Images by Nadia Morales for Here's To You by A. John Boulanger, FronteraFest at the Blue Theatre, January 28 - February 5

Received directly or found at FaceBook, images by Nadia Morales for the

presentation of

Here's to You, an old comedy

by A. John Boulanger

FronteraFest 2012 at at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Road

Saturday, January 28 @ 9:15 pm
Wednesday, February 1 @ 9:15 pm
Saturday, February 4 @ 7:15 pm
Sunday, February 5 @ 4:15 pm

Tickets are $8, available on-line through Hyde Park Theatre

Newlyweds Steven and Ellen Gellar pop into a psychic parlor to see what lies ahead for them as husband and wife. Skeptical Steven fears the worst, as eager Ellen awaits the arrival of Madame Orida Mozelle, psychic extraordinaire (and stage star of yesteryear). With each c...ard (and after a few cocktails) Madame O reveals devastating predictions for a marriage that might not last its first night.

Here's to You stars Judd Farris, Kim Adams, and Michelle Cheney as Madame O.

Click to view more images from Imagine That Productions . . . .

Upcoming: Here's to You, Imagine That Productions at FronteraFest, January 28 - February 5

Received notice via Twitter and Facebook:

Here's to you, an old comedy

by A. John Boulanger

FronteraFest 2012 at at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Road

Saturday, January 28 @ 9:15 pm
Wednesday, February 1 @ 9:15 pm
Saturday, February 4 @ 7:15 pm
Sunday, February 5 @ 4:15 pm

Tickets are $8, available on-line through Hyde Park Theatre

Newlyweds Steven and Ellen Gellar pop into a psychic parlor to see what lies ahead for them as husband and wife. Skeptical Steven fears the worst, as eager Ellen awaits the arrival of Madame Orida Mozelle, psychic extraordinaire (and stage star of yesteryear). With each c...ard (and after a few cocktails) Madame O reveals devastating predictions for a marriage that might not last its first night.

Here's to You stars Judd Farris, Kim Adams, and Michelle Cheney as Madame O.

Ghosts, Penfold Theatre Company and Breaking String Theatre Company at Hyde Park Theatre, October 13 - November 5 (ALT Review 2)

by Michael Meigs

The Penfold-Breaking String joint production of Ghosts is a moody, beautiful piece. Its honesty to Ibsen's 1881 text is almost a disadvantage, for among we twentieth-first century chrononauts will be some who find inexplicable and inherently comic the restraint of his language. How quaint not to name the evils: prostitution, syphillis, debauchery, incest, spouse abuse, addiction, wifely duty, madness, social convention, obligatory purity for women, licensed libertinism for men . . . .

By retaining Ibsen's approach of creating in our minds the unnamed spectres which polite company will not name, director Graham Schmidt takes us back to the sharp blacks and whites of brittle European morality of the 19th century. Never mind that in our own day we indulge and are indulged by broad fields of gray and we celebrate the colors of experiment and diversity.

The subtle set designed by Ia Ensterë captures that world, with a sort of spider web of threads along the walls, wrapping the proper 19th century living space in an evocative indefinition. Costuming by Buffy Manners gives visual reinforcement to time and place -- from Mrs. Alving's gown to the opposed masculine visions of Pastor Manders' Norwegian cleric black and Oswald's muted extravagance.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw, Austin Shakespeare at Rollins Theatre, Long Center, February 17 - March 6

Austin Shakespeare's staging of Shaw's Man and Superman at the Rollins Theatre has the pleasures of a long agreeable evening with toffee and cigars. No game of whist or bridge, for the contest here is between Man and Woman, or, to wax a bit more Shavian, between Man the Romantic and Intellectual on one hand and Woman the Life Force on the other.

Man doesn't stand a chance, of course.

You may well ponder -- where's the Superman? Shaw's play took the stage in 1903, less than ten years after the first translation into English of Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra. That book presented the notion of the Übermensch, the human being who transcends conventional morality and the deceptive controls imposed by tradition and society. Treating the concept in this play, GBS disdained the awkward term "Beyond-Man" used in the first translation and coined the term "Superman." With his characteristic cheerful, waspish verbosity Shaw thoroughly explored this relatively new notion and used it as a club to wallop the conventions of English bourgeois society.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Images by Kimberley Mead for Austin Shakespeare's Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw

Images by Kimberley Mead for

George Bernard Shaw's

Man and Superman

February 17 - March 6, Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m. & Sundays at 3 p.m.
The Rollins Theatre at The Long Center, Riverside Drive at South First Street

(click for map)

Tickets are on sale now at http://thelongcenter.frontgatesolutions.com or call 512-474-5664.

Austin Shakespeare presents a delightful comedy of topsy-turvy romantic pursuit, George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, a timely look at the perennial clash between the past and the future, the reactionary and the progressive, and questions of what the proper roles of men and women really are.

Man and Superman stars Kimbery Adams, Jill Blackwood*, Janelle Buchanan*, Michael Dalmon, Shelby Davenport*, Jenny Gravenstein, Philip Kreyche, Ev Lunning Jr.*, Barry Pineo, and Mark Stewart (* Member of Actor's Equity Association).

As a special addition, there will be a staged reading of Shaw's Don Juan in Hell with Babs George* and Harvey Guion at the Rollins at 7:30PM, Sunday February 27.

Click 'to view additional images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .