Robert Faires Interview: Murder Ballad Murder Mystery Saloon Tour

 



'Murder Ballad Murder Mystery'

Paper Chairs resurrects its hit musical as portable, hit-and-run bar entertainment
 
By Robert Faires, Fri., Nov. 15, 2013

Usually, when a play reaches the end of its run, it's dead, departed, gone with the wind. Once in a while, though, a show gets pulled back from oblivion, and such is the case with Murder Ballad Murder Mystery, the backwoods musical by Elizabeth Doss (book) and Mark Stewart (score) that scored critical raves and multiple awards when it premiered in 2009. Now, like the ghost-faced killers who populate its swampy setting, it once more walks among us – only this time the show won't be haunting a theatre as it did in its original co-production by Tutto Theatre and Vortex Repertory Company, and it won't be the full-length, site-specific spectacle seen before. Paper Chairs, the company that grew out of that staging, has reconceived the show as a shorter, portable production to be presented in saloons. The new incarnation will debut at three local watering holes, as well as one in New Orleans (for the New Orleans Fringe Festival), and one in Marfa. The cast has been whittled down to eight characters, and director Keri Boyd and designer Lisa Laratta have worked to make the space adaptable to any environment. Playwright/performer Doss explains the show's second life in an email exchange.

Click to read interview at the Austin Chronicle

Heddatron, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, February 11 - March 5

Central Texas is about to be knee-deep in Heddas. Dustin Wills and friends down at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre start that unplanned festival with this "back to the future" version. The promising, term-limited Palindrome Theatre opens a "world premiere" (!) adaptation by Nigel O'Hearn at the Blue Theate, beginning next week. And then in May Tony Ciaravino will do another, presumably more classic, with the Classic Theatre in San Antonio.

SVT's jangly, mystifying absurdist staging of Heddatron runs riot with Ibsen's play. To tell the truth, you don't need to be familiar with the original in order to appreciate this funhouse madness. Precocious young Ava Johns plays a smug-beyond-her-years sixth grader giving a book report on the play.

A sixth grader assigned to read Ibsen's subtle portrait of the destructive, self-destuctive young Norwegian bride? That should give you a hint and a warning.to fasten your seatbelts for a theatre ride that outdoes Honey, I Shrunk The Kids for weirdness, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly for menace, and The Iron Giant for cybernetics. The script riffs explicitly on the first two. And on Ibsen -- both on Hedda Gabler and the mutton-chopped, sometimes oblivious incarnation of the Norwegian writer himself.

Click to read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .