UPDATE, Thursday night:Additional seats addedFriday 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!!
Touchstone themes for the Georgetown Palace Theatre are "fun" and "familiar." Probably the most affectionately remembered piece of Neil Simon's 40-year career, The Odd Couple fits both themes exactly.
Slobby Oscar Madison and meticulous Felix Ungar are seated firmly in the American consciousness. Simon's play opened on Broadway in 1965 and appeared as a film in 1968. It ran for five years as a television show, 1970-1975. ABC cancelled it at the end of every season but then brought it back because of the high Nielsen ratings for the summer reruns. Simon rewrote the play for a female cast in 1985 and in 2004 he produced an updated version, Oscar and Felix: A New Look at the Odd Couple.
The Georgetown version is the original script, set in the mid-60s. You can tell that immediately when the guys talk about prices. A New York cab ride is $1.30. A pack of cigarettes is 38 cents. The butcher's bill for London broil for four persons is $9.64. And Felix's half of the monthly rent for the eight-room apartment in metropolitan New York City is $120 (rent-controlled, for sure, but still!). Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .
My Bugatti Story is playing at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre as part of the 2009 FronterFest Long Fringe. Writer Paul Ehrmann plays Alexander, the principal character. Though there's a cast of six, the show is essentially a long monologue by Ehrmann, interspersed with illustrative scenes. The near-monologue format is appropriate, for most of the action is taking place in his head, or at least in his fantasies.
At the opening, Alexander is found in a psychiatric ward, just about to undergo a board review of his non-voluntary commital. He has refused to participate in drug trials that would take away his memory and he has hoarded enough doses of potent sedative Thorazine to commit suicide. The bout with the review board is unsatisfactory to both sides.
Before chomping down those fatal pills, Alexander tells us his story. When he was seven years old, his parents took him to Paris to visit the neighborhood from which they'd fled the Nazi occupation. His parents tell him of the arrest, brutal mistreatment and deportation to Germany of one of the bakery workers, a simple boy who unknowingly was wrapping bread in copies of the newspaper of the French résistance. Alex is horrified by the pictures in a book on the résistance movement,including a Gestapo "machine pour découper les mains" - - "a machine for cutting off hands."
He returns to the United States forever shaken. We witness some of his unsuccessful attempts to overcome the neurosis and become a "spacious guy" like other American yokels. We do not really understand when or how, exactly, he wound up in the bin.
As Alexander thinks of suicide, he is saved by the return of one of the luminescent memories of that séjour in Paris -- the sight of a Bugatti dealership with its powerful, fantastically styled sports cars.
"I escaped into my dreams," he exults, and we follow him into a fantasy world of occupied France where he is a much admired mechanic and driver for Bugatti (played by the imposingly authoritative Frank Benge).
There's a girl, of course, the delicate artist and advertising designer played by Cici Barone,seen here in a light-as-air confection of a dress.The crass American boys of his youth played by Matt Connely and Craig Nigh have transformed into confident coveralled Frenchmen, with pretty good French accents.
We follow the plot as the rotten Nazis oblige portly Bugatti to convert his factory to produce torpedoes, the nobly patriotic French (plus Alexander) scheme to frustrate them, and Alexander's love escapes over the Pyrenees to Lisbon and, eventually, the United States. Alex triumphs over all the bad guys, both those in his fantasies and those running the psychiatric institute.
Publicity for the show asserts that it is "71 percent true."
Paul Ehrmann's heroic little story reminded me irresistibly of a literary genre little known in the United States. Beginning immediately after World War II, principally in Belgium, artists such as Edgar P. Jacobs and Hergé drew and published what we with current political correctness now call "graphic novels." These were fantasy pieces for French speaking boys, in which intrepid adventurers travelled the world, foiled crooks and fought maniacal villains who resembled the worst caricatures of Prussians, Nazis, evil eastern Europeans and third-world dictators. These were not pulp publications, exactly, although they often appeared as serials in boys' magazines. Publishers offered them as albums. Despite dusty concepts and pre-CGI FX, they remain popular today.
Every French bookstore deals in bandes dessinées. And behind the manga and French surrealist sexy space and crime albums there sits a solid shelf or two of these classics. Paul Ehrmann's pleasant fantasy reminds me particularly of the various adventures of Jacobs' "Blake and Mortimer," a pair of very British gentlemen who were always foiling the wicked.
Ehrmann's writing is vivid. His images are often surprising, even poetic -- for example, his description of the first Bugatti shown above, which he hails as "hot cheese poured over a rollerskate." When he imagines an impossible story of pursuing with his fleet, muscular Bugatti the train carrying Louis toward Germany, we accept the story, however far fetched.
Some of his jokes succeed less well -- a gibe about nepotism in Texas state contracting is incongruous. The momentary return of captive Louis as a hostage is the occasion for a dumb sally about "not being the only 33-year old Jew who has ever returned."
By his own admission, Ehrmann has a lot of himself invested in this narrative. At times he comes across as confessional or woodenly self-obsessed, characteristics which are perfectly in keeping with his imaging of Alexander.
Afterwards, I spent some time trying to picture in that role some other Austin actor who could bring more delight and mischief to the portrayal, qualities that could "sell" us more convincingly the happily surreal dénouement. Ben Wolfe, perhaps, or Tyler Jones?
This zany musical comedy comes bursting out of the Georgetown Palace stage like fireworks on the 4th of July.
Yes, we all know the story. After all, the Mel Brooks film about fraudsters producing a Broadway musical was released in 1968, forty years ago.
Brooks and co-writer Thomas Meehan turned it into a real Broadway musical in 2001, with musical numbers by Brooks, where it won an unprecedented 12 Tony awards and ran for 2500 performances. The London production ran for three years.
And in 2005 Sony Pictures made a movie of it – a movie about a musical about producing a musical, drawn from a movie about producing a musical.
But who cares? The Georgetown Palace production is terrific fun and its big- voiced glittering cast of 24 could have filled with music and laughter a hall ten times as large as the 300-seat Palace.
It’s gaudy, vulgar, suggestive, happy and filled with as many comics and Girls Girls Girls as any Ziegfield show.
Yes, you’ll recognize almost every bit from the movie(s) or the Broadway show – the fretful, mendacious Max Bialystock, his reluctant partner the nervous young CPA Leopold Bloom, Ulla the Swedish knockout with all those names, Otto the Nazi, flaming homosexuals, and the little old ladies enamored of Max. Mel Brooks spares no one, and that’s part of the fun of it. When Jewish comedian Mel Brooks came up with the concept for The Producers and the musical number “Springtime for Hitler” back in 1968 it was a dazzling piece of audacity. For gosh sake, World War II had ended less than twenty-five years before that, and the “Greatest Generation,” contemporaries with Brooks, were in the spring of middle age.
Brooks was God’s fool, dancing on the rawest catastrophe of the western world and daring to laugh at the guilty, long and hard, while mocking the business of show business.
The Palace scrupulously advises its patrons, Rated PG-13 for sexual humor and references and is intended for mature audiences.
The shock value is mostly gone today, although I wonder what conversations parents had after opening night with the various ten- to twelve-year-olds dressed in their best and seated in the front rows. In fact, those youngsters were probably unshockable - - but maybe apprehensive about discussing sex jokes and flowering queens with their parents.
Stars Matt Gauck as Max Bialystock and Larry Frier as the worried young Leo Bloom are a great pair of song-and-dance comedians.
Gauck must have been stifling under the stage lights with that padded belly and an elaborate bald wig with comb-over; the ageing effect of his makeup was a bit too sharp in the opening scenes but the fast pace and relentless clowning got it properly blended in.
Bialystock is the epitome of an unscrupulous egotist, and the ongoing gag of his instruction of the naïve Bloom on Broadway ethics and morals was comic and cautionary.
A quick summary, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last 40 years: Bialystock is on his way down, reduced to seducing a stable of little old ladies for funds. Visiting him, the grandma type nicknamed “Hold Me,Touch Me” suggests coyly, ”Let’s play the virgin milkmaid and the well hung stable boy!”
Bloom, the quiet, worried accountant, comments to Bialystock in passing that if backers lost money in a show, it would be easy to conceal contributions and keep excess financing. Bialystock leaps on the idea and pushes Bloom to become his partner in crime.
Bloom declines, but back at the Dickensean accounting office, he succumbs to visions of glamor, success and showgirls.
So B&B set out to find the worst possible script, the worst possible director, and the worst possible actors. And they succeed!
The script is “Springtime for Hitler” by unrepentent Nazi Franz Liebkind (Bill Lindstrom, also a fine hoofer, with accent, helmet and mad-eyed devotion).[German: "Liebkind" = English "Love Child."]
The director is Roger DeBris (Matt Connely), as wildly, extravagantly queer as one could imagine, shown here being coiffed by his sidekick Carmen Ghia (played with wicked, pouting, hip-swiveling delight by Palace regular Matthew Burnett).["Bris" is the Jewish ritual of circumcision, carried out on a Jewish male child the 8th day after birth; the "Carmen Ghia" was a nifty sport car from the 1950s.]
And for the actors, Nazi Liebkind and the luscious Swedish cupcake Ulla Inga Hansen Bensen Yonsen Tallen-Hallen Svaden-Svanson. Bialystock explains to Bloom, “There’s always a part for the producer’s girlfriend!”
Nicole Pritchard as Ulla can act, sing, and dance, and she’s as tasty a bit of eye-candy as you’re likely to see. Pritchard has just gotten to Austin after playing Disney characters at Orlando for three years. Texans are clear winners by the change.
The show goes on, complete with that signature number, “Springtime for Hitler.”
Ulla plays a sort of Miss Rhinegold walk-on (a concept straight out of Ziegfield).
The show is a disaster. But only for Bialystock and Bloom. At the last minute they must substitute director DeBris for Nazi Liebkind in the role of Hitler, and a campy, crowd-loving Adolf makes the show a smash hit.
Max Bialystock gets arrested while Bloom and Ulla abscond to Brazil. Max waxes indignant in jail, recounting in fragmentary fashion the whole plot to that point, getting one of the biggest laughs in the show.
Bloom returns. Both go to prison, where they put on a wildly successful prison revue and get pardons. They celebrate with a fine bit of hoofing at the end.
Before the show, director Mary Ellen Butler greeted the opening night audience and invited them to the on-stage post-production party. She warned us that because technical director Ron Watson had just sprained an ankle, his substitute working the twelve sets of flies (hoistable scenery) might be shaky from time to time. And by the way, Austin’s Paramount theatre is equipped with only ten sets of flies.
So what’s not to like, already? This show has energy, glitter, comedy and class; it’s an insouciant salute to the big kid in all of us. It makes us say, like Leopold Bloom, I wanna be a producer, too.
Congratulations to cast, director, and crew. This was a huge, complicated piece to produce. Mary Ellen says that 2000 hours of volunteer labor went into construction of the sets. Ensemble members had up to 9 costume changes and pitched in to keep those scene changes running smoothly. They all appeared to be having the time of their lives. They certainly deserved that enthusiastic applause at the curtain call.
And congratulations once again to the Georgetown Palace Theatre for its vaulting ambition and the high quality of its entertainment!
UPDATE, Thursday night: Additional seats added Friday night, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night. Check availability at SVT tickets. 
