Shakespeare and Mario Puzzo meet for drinks at Bogie’s joint. At $8 per head, it’s ‘an offer you can’t refuse’.

Click to read ALT's review of the 2009 staging

Upcoming: Richard III, Wonderous Strange Players at Community Renaissance Market, March 11 - 19

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“Oh day and night, but this is Wondrous Strange”

The Wonderous Strange Players, formerly of the Austin Drama Club, present

Richard III

by William Shakespeare

directed again by Julio Mella

March 11 - 13 and 18-19

Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m.

Community Renaissance Market, 6800 Westgate Blvd (click for map from Yelp.com)

(APPLE users: can't see the video? Click here to see it at Veoh.com -- prefaced by an advertisement)

Director Julio Mella also takes the title role. This happens often with these players. The guy with the biggest role directs the whole play. That's how Shakespeare did it and they rarely mess with a winning formula. Julio Mella was a core member of Austin Drama Club from its first show in November of '06. The company produced his Richard III a few years back and Julio has been gung ho to do it again for a while now. He takes his inspiration for this repertory production from his love of gangster movies about the time of Al Capone and prohibition. Look for the actors to carry tommy guns as they chop down their enemies in a ill-fated rise to power. Richard is a bad man. You won't believe some of the things this guy does.

Christopher Harris and Casey Allen return from the old cast. They are joined by company members Steven Brandt, Sabrina Tarbutton, and Kevin Karowski. Megan Berry and Chrstyl Climans join the cast for their first show with the Players.

See the video above or at Austindramaclub.com but remember that the company has been modified and the dates are new. The show opens very quickly on March 11,12,13 and 18,19,20 in the comfortable new venue at The Community Renaissance Market at 6800 Westgate Blvd in south Austin. Cash only at the door. $8 gets you in. Seating begins 7: 30 p.m.

Upcoming: Julius Caesar, Austin Drama Club, September 17 - October 3

Received directly from Japhy Fernandes and Austin Drama Club:

Welcome to the toga party!

Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare will blow your mind. Its plays Sept 17th through Oct. 3rd on Fri, Sat,and Sunday nights at 8 pm. Opening weekend is free for any who arrives wearing a toga!

Come to our country location between Oak Hill and Dripping Springs off Fitzhugh Rd @ 12345 Pauls Valley Rd (click for map). We have a big sign up out there. It's easy to find and there is plenty of parking.

But you may ask yourself, "Why would I possibly want to go see a long Shakepeare play about some old dudes. I mean the last time I went and saw a Shakespeare play i was bored out of my freaking mind!"

It's true. Plenty of boring ass Shakespeare plays can and will be seen. They do exist out there some where. You can have a great cast, stunning scenery, in a great comfortable location and still a production can be a total flop. "How is that possible?" you might ask. If a director takes away an actor's freedom and liberty or if a director rejects the actors imagination and vision, then a play can turn into a load of bullcrap and you cant sell bullcrap even if you put a pretty ribbon on it. When you come see Julius Caesar you won't be disappointed at the end of the night or we'll give you your money back and free video from the gift shop! You should just prepare to have your mind blown!

Who needs to see Julius Caesar? Lawyers! and Legal eagles! Debate team captains and would be politicians. Lovers of the Republic and Roman historians, Those who seek to preserve the English language and those that would wish to learn it. And of course, actors who are wise enough to come study the great thespians of their age so they borrow tricks and riffs.

If your going on a first date it should be to this play. Shakespeare makes a great first date cause you don't have to talk to each other that much but at the end of the evening you will have shared an epic experience, like watching the NBA playoffs or the Daytona 500. You'll never forget it.

The Austin Drama Club is also the perfect place to learn new catch phrases like "You must needs." "You must needs clean your room. You must needs take a bath. You must needs brush your teeth." And new ways to say good-bye like "Farewell and adieu" or "Go! But do it quickly" or my personal favorite, "Get thee gone. We will hear ourselves again tomorrow."

Forget about your credit score and start thinking about your IQ score because it's bound to rise after a night of theatre.

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare is co-directed by Christopher Harris and Casey Allen.... who each take lead roles. They are joined by Julio Mella, Sabrina Taributton, Steven Brandt, Bobby Dean, Sarah England, and Java Blume.

I took these promo photos last night and I'll be doing lights and sets for the production and it is my extreme pleasure to do so. Its been a privilege to stand back and watch these top guns of the Austin Drama Club put Julius up in record time with poise and grace and love.

Best wishes,
Japhy Fernandes...artistic director...Austin Drama Club

Lysistrata, Chaotic Theatre Company at City Theatre, May 28 - June 6

Lysistrata is a surprise in the compact canon of Greek drama. It's Aristophanes' clever satire of two usually unassociated aspects of manliness -- the male as warrior and the male as lover. Swordsmen in each case, although of quite different aspect.

There's a historical context of great seriousness to it involving wars between Greek city states in B.C. 413. That may partly explain why this text was awarded only third place in the theatrical competition that year. That background has dropped away in the 2500 years since that time, and Lysistrata stands -- erect -- on its own merciless mockery of the awkward aspects of human lust. Let's face it -- an aroused man is a bizarre sight, with his manly pride and attention concentrated in a yearning member, usually hidden. Nothing is more urgent for him that the business immediately at hand -- and if there were only some way to take him firmly near the short and curlies, one could lead him just about anywhere.

The Chaotic Theatre Company, established in 2009, has taken on familiar classics with the evident aim of giving them distinctive interpretations. Their Alice! was a psychotic adventure in the wonderland of an institute for the insane and their Midsummer Night's Dream was an effective although unadorned version of that familiar Shakespeare text, assisted by a guitar band.

Their Lysistrata is an intriguing two-speed interpretation. The thesis -- never really exploited or completely explained -- is that the events we are witnessing take place in some undefined future time. The company combines an anonymous but intact translation of Aristophanes' mocking, often ribald text with monologue commentaries delivered by individual actors. Jenny Lavery, Aja McMillan, Elexia Lowe and Donovan McCallum reflect on our culture's commercialisation of sexual themes, speak of uneasy feelings about sexual self images and seek to define manliness and womanliness. This additional material is credited in the program to them and to director Michael Floyd, whose program notes evoke the same themes.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Oedipus Rex, Austin Drama Club, January 14 - 30

UPDATE: review by webmaster, www.groups.yahoo.com/group/theatreaustin, January 21

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Out with the old and in with the new.....

AUSTIN DRAMA CLUB
offers up

OEDIPUS REX


Oedipus Rex is a Greek tragedy from back in the time of The 300 Spartans and Alexander the Great. It was a time before the Romans and gladiators. It was a simple time when bad children were taken out of the city and left in the middle of nowhere for someone else to find and raise.

The story is a rags-to-riches to stabbing-out-your-own-eyeballs kind of thriller.

Most of the cast returns from the '08 production, including Julio Mella as Creon, Jennifer Fielding as Jocasta and Erin Jo Montanna as Chorus. Japhy Fernandes joins the cast as the messenger, and coffeehouse poet Java jumps in as the shepherd. Kat Eason bellies up to the project as the the prophetess. Ashley is in it, too!

Erin Jo re -directs the show with a vision setting the characters and the story in the land of hippies and flower power. She wants everybody to have their fair share of the peace. Look for more comic relief than you might expect in a story of incest and mistaken identity.

The show opens January 14 and runs three weekends on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. For more details, email Japhyfernandes@live.com To see pictures from other Austin Drama Club productions visit the ADC Myspace page.

Hamlet, Austin Drama Club, December 10 - January 2

Going to an Austin Drama Club production is like Alice's falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Their venue is a house just off E. 7th Street in Austin, Texas, and you enter through a scruffy back yard surrounded by a chain link fence. When my son and I arrived, Jennifer Fielding was standing by the gate on back yard duty. Her question was, "Have you been here before?"

It wasn't a speakeasy challenge question, but rather an offer of guidance. Finding one's way into the theatre space isn't easy the first time, for that small house has been converted with curtains and a miscellany of improvised, tiered seating into a 25-seat ad hoc theatre. Sightlines are so constrained that three closed-circuit televisions offer alternative views into the corners of the playing space. Lighting consists of inexpensive floorlamps and wall-mounted goosenecks wrapped with aluminum foil and masked with gels in deep red and blue.

You could call it underground theatre, except that it isn't underground. Japhy and Ellen Fernandes and friends are more of a cult, one that is dedicated to dark and somewhat deranged productions of the classics, each done on half a shoestring. Their output is impressive. In 2009 they filled out Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays with three-week runs of Talk Radio, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Fool for Love, Henry V, The Wizard of Oz, Richard III, After the Fall and now, again, Hamlet, their fifth presentation in three years of the epic of the melancholy Dane.

Under Japhy's direction, this is a six-person Hamlet, edited down for a two-hour staging that includes two ten-minute intermissions. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern disappear -- as they did in Laurence Olivier's 1948 version. Also gone are Fortinbras and the gravedigger, much to my disappointment. What remains is a quirky Freudian psychodrama in which Shakespeare's language shines fitfully out of the dark.

The character transformations are often striking and often inexplicable. For example, Rob Novak's Hamlet dresses in white tights and short dark tunic but sports a Tyrolean hat and an ice ax, as if old Europe had somehow slipped in space and time. Casey Allen as Leartes (sic) looks like one of the three musketeers. Although Christopher Harris proved himself an articulate and focused actor in their previous Macbeth, here plays Horatio as a dimwit with a pistol.

The favor that Kat Eason as a juicy Ophelia in tight bustier seeks to return to Hamlet is a Playboy magazine with centerfold deliberately unfolded. The Player King phones in his performance -- literally -- and The Mousetrap is an eerie black-and-white pantomime on the television sets. Julio Mella's Polonius shuffles and mumbles. When Hamlet skewers him through the arras, neither Hamlet nor Gertrude investigates the identity of the corpse. After Hamlet berates her, Ellen Fernandes as Gertrude responds with scornful laughter when her son sees the Ghost.

Playing Claudius, director Japhy Fernandes applies an appropriately theatrical demeanor and uses impressive tone and phrasing, although in an occasionally flutey voice. The strength of his personalization of the confused king carries over the other actors like a big clear-channel radio transmitter dominating other signals.

The cast surprises us with the entirely unexpected and unforeshadowed means of Ophelia's demise, a plot development that suggests a rich and enigmatic undertext. There's madness in this Denmark, but Hamlet isn't the lunatic.

The Fernandes couple and friends are waving torches in a menacing darkness. There's potential treasure there, but unfortunately it is never fully revealed. If you can bear with ambiguity, you'll take away some food for thought. And perhaps you'll develop a taste for alt-Shakespeare.

Click to view ADC Hamlet slideshow on MySpace

Ongoing: Salomé by Oscar Wilde, Austin Drama Club, November 5 - 21

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Hello Theatre Fans,
The Austin Drama Club welcomes you to come enjoy the underground biblical hit from so long ago......

Salomé
by Oscar Wilde
November 5 - 21, Thursdays - Saturdays, 8 p.m.
Austin Drama Club

Do you remember the story about the John the Baptist, the guy who gave Jesus the idea to dunk heads under water as a sign of spiritual re-birth? Do you remember how John the Baptist met his maker and why? It had to do with one hot, lit babe called Salomé who because of her pervert of a dad, King Herod, does a little dance and gets what she wants tonight as the moon turns a bloody red.

Back in the day Oscar Wilde was the bomb playwright. His plays stand the test of time and most are of the light, farcical nature. Salomé was his private play for close friends and those he could trust with secrets. Oscar later did some time in a brutal English prison for confessing his gentle disposition and his weakness for young men. Up until then had been seen in the best of society and had adapted quite well. Wit and play writing were the focus of his life and he had no interest in political martyrdom.

Salomé was first performed by the Austin Drama Club in August of 08. The vision for the show belongs to poet Casey Allen who returns as director with most of the original cast. Casey turns King Herod's bash into a costume party where Herod (Christopher Harris) comes as Elvis. Casey plays John, the doomed prophet. Erin Jo E. is his angry wife. Kat Eason returns as their daughter Salomé with a dance of the 7 veils not to be missed.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Ongoing: After The Fall, Austin Drama Club,

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Upcoming at the Austin Drama Club

After The Fall

by Arthur Miller
Sept 17 through Oct 3, Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m.
japhyfernandes@live.com for details and location

Arthur Miller? Why does that ring a bell? He wrote Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and All My Sons which still get done on a regular basis around the country. But what do you know about the playwright himself? Tangled in the McCarthy red scare of the 50s, he tangled himself in several relationships with very different types of woman. You may remember one of the gals as Norma Jean.

Some names may have changed to protect the guilty but After The Fall is still as austobiographical as it gets.

Come peek inside the life of the man who gave us these great plays. A long drama with three intermissions ....

Read More at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Richard III, Austin Drama Club, July 30 - August 22

He was standing at the gate when I walked up. East 7th and Concho. This looked like the place.

"Is this where the play is?"

He looked me over.

"Yeah. Go ahead. The house is open."

Yes, it was open. And it was a house. Dark inside, with rough fabric curtains hanging between the entry and the kitchen, and then between the kitchen and the living area. Cooler this time, with an air conditioner laboring away in the depths of the room. Singly or in couples, the audience gathered. Friendly enough. Waiting, though. Quietly murmuring.

The lights dimmed, a curtain moved aside. Barely visible in the low light, a man in a scruffy suit stood there, then lurched forward toward us, into the playing space.

"Now is the winter of our discontent. . . ."

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Richard III, Austin Drama Club, July 30 - August 22

UPDATE: Review by ALT, August 16




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Austin Drama Club presents

Richard III

by William Shakespeare
July 30 through Aug 22
Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m.
Austin Drama Club is in the house at the corner of 7th St. East and Concho.

Richard III is directed by Julio Mella, a core member since our first production of Henry V in the winter of '06. Here Julio directs for the first time and takes the title role. His vision for the play takes its inspiration from the Mafia spirit of Mario Puzzo's Godfather books and from the black and white gangster movies from the 1930s - 1950s. ADC expects that this production will inspire more people to come see this classic that gives us some great lines including, "My kingdom for a horse!"

Julio is joined by several Austin Drama Club vets --

Jennifer Fielding (the Witch in The Wizard of Oz)

Jessie Satura joined our company as uncle Exter in our last production of Henry V. He is from that fine Wimberly acting tradition.

Casey Allen, who will direct and star in our upcoming encore production of Oscar Wilde's Salomé. Casey has played Romeo and several supporting roles along the way since '06.

Christopher Harris is our lead in Titus Andronicus and Salomé. He played Antonio in The Merchant of Venice and Horatio in our 4 productions of Hamlet.

Erin Jo Enochs was the the star of our production of Oedipus. She played Shylock's wife in The Merchant of Venice and Desdemona in Othello.

Richard Bateman is a magician and story teller who joins the cast for his first show with Austin Drama Club. Look for him to perform his show here later this fall.

Japhy Fernandes does the lights and sets with help from his wife Ellen Fernandes.

Reservations available via e-mail to japhyfernandes@live.com .