Alice in Wonderland, Scottish Rite Children's Theatre, February 5 - 28

Macey Mayfield with her china doll good looks and silvery little voice is a lovely match for the imaginary Alice whom Lewis Carroll sent off to Wonderland.

Children's theatre in the style of the Scottish Rite Children's Theatre requires of actors a special willingness and ability. The actors have their audience just two steps away, on mats spread in the wide open space at the center of the theatre.

SRCT scripts pretty much banish the fourth wall, as well, and engage the kids in question and answer. Despite the imaginary "bottom glue" applied pre-show at the chirpy urging of a couple of cast members, the 4 - 8 year-old-crowd is a pretty unpredictable bunch. The little ones might get up and wander around and the older ones might think it's cute to sass back to the actors.

I enjoyed a preview show of Alice in Wonderland, even though the young audience wasn't really numerous enough to spark the participatory dynamic the actors were promoting. Once those bottoms were in place, Macey came forward unobtrusively and knelt primly at the front of the kid's area, starting as a member of the audience. Mrs Crabby-Pants the teacher (Corley Pillsbury) came on with the officious strut and patronizing sweetness of a rotten elementary school teacher, and suddenly we were all back in grade school. After some admonitory dialogue, she told Alice to come up and tell us the story of the dream that she'd had. And we were off to Wonderland.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Laughter on the 23rd Floor, City Theatre, November 21 - December 20

There's no assembly more live-wire, unpredictable and funny than a room full of comedy writers. In Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Neil Simon, director Andy Berkovsky and a wild, accomplished cast mint anew the eccentrics of the early days of television.

Word has gotten around about this show, which opened in November, took a long weekend's break for Thanksgiving, and will now be on the boards until just before Christmas. I planned to slip in on a Thursday night, usually a quieter time for theatre venues. The parking lot was full, and so was the theatre. They might have benefited from holiday spirits, but word of mouth and favorable reviews probably had a lot to do with it.

This is Simon's tribute to the wild clan that wrote Sid Caesar's Show of Shows, the variety and sketch show that had a huge following in the early days of television. Caesar hired Simon and his brother Danny on the strength of comedy sketches they staged at Camp Tamiment, an adult summer camp in the Poconos. In the play the young writer Lucas Brickman, played by the affably sincere Keith Yawn, serves as narrator, chorus and stand-in for Simon.

Simon presents the eight writers as magnificent New York eccentrics, mostly Jewish and mostly with recent ties to Europe -- principally to Russia and Poland. The show program provides Simon's one-paragraph sketch of each. Wikipedia matches them to the real-life writers Larry Gelbart, Mel Tolkin, playwright Michael Stewart, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Selma Diamond and Woody Allen and Dave Caesar, Sid's brother.

Read more, view images & videos at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Neil Simon, City Theatre, November 19 - December 20

UPDATE: Click for ALT review, December 13

UPDATE: Review by Ryan E. Johnson at Austinist.com, December 10

UPDATE: Review by Barry Pineo in Austin Chronicle, December 10

UPDATE: Review by Rob Faubion at AustinOnStage, December 3

UPDATE: View production images received November 19

Received directly:

Ring in the holiday season
at City Theatre
with Neil Simon’s comedy of high jinks, good times and

Laughter on the 23rd Floor
directed by Andy Berkovsky

November 19 – December 20
Thursdays – Saturdays 8:00 p.m., Sundays 5:30 p.m.
City Theatre, Austin
Tickets $15 - $20. Guaranteed front row reserved seats $25. Students $12. Discounts available for groups and seniors. Thursdays, all seats $10.

If Broadway ever erects a monument to the patron saint of laughter, Neil Simon would have to be it. And The City Theatre Company is thrilled to announce the holiday run of his hilarious comedy Laughter on the 23rd Floor, an autobiographical farce inspired by Simon’s own career churning out jokes for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, where he worked alongside of Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Larry Gelbart.

The comedy plays November 19 – December 20, Thursday through Sunday at The City Theatre.

Laughter introduces an assortment of zany and oddball writers, many based upon actual personalities, including Simon himself. The play chronicles the outrageous antics of The Max Prince Show, a 1953 variety show under the pressure of McCarthyism, censorship, and, of course, the egos and individuality of the writers themselves.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Evil Dead, Doctuh Mistah Productions at the Salvage Vanguard, October 8 - 31

UPDATE, Thursday night: Additional seats added Friday night, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night. Check availability at SVT tickets.

UPDATE: New shows added: Wednesday, October 28 and Saturday afternoon, October 31. All others SOLD OUT (per @JMJTX)




Michael McKelvey and the cast & crew of Evil Dead, The Musical have a hit on their hands, if you take as evidence the turnout on opening night. The scene at the Salvage Vanguard was like trying to load a 747 at a tin-roofed shack in the Caribbean.

Michael was astonished. Once he'd gotten the surging, enthusiastic elbow-to-elbow crowd into their places, he told us that as of that afternoon they'd had only 60 seats confirmed -- 30 reservations and another 30 distributed to the press and to friends of the company.

He told the folks in the "splash zone" of the first three rows that they wouldn't need those black plastic garbage-bag ponchos until the second act.

This was an audience of happy 20-somethings, except for me and for two rather elegantly deliberate older gentlemen wearing cowboy hats. They all appeared to know the story established by the three 1980s horror flicks that I had never seen or had any interest in seeing.

Five young people set out to spend a weekend at a remote cabin in the woods. Two couples: Ash and Cheryl (David Gallagher and Kelly Bales) and Scott and Shelly (Christopher Skillern and Macey Mayfield); and Ash's bratty little sister Cheryl (Corley Pillsbury). No, they don't know the owner. They're just going to break in and have a good time. The guys are hot for the girls and NO ONE IMAGINES THAT ANYTHING BAD COULD HAPPEN (ooh!). But we know that there's an ancient book of the dead involved, because this creepy guy told us so. The vanished owner has left a tape recorder reciting spells to invoke demons and that gullible Ash just insists on listening to THE WHOLE INCANTATION!!

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Little Shop of Horrors, SummerStock Austin at Rollins Theatre, August 1 - 9

SummerStock Austin's joyous production of Little Shop of Horrors gets extra class credit in recognition for its part in re-Americanizing this reviewer.

After last May's production of the same script by the Georgetown Palace Theatre, I took the liberty to grump that theirs was a "Grade A production of a Grade D musical play."

I did explain that unlike the rest of the audience, I had never been exposed to Audreys 1 or 2, either on film or in the theatre. Little Shop didn't travel to places like the Dominican Republic, my last posting abroad, where the musical theatre tastes ran to Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. So I was a blank slate at that time both for Alan Menken's music and Howard Ashman's book and lyrics.

Last Sunday evening we were sitting in the middle of the front row, exhibiting the naive courage of theatre fanatics, so we took the full blast of SummerStock's music, singing, dancing and highly stylized camp. And, you know, seeing a Grade A production of a Grade D musical play up close and personal is a helluva lot of fun.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .