Upcoming: Night of the Living Dead, Weird City Theatre Company at Dougherty Arts Center, October 13 - 29

Received directly:

presents

George Romero's

Night of the Living Dead

October 13 - October 29, Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.

Dougherty Arts Center 1110 Barton Springs Rd (click for map)

Thursday Nights are “Pay What You Wish” at the door. For all other performances, tickets are $20.00 for adults and $15.00 for seniors and students (with ID), and group rates are available. Tickets can be purchased at our website, www.weirdcitytheatre.com.

*There is a limited number of tickets available for each performance and reservations are highly encouraged.*

Weird City Theatre Company announces the premiere of the audience favorite Night of the Living Dead, newly adapted & directed by WCT Artistic Director, John F. Carroll. George Romero & John Russo's classic zombie film is brought back from the dead in a new adaptation of WCT's 2008 hit [click for ALT review of November 7, 2008]. The cast includes WCT familiar faces Patti Neff-Tiven, Kevin Gouldthorpe, Michael Covey, Sarah Covey, Emily Hampton, LeRoy Beck, Jenni Bauer, Nick Orzech, Robert Berry, Bethany Harbaugh,Chris Romani, Javier Smith, Justin Hampton, and introducing Elisabeth Giminiani.


Weird City Theatre's mission is to encourage the growth of the artist and represent the uniqueness and vitality of Austin through re-envisioned classics and original works. Keeping a child-like sense of play, we focus on the process of the actor and we are playing our part to keep Austin weird! Weird City Theatre is a sponsored project of the Greater Austin Creative Alliance, a nonprofit performing arts service organization.

Upcoming: A Teenager's Guide to Love, musical by Weird City Theatre Company at Dougherty Arts Center, May 54 - 21

Received directly:

announces the world premiere of

A Teenagers Guide to Love

A 50's Musical Parody

May 5 - 21, 2011 at the Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Road (click for map)

Performances are Thursday through Saturday nights at 8 p.m.

Thursday Nights are “Pay What You Wish” at the door. For all other performances, tickets are $15.00 for adults and $12.00 for children, seniors and students (with ID), and group rates are available. Advanced tickets can be purchased at our website, www.weirdcitytheatre.com.

Weird City Theatre Company announces the world premiere of A Teenagers Guide to Love, written & directed by WCT Managing Director, Patti Neff-Tiven. A Teenagers Guide is a musical parody of 50's – 60's educational films- How Do You Choose a Date? How Much Affection? Who Wrote the Book of Love?

These questions and more will be explored in an evening of kitschy, song-filled fun Our trusty narrator John F. Carroll guides us through the romantic pitfalls of our teen couple played by Sarah Griffin-Covey and Justin Hampton. With WCT company members Kevin Gouldthorpe, Jenni Bauer, Bethany Harbaugh & Robert Berry. The band includes Seth Tiven (guitarist- Dumptruck, Promise Breakers), Justin Bankston (bassist- Promise Breakers, The Paper South) and Donnie Poston (drummer- Dumptruck, Dunebuggy)

Weird City Theatre's mission is to encourage the growth of the artist and represent the uniqueness and vitality of Austin through re-envisioned classics and original works. Keeping a child-like sense of play, we focus on the process of the actor and we are playing our part to keep Austin weird!

Weird City Theatre is a sponsored project of the Greater Austin Creative Alliance, a nonprofit performing arts service organization.

Alvida and the Airship Pirates, Weird City Theatre Company

I was on the last airship with Alvida out of Weird City on March 12 and as sometimeshappens with scribes errant, I got too busy and distracted to send her, author John Carroll and their band of adventures a proper bread-and-butter note.

Your mother may have admonished you about good manners, as does the mother of my children. It’s never too late, although sometimes it’s too late to do much good. I prefer the warm glow of virtue associated with writing the first review to hit the electronic doorstep, for there’s the cyberghost of a chance that it’ll attract another spectator. Or, to use the Britishism entirely appropriate to this steampunk adventure, it’ll put an additional bum on the seat.

The Weird citizens like to play with their plays. With this script John gave colleague Patti Teff-Niven as the eponymous Alvida a hand into chick adventure with the warm and vivacious Bridget Farias as her best buddy. The Alvida stage at the familiar imagination station of the Dougherty Arts Center featured a fine crew of female troopers on both sides as well as Weird regulars Kevin Gouldthorpe and Robert Berry.

I confess that I don’t know much about steampunk, a curious genre that seems half Victorian and half sci-fi, but I’ve noticed that it’s capturing a lot of imagination these days. Earlier this week, while I was checking background for the steampunk Tempest that Frank Benge is putting together for the Sam Bass Community Theatre in Round Rock, I found that there’s even a steampunk Shakespeare website encouraging submissions of bard-derived steampunk adventures. That invitational tournament is open until the end of May.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .

Upcoming: Fan-Produced webseries 'Dark Shadows,' beginning in January 2011

Received directly:

Members of Austin's Weird City Theatre Company are producing

a weekly web series tribute to ABC's camp classic daytime serial "Dark Shadows" (1967-1971). Episodes will be available from January, 2011.

SCTC artistic director John Carroll will be appearing as vampire Barnabas Collins (image, above, by Russell Minton). The cast is drawn largely from actors who have appeared in previous WCTC productions in Austin, including Russell Minton, Patti Neff-Tiven, Kevin Gouldthorpe, and John W. Smith.

Full information about their non-commercial fan tribute series is available at their website Dark Shadows: The Web Series. Participants invite financial contributions via the indigogo website.

Curse of the House of Usher, Weird City Theatre Company, February 18 - 28

Weird City Theatre Company specializes in the creepy, the spooky and the haunting. Their sense of "weird" shares something with the scruffy, quirky laid-back attitude of the now clichéd slogan "Keep Austin Weird," in that they are working on a shoestring and a vision. But they are really embracing a different notion of Austin creativity: the idea of translating otherworldly out-of-copyright works into evening séances to give us suspense, a shiver and a release.

Patti Neff-Tiven's set and Philip B. Richard's lighting provide plenty of atmosphere. That's particularly important for a piece in which Poe immediately establishes the crumbling Usher mansion as a character in its own right. In the first paragraph of the short story as he arrives on the scene, the unnamed narrator stops to examine that manse:

What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble. [. . . ] I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Poe's language goes on like that through his twenty atmospheric pages, as the narrator seeks to renew the childhood friendship and draw Roderick Usher from black depression and acutely painful reactions to sound and sensation.

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

Nosferatu, Weird City Theatre Company at Dougherty Arts Center, October 22 - November 1

If you're looking for dark and spooky, then Weird City Theatre Company has got dark and spooky for you, down at the Dougherty Arts Center for the Thursday to Sunday Halloween weekend.

These connoisseurs of the unnerving have blended Bram Stoker's Dracula and F.W. Murnau's unauthorized German expressionist knock-off of the novel for a short, satisfying evening of the eerie.

You could view the 84-minute video of Murnau's 1922 silent film as preserved by the Cinemathèque française with an orchestral soundtrack either at Google video or at YouTube, but it may well be more fun to see Weird City reincarnate both the characters and the ghosts of those actors now long dead and gone.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Weird City Theatre Company, July 16 - 26

Here's what I like about John Carroll and the Weird City Theatre Company: they have a sense of fun that's irreverent and modern, but they take their drama seriously.

Necessarily low-rent but not sloppy, the company performs with energy, confidence, and an appreciation for the text, whatever it might be. They have a taste for pop -- we've seen an adaptation of Night of the Living Dead, a faithful production of William Gillette's Sherlock Holmes, and around Halloween we'll get their take on Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau's 1921 unathorized film version of Dracula.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals from 1775 is pop of a different sort. Sheridan, born into a theatrical family and married for love. The success at Covent Garden of this, his first play, spurred him to buy out Garrick's Drury Lane and subsequently to run successfully for Parliament. It's a comedy of manners in which Jack, an artistocratic military officer, disguises his well born origins in order to court Miss Lydia Languish, a dizzy heiress beguiled by popular novels and intent on forfeiting her ample trust fund by marrying poor, for love.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .