Upcoming: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare abridged & revised, City Theatre, July 5 - 15

at City Theatre's 

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE [ABRIDGED] [REVISED]

written by Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield

with Kristen Bennett, Lindsay McKenna and Annie McCall

July 6 - 15

July 6 @9 pm, July 7 @4 pm, July 7 @10 pm, July 8 @2 pm, July 11 @9 pm, July 15 @6 pm.

City Theatre, 3823 Airport Rd (behind the Shell station)(click for map)

For reservations, call 512-524-2870 or e-mail info@citytheatreaustin.org. General seating $10. Reserved $15. http://www.citytheatreaustin.org/

All thirty-seven plays in ninety minutes?? The new irreverent, fast-paced romp through the Bard’s works celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the classic farce. 

Join three madcap women in tights...Yes, we said women!..as they weave their wicked way through all of Shakespeare’s comedies, histories and tragedies in one wild ride that will leave you breathless and helpless with laughter. Part of the 2012 Summer Acts! Austin Theatre Festival.

Wit by Margaret Edson, City Theatre, March 18 - April 8

It helps to have someone holding your hand when you look over the edge of the precipice. Even if you've always lived alone, felt self sufficient and devoted yourself to the life of the mind.

Margaret Edson's Wit is the portrait of literature professor Vivian Bearing, a devotee of 17th century English literature renowned for her publications on the metaphysical poetry of John Donne. At the age of 50 this scholar has been discovered to be the victim of Stage IV ovarian cancer. Our time with her is spent in the cancer ward, except for brief flashbacks to happy moments - as a child, learning to read; as a graduate student discovering the woman professor who became her mentor; standing authoritatively in front of a class of undergraduates, challenging them to grapple with the conceits of Donne's poetry.

Bearing's thoughts spin as she confronts the unimaginative protocol realities of medicine. She works to remain objective and in intellectual control, occasionally sharing with us a fugue state, sometimes even over the unnerving revelations being delivered by her physicians.

This piece demands a virtuoso performance every night, by a virtuoso performer, and Judith Laird is exactly that. Wit is essentially a monologue with regular lapses into conventional stage representation. The frail, earnest protagonist speaks directly to us as audience, acknowledges our presence and even comments in passing, "I have only two hours here before I die." That ironic confiding in the spectators has a touch of the metaphysical to it, a shadowed reflection of Donne's perspective in the Holy Sonnets written late in his life.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: A Feast of Fools, Shrewd Productions at the Off Center, December 16 - 18

Received directly:

Feast of Fools:

Merriment & Misrule

December 16-18
Thursday – Saturday, December 16 - 18 at 8 p.m.
Doors open at 7 p.m.
The Off Center, 2211-A Hidalgo (click here for a map)

Tickets: $20-30* A limited number of tickets are onsale now for $15! Use the password "Misrule".)
Call 512-626-5901 or click here to buy online!

Taste the Cake of Reckoning! Win a chance at the Crown of Misrule!
Be Queen or King for a Night!

A feast for the senses and a delight for the soul, join the Company Shrewd for our Feast of Fools as we celebrate twelve magical days in just one night.

A festival of song, dance, comedy and games crowned by gourmet treats, fabulous prizes, live music and a fantastic silent auction, Feast of Fools is the holiday party you don't want to miss!

A portion of all proceeds will be donated to HAND (Helping the Aging, Needy and Disabled).

Featuring Aaron Alexander, Kristen Bennett, Jennifer Davis, Trey Deason, Ashley Edwards, Shannon Grounds, Jason Hays, Kimberley Mead, Alex McDonald Villareal, Marisa Pisano, Alejandro Rodriguez, Bryan Schneider, Justin Scalise, Sarah Skelton, Andrea Smith and Amelia Turner with guest artists The Confidence Men: Improvised Mamet.

SUPPORT OUR WORK!

Thanks to all of those who joined us last season for Shrewd Summer Nights and MilkMilkLemonade! For more information about our productions and company history, visit our website at www.shrewdproductions.com. Help Shrewd take The Long Now on the road in 2011! Support our work by making a donation though Paypal. All donations are tax deductible.

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Rent, Zach Theatre, September 16 - October 31

Rent is the sort of production the Zach theatre uses to pay the rent: the staging of a familiar rock and roll work with appeal for the young, for the young professionals, for the creatives and for the club goers. Seen as daring at its 1996 debut, Rent has become sufficiently mainstream that it can be staged in community theatres, summer theatres, and, this past February, even by the kidsActing studio here in Austin.

Director Dave Steakley gets a powerhouse performance from a cast consisting redundantly of "local Austin artists."

You just can't help being seduced by the spotlight numbers in this show: winsome Andrew Cannata and Kristen Bennett doing the wickedly funny Tango Maureen, the irrepressibly strutting Joshua Denning as Angel the drag queen extraordinaire in the damn-your-eyes-love-me glitzy Today 4 U (Tomorrow 4 Me), and Ginger Leigh's leering, laughing physicality in the trippy story about the cow that jumped Over the Moon.

Multi-talented Jonathan Larson did book, music and lyrics for a story that he based loosely on Puccini's La Bohème, the elegantly sentimental 1896 opera portraying a bunch of down and art artists in Paris and the doomed romance between a writer and Mimi, the street waif who dies of tuberculosis in the last act.

Puccini's work has been called the most popular opera of all time, and Larson's use of it is a savagely ironic premise. No doubt all those affluent parents in Scarsdale and similar well-trimmed suburbs (West Lake Hills, for example, or Lakeway) had the cash and leisure to buy opera tickets, as their neglected children grew up unguided and then slipped off to the grim-smeared once-upon-a-time low-rent districts of the Bowery.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

A Raisin in the Sun, City Theatre, February 25 - March 21

Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun was a triumph for its 29-year-old author in 1959, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle award for best play. It opened career avenues in theatre and in the cinema for a cast that included Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Louis Gossett, Jr.

The play was a victory for African American arts, as well. Hansberry broke both the color barrier and the gender barrier in American theatre -- with a play based on her family's own experience with restrictive real estate covenants in Chicago, a struggle vindicated by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1940.

Lisa Jordan's production at Austin's City Theatre acknowledges that history but is not burdened by it. She and the cast find the strength of Hansberry's story where it resides: in the resilience of family.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .