Showing posts with label Trey Deason. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trey Deason. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Stars and Barmen by Reina Hardy, Vortex Repertory, October 26 - November 16, 2013


ALT review
Stars and Barmen Reina Hardy Vortex Repertory Austin TX
(www.vortexrep.org)




by Michael Meigs

I was in the mood for a a feel-good experience on Halloween, something without fangs or fishnets or pumpkins, and the Vortex's blurb 'a romantic comedy about getting lucky in space time' enticed me to their staging of Reina Hardy's script. She is semi-local, after all, as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, and the Shrewds staged her piece Glassheart not too long ago.

The Vortex, bless Bonnie's heart, has succeeded in transforming itself from a make-do neighborhood theatre to a social center. The Butterfly Bar appears to keep the place hopping most nights of the week, and there were plenty of folks there for the BYOP pumpkin-carving contest later on. Only twelve of us elected to go to the play that Thursday evening.


Stars and Barmen Reina Hardy Vortex Rep Austin TX
Trey Deason (photo: Kimberley Mead)
In the enigmatically titled Stars and Barmen Trey Deason plays Rupert, a grad student in astronomy so hapless and clumsy that his only intimate companion is the computer program scanning the skies for anomalies -- not the big, blow-out anomalies, but others more modest, perhaps closer to his level of ability. The playwright's not particularly kind to him, setting him up in the opening scene as a lonely party crasher who fails miserably three times in a row to initiate conversations with unseen women. Deason, himself a capable playwright, singer and thespian, swallows the bait and director Rudy Ramirez's instruction, and he turns Rupert into such a mass of inferiority complexes and tics that he's ridiculous and almost painful to watch.


Rupert encounters Bridget Farr as the dreamily disappointed Claire, a self-pronounced poet who's trying to avoid someone at the party. He thinks he's getting through to her in his ungainly way, but that computer program Mandy interrupts via telephone, yanking his chain and obliging him to leave to attend to his late night duties in the lab. He forgets to ask for Claire's number or to get some way to contact her again.

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

Friday, May 31, 2013

SNAPSHOTS, the OUT OF INK PLAY FESTIVAL 2013, Scriptworks at the Salvage Vanguard theatre, June 20 - 29, 2013 -



Scriptworks









presents
OUT OF INK 2013

Snapshots
the 15th annual showcase of 10 minute plays

June 20-22 and 27-29, 2013 at 8 p.m.

Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Rd. - click for map$15 general admission, $12 students/seniors/ScriptWorks
June 20th is a Pay-What-You-Wish preview

RESERVATIONS/INFORMATION: www.scriptworks.org512-454-9727

Whether it's avoiding adjectives, employing superheroes, crickets, or trunks, or finding a way to incorporate the opening and closing lines of Finnegan's Wake, ScriptWorks members have been up to the challenge of combining three arbitrary ingredients into cohesive ten-minute plays for 15 years.
Every year for the past 15 years, members have worked feverishly for 48 hours during the Weekend Fling to pen their opuses built around that year's three ingredients. And every year for the past 15 years, eight of the plays have been produced in the Out of Ink 10 minute play showcase. Over the years, the showcase has been performed at six different venues, from the long-gone Public Domain to the recently-gone Blue Theatre with stops at ACC, The State Theatre, The Hideout, Hyde Park Theatre, and Salvage Vanguard along the way.
Dozens of national and local theatre artists have contributed ingredients including Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle, Michael Barnes of the Austin-American Statesman, director and casting director Vicky Boone, actors Ev Lunning and Babs George, designers Leilah Stewart, Ia Ensterä, and Natalie George, and playwrights Sherry Kramer, Suzan Zeder, Sibyl Kempson, Zell Miller, III, Naomi Iizuka, Dan Dietz, and Lisa D'Amour to name just a few.

This year the mini-festival returns to Salvage Vanguard and with eight plays inspired by the following ingredients:

1) The play must contain or involve a photograph--which two or more characters interpret the meaning of differently.
2) One character speaks only in commercial lingo, using known tag-lines or slogans.
3) The play must contain a gunshot or a birth.

At the end of the Weekend Fling, the plays were read in a ScriptWorks Salon at Hyde Park Theatre. A selection committee picked eight of the plays for production in Out of Ink. The selection committee included director Sharon Sparlin and non-applying members Elizabeth Cobbe and James Venhaus.

The Snapshots scripts were written by James Burnside, Trey Deason, Amparo Garcia-Crow, Kirk German, Zac Kline, Max Langert, Jason Rainey, and Anne Maria Wynter.

The plays will be performed by an ensemble of actors including Roxy Becker, Pete Betcher, Amy Chang, David DuBose, Nathanael Dunaway, Joe Hartman, Heather Huggins, Katie Kohler, Jordan Marrett, Don Sneed, Rommel Sulit, and Katy Taylor. They'll be directed by Lowell Bartholomee, Heather Huggins, Ellie McBride, Christina J. Moore, and Sharon Sparlin. Designers for the project are Pam Friday, George Marsolek, Jennifer Rogers, and Bryan Schneider.

ABOUT SCRIPTWORKS ScriptWorks (formerly Austin Script Works) is a playwright-driven organization that seeks to promote the craft of dramatic writing and protect the writer's integrity by encouraging playwright initiative and harnessing collective potential. ScriptWorks is funded and supported in part by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts and the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division believing an investment in the Arts is an investment in Austin’s future.

For more information about ScriptWorks call 512-454-9727 or email: info@scriptworks.org

 


(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)


Monday, August 27, 2012

The Twelfth Labor by Leegrid Stevens, Tutto Theatre at MacTheatre black box, August 10 - September 1

Twelfth Labor Leegrid Stevens, Tutto Theatre AUstin TX
(www.tuttotheatre.org)
alt REVIEW

by Michael Meigs

If you arrive at the MacTheatre Black Box with happy memories of Leegrid Stevens' The Dudleys as staged last year by Tutto Theatre -- winner of eight of Austin's B. Iden Payne theatre awards -- you may well be disconcerted. The Twelfth Labor, behind its enigmatic title, is as far from the hectic world of 8-bit video games as, say, Eugene O'Neil or William Faulkner.


Tutto has mounted a gorgeously moody, intellectually challenging piece, comprised of Steven's four-part suite in the stark isolation of a farmhouse somewhere out on an alien landscape of the mind. Designer Ia Ensterä again creates a wrap-around environment in weathered wood, a falling-down barn and a two-story farmhouse.
Twelfth Labor Leegrid Stevens Tutto Theatre Austin TX
Erin Treadway, Rebecca Robinson (image: Kimberley Meade)


Stevens' script is densely conceptual, a virtual Cirque de Soleil of intellectual performance, but the story is much less complicated than his working and reworking of it. This Idaho farm family lives in harsh rural deprivation in 1949.


Rebecca Robinson plays Esther the grim matriarch, trying to hold together her own existence and those of the four variously handicapped or rebellious children of the family. The father of this beleaguered family disappeared into Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in the Pacific eight years before and has never returned.


The program lists the labors of Hercules, the last of which is his wrestling with Cerberus, the monster guarding the Underworld. But there's no obvious or easy parallel here -- in fact, pattern-makers might find that with the absent father, a couple of suitors, and the strong matriarch could track the late passages of the Odyssey just as well; the father does eventually return.

Cleo the oldest daughter is severely dyslexic and mentally handicapped -- an earnest, striving young woman old before her time, bewildered by language that twists and turns on her mind the way a live snake might. In this role Erin Treadway delivers a performance that will break your heart, first to last, certainly one of the year's most impressive dramatic performances.


(Click 'to read continuation and view performance photos at www.AustinLiveTheatre.com)

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Upcoming: The Twelfth Labor by Leegrid Stevens, Tutto Theatre and MacTheatre, August 10 - September 1


Tutto Theatre presents
in Co-Production with MACtheatre

The Full-Stage Premiere of

The Twelfth LaborThe Twelfth Labor Banner. Photo: Daniel Brock Photography

 

 

 

By Leegrid Stevens

(Click for AUTHOR BIO)

Directed by Gary Jaffe

10 August – 1 September 2012
WEEK 1—Friday and Saturday
WEEK 2—Thursday through Saturday
WEEKS 3 & 4—Wednesday through Saturday
All Performances are at 7:30 p.m.
The Laboratory Theater, McCallum Fine Arts Academy, 5600 Sunshine Drive, Austin, TX 78756
Thursdays – Saturdays: $15 General Admission
(
GACA/Senior/Student: $12 & Priority Seating: $25)

LIMITED SEATING, Reserve Yours TODAY.
Wednesdays are Pay-What-You-CAN
Name Your Own Price w/ Donation
of Non-Perishable Canned Food Item(s) to benefit
Hope Food Pantry at Trinity United Methodist Church

[Price without donation is $12]

Featuring the award-winning artistic contributions of actors: Helen Allen, Wray Crawford, Trey Deason, Chris Humphrey, Skip Johnson, Content Love Knowles, Megan Minto, Rebecca Robinson, Erin Treadway, Fred Winkler, and introducing Annamarie Kasper; the set design of Ia Ensterä; the lighting design of Natalie George; the costume design of Benjamin Taylor Ridgway; and the hair and make up design of Austin M. Rausch.

Leegrid Stevens’ evocative new play, The Twelfth Labor, is epic, utilizing the myth of The Twelve Labors of Hercules to explore the inner workings of a hardscrabble World War II era family in Idaho. We follow a single day in the life of an Idaho farm family, October 15, 1949, as seen through the uniquely damaged mind of the family's eldest daughter, Cleo. Through her fragmented memories, often prophetic dreams, and swirling language, we come to understand the price she and her family have paid for a little dignity, as they await the return of their long absent father, lost somewhere in the war, half a world away.

In addition to the myth of Hercules, The Twelfth Labor draws upon the popular culture (music, literature, and film) of Cleo’s childhood, which frames and colors her experience of the real world—an outer shell of Realism surrounds an inner-shell of Surrealism, which together generate what The Des Moines Register (speaking of the second workshop production) called an “[…] elemental magnetism […]” which pulls the audience in and keeps them thinking of the play days and even weeks after.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Upcoming: Lear by WIlliam Shakespeare with Jennifer Underwood, Vortex Repertory, May 20 - June 18

Found on-line:


Vortex Repertory, Austin

Arden Shakespeare Lear

presents

Lear

by William Shakespeare

starring Jennifer Underwood

directed by Rudy Ramirez

May 20 - June 18

Thursdays - Sundays at 8 p.m.

Vortex Repertory, 2307 Manor Rd. (click for map)

In an age when women hold more power and in a time when the media turns the private into the public a mother divides her empire among her daughters. As her world crumbles and her family turns its back on her, can she face the storm and find love, forgiveness, and peace? A Celtic legend made into a Renaissance masterpiece, The VORTEX now re-imagines William Shakespeare's King Lear as a female leader for the modern world, where globalization blurs the line between governments and corporations and names like Clinton, Palin, Thatcher, Stewart, Wintour, and Winfrey have inspired admiration, contempt and controversy. Jennifer Underwood leads a cast of Austin's finest actors in a story of gender and power, family and business, compassion and betrayal.

Produced by VORTEX Repertory Company. Adapted from Shakespeare and Directed by Rudy Ramirez. Scenic Design by Ann Marie Gordon, Lighting Design by Jason Amato, Video Design by Sergio R. Samayoa, Costume Design by Pam Fletcher Friday. Stage Management by Tamara L. Farley.

Starring Jennifer Underwood as Lear with Suzanne Balling as Cordelia, David Boss as France/Ensemble, Jennifer Coy as Regan, Mick D'arcy as Gloucester, Trey Deason as Oswald, Joseph Garlock as Burgundy/ Ensemble, Micah Goodding as Edmund, Shannon Grounds as The Fool, Chelsea Manasseri as The Doctor/Ensemble, Toby Minor as Albany, Mindy Rast as Curan/Ensemble, Laura Ray as Lear's Gentlewoman/ Ensemble, Andrea Smith as Goneril, Tom Truss as Cornwall, Amelia Turner as Edda, and Julianna Elizabeth Wright as Kent.

VORTEX Repertory Company is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division, by the Texas Commission on the Arts, and by a and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Upcoming: Cardigan by Trey Deason, added performances at UT, February 5 and 6

Received directly:


Purple Crayon Theatre presentsTrey Deason in Cardigan


Cardigan

by Trey Deason

reprised from FronteraFest 2011

Saturday, Feb 5th and Sunday, Feb 6th at 8PM
Rm 2.112, The Winship Theater
UT Campus, corner of 23rd and San Jacinto
Suggested Donation: $10 (no one turned away!)

Edgar Cardigan is a world-renowned author and university professor: beloved by his students, courted by publishers, desired by women. Or he's a pathological liar compensating for life's disappointments by indulging in a world of fiction. As he assails his students with the story of his fateful date with Mary, a waitress with acting aspirations, the line between truth and fiction becomes blurred beyond distinction.

Click for ALT review, January 30

Cardigan by Trey Deason, Purple Crayon Theatre at FF Long Fringe, January 20 - 29



Cardigan by Trey Deason


Maybe a playwright shouldn't act in his own play. Unless, of course, he's one of those comedy yuksters who speaks directly to the audience and makes smartass observations about his own life exeriences and surroundings.

Trey Deason, the playwright, plays the lead character in Cardigan, a piece expanded from a well-received 2010 Short Fringe offering. His assumption of that identity may be disconcerting to those who have run into him in so-called real life.

Deason is reticent, polite and quiet almost to a fault, at least with those whom he doesn't know well. As Edgar Cardigan, writer, arriving to lecture to us for a class in creative writing, he's emphatic, dismissive, vulgar and as hopped-up as if he were on speed. One is tempted to suppose that this is a portrait of Deason's Evil Twin, a sort of exercise in personal psychodrama. The writer is writing about a writer who is quickly revealed as a compulsive fabricator, and most of what follows is demonstration both of misogyny and misanthropy.

Perhaps director Rudy Ramirez shouldn't have allowed Cardigan to have have snarled so quickly and viciously at Angelia Davis, the actress planted in the audience to play the student. Perhaps Deason should have done breathing exercises so that his character would be less twitchy at the start. Or perhaps just have entrusted the role to another actor.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Hamlet, Scottish Rite Theatre, September 16 - October 3




Those lustrous eyes, that bony frame, that complexion sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought -- many of us believe that Justin Scalise was born to play Hamlet.

He has certainly trained for Shakespeare and for this role, in New Orleans, in England, and for the past three years in Austin. We have seen him as Bottom, Feste, Adam & Silvius, Don John, Mercutio and Lucio. And even Hamlet, freeze-dried, for Austin Shakespeare's 2008 and 2009 World's Fastest Hamlet.

This Hamlet drected by Andrew Matthews for the Scottish Rite Theatre is a keen, intelligent, entertaining and gripping production. Scalise has the principal role but this evening offers much more than just an outing for his fan club.

This cast knows how to speak the speech. Babs George as Gertrude, Harvey Guion as Claudius, Robert Deike as a whole suite of ordinaries, Brock England as Horatio, Chuck Ney as Polonius. . . the verse comes trippingly on those tongues. It's a thrill to hear it delivered articulately, with convincing scansion and appropriate targeting and emotion. The action is swift but unerringly certain. There are moments when one would like to see a bubble of silence as a character reflects or absorbs the meaning of something just said. But anyone who has studied the play, read it or seen any other version of Hamlet will follow the players all the way and will be on the edge of his seat.

Harvey Guion, Justin Scalise, Babs George in Hamlet, Scottish Rite TheatreMatthews has put them into contemporary costume but does not burden the play with unnecessary concept or gimmickry. No telephoning in performances, no AK-47s, no roller skates or cowboy hats. The familiar, haunting action develops immediately before us in the intimacy of the Scottish Rite Theatre, using a minimum of portable furniture placed as needed before various of its intricate trompe-l'oeuil 19th century painted backdrops. The striking, appropriate music before the play is recorded.

In this version, the play's the thing.

Read more and view images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .


Saturday, July 10, 2010

Spider's Web, Different Stages at the Vortex Repertory, July 2 - 24







You don't see much of Agatha Christie in the United States any more, except perhaps in public libraries and the occasional revival of one of her many plays. Airport newstands will offer you thick paperbacks by Clive Custler or Sue Grafton or any of a number of other contemporary producers of blockbusters.

Different Stages does us a service by providing an accomplished and amusing production of her mid-twentieth-century curio, Spider's Web. Most of Dame Agatha's familiar elements are there: an isolated old manse in the countryside, a collection of proper, well brought up English folk, a murder and some earnest police officers trying to clear it up. There's a mystery to solve -- who assaulted the despicable Oliver Costello with a blunt object in the secret passage? Christie is very sporting with her puzzle, scattering clues along the way like Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs in the woods.

T.J. Jolley, Tyler Jones, Craig Kanne  (image: Brett Brookshire)Spider's Web is a comedy rather than a thriller. Clarissa, the vivacious young wife of a much older British diplomat, happily plays country hostess as husband Henry, all atwitter, rushes off to deal with Foreign Office business. She teases and charms the three men visiting from London -- her former guardian, who has been knighted; a half-deaf old country duffer; and a young man from London who courts her shamelessly. Mix in a couple of eccentric servants, the wicked dope dealer who gets bashed, and the plods from the local constabulary.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Friday, July 10, 2009

An Inspector Calls, Different Stages at Vortex Repertory, July 3 - 25






Under the artistic direction of Norman Blumensaadt, Different Stages and its predecessor the Small Potatoes Theatre Company have furnished Austin Theatre with a considerable library of stage work.
The back page of the program for An Inspector Calls lists 109 productions the company has brought to the boards since 1981.

Different Stages has given the city a good dose of the classics and a wide array of works from the British and European stages.
The company has often reached back decades in the English-speaking repertoire to present twentieth century works unlikely to be offered by other enterprises in town. For example, their production last year of Shaw's Getting Married was a fine example of Blumensaadt's taste, dedication and success as a curator.

J.B. Priestly's
An Inspector Calls was first performed in 1945. It recounts a story set in 1912 urban Britain. It's a moral fable with an intrigue that inexorably and progressively reveals the hypocrisy of each member and associate of a wealthy capitalist family. Priestly gives the story a twist of the supernatural, but it' essentially a piece preaching to the British middle class about the wickedness of earlier capitalist generations' exploitation of the poor.

The first two productions of An Inspector Calls were in Moscow. The 1946 London production featured Ralph Richardson as the ominous Inspector Goole, Margaret Leighton as ingenue Sheila Birling, and Alec Guiness as her brother Eric. Goole's berating of the non-aristocratic capitalists touched sensibilities in post-war Britain.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Upcoming: An Inspector Calls, Different Stages at the Vortex, July 3 - 25



UPDATE: Click for ALT review



Received June 18:


Different Stages closes its 2008–2009 season with J.B. Priestley's haunting thriller

An Inspector Calls

Set in 1912 in Edwardian England, the story begins when a mysterious police Inspector calls unexpectedly on a prosperous family. Their peaceful dinner party is shattered by his investigation into the death of a young woman. Under the Inspector's relentless interrogation, secret after secret is revealed, leading to an unexpected and eerie conclusion.


Directed by Norman Blumensaadt (Getting Married), An Inspector Calls features Garry Peters (Molly Sweeney), as the inspector.

Sam Z. Damon (The Tempest) and Paula Gilbert (Suddenly Last Summer) play the industrialist and his wife. Nicole Swahn (Amadeus) and Andy Smith (Red Cans) play their daughter and son. Trey Deason (Faster than the Speed of Light) plays the daughter's fiancé.


Join us on July 4 for an ice and fire special – ice cream and sparklers!

EXTRA

Click here or on image below to view photos by Bret Brookshire












Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Human Sketches by Trey Deason, Sam Bass Community Theatre, March 20 - April 4


This is a "world premiere," in public-relations-speak, and the folks at the Sam Bass Community Theatre once again show their inventiveness and their determination to be more than a simple source of weekend amusement for the suburbs of Austin.

SBCT isn't a large group and they don't have the ample venues or resources of some other out-of-Austin theatres. But they make up for that in pluckiness. Following close on their accomplished production of funnyman Steve Martin's quasi-absurdist piece Picasso at the Lapin Agile, they're now doing Human Sketches. The script was chosen from more than twenty original pieces submitted for SBCT's So You Think You're A Playwright? competition.

It's a winner in more ways than one. Author Trey Deason's two-act piece is well crafted, peopled with sharply drawn central characters and examines serious, interesting issues -- although perhaps not those you might expect from the M.C. Escher sketch used on the poster.

Read More . . . .

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Upcoming: Human Sketches, Sam Bass Community Theatre, March 20 - April 4

UPDATE: Austin Live Theatre review of Human Sketches

Received March 17:





Sam Bass Community Theatre presents the world premiere of


Human Sketches

Written by Trey Deason
Directed by Sean Hunter

Rebecca Guare is a single mother and a college dropout trying to make ends meet. Leticia Martindale is a successful and acclaimed New York artist who finds herself at a creative standstill.

Rebecca desperately needs a purpose. Leticia desperately needs inspiration. Two women from wildly different lifestyles try to find what they need in each other, and ultimately find much more than they originally bargained for.

Human Sketches, an original contemporary play by local playwright Trey Deason, is a heartfelt and moving depiction of the unique bond between artist and model. This beautiful story demonstrates how pain can inspire, how art can heal, and how so much humanity can be contained within a simple sketch.


Performance Dates & Times: March 20 - April 4, Thu - Sat 8:00pm, Sun 2:00pm
Prices: $15 general admission, $13 seniors/students/educators, Thursdays $10 general admission
Rating: Adult language and content - Not suitable for children

Reservations can be made at www.sambasstheatre.org, by calling (512) 244-0440 or by emailing reservations@sambasstheatre.org. Please include your name, a contact phone number, the number of seats you would like to reserve and the specific show you wish to attend if you call or email. Reservations for groups of 6 or more must be prepaid by sending a check to Sam Bass Community Theatre, P.O. Box 767, Round Rock, TX 78680-0767.

Location: Sam Bass Community Theatre, 600 N. Lee St (in Memorial Park), Round Rock, TX

Monday, February 9, 2009

The Secret Lives of the InBetweeners, Vortex Repertory, February 6 - March 7


Aaron Brown's musical at the Vortex benefits from a strong cast, Bonnie Cullum's assured direction, and a bouncy score, well executed by a five-piece band including piano, keyboard, guitar/bass, drums and a cello. You can relax and laugh, sympathize with the dilemmas of poor Joe (Jonathan G. Itchon, below) and his acquaintances, and generally have a good time.

But as for those Inbetweeners -- they seem to be the target audience for this piece, folks of university age or just beyond, who are likely to sympathize with an aspiring artist suffocated by the selfish embrace of his horrible mother (Jennifer Coy, seen only in silhouette, even during the curtain call).

This is plotting by the numbers. Central character Joe is frustrated artist who flees vulnerable woman photographer Tina (Sarah Gay) who's powerfully attracted to him ; comic relief is hairy geek Waldo (!) (Trey Deason) who lives in a computer game dream world but falls for a sassy, self-assured blonde, Charlotte (Jo Beth Henderson). Joe is putting on a play featuring Charlotte, so geek Waldo insinuates himself into rehearsals as the prop manager. Tender Tina obsesses over Joe, asks Charlotte for advice, has her telephone messages to Joe erased by the wicked Mom.

Okay, we could probably work with that. But what comes along then? A mephistophelian figure Fear (Rudy Ramirez) in black clothing, mascara, and black lipstick, balanced by Hope, a sort of happy urban gypsy played by Betsy McCann.

Let's review the Greatest Writing Clichés once again: #1, "It Was All Just A Dream"; #2, "He Dies and Goes to the Afterlife and Gets Another Chance"; and now this one: #3, "Indecisive Human Has a Devil on One Shoulder and an Angel on the Other, and the Supernatural Guys Make A Bet on Temptation and Salvation."

In all this mess, the most interesting character is None of the Above.


Errich Petersen (right) as Harry is probably meant to be the real-life devil. In a coffee shop he overhears the girls dramatizing Tina's plight and he intrudes, coming on to Tina with the casual assertion that she should pay attention to a real man. They expostulate and leave, but Tina comes back for her forgotten cell phone, and she's hooked. Harry is rich, or he pretends to be; he is out for a good time; and when Tina gets knocked up, bad old Harry urges her to turn to "a doctor that my parents have."

One problem with this stereotype is the actor. Errich Petersen is simply too credible for the character. He doesn't camp it up, so we can hiss him; he has good control over himself, his emotions, and his singing. I wound up thinking that the whole musical would have been a lot more interesting if it had been written about Harry. Oh, sure, give him a tough love lesson; but that would be a better dénouement than the one we get -- Joe finally storms out of Mommy's house to seek his fortune and Tina finds him for Instant Happiness.

Okay, maybe that's too cranky a summary of these goings on. I will confess that I'm far beyond the age of the Inbetweeners, so maybe that's why a predator is more attractive than a martyr.

Every one of these actors is talented and they give their all. Never mind me. Go and have a good time, cut 'em some slack. Especially if you're an Inbetweener!

Joey Seiler's review on the Statesman Austin360 blog, February 9.

Pre-production interviews by
Priscilla Totiyapungprasert of the Daily Texan, published February 12

KUT.org audio piece published February 16

Review by Ryan E. Johnson on Austin.com, February 18