End of the Road for the Austin Live Theatre Blog

This post at www.austinlivetheatre.blogspot.com is #5247 in a series that started in June, 2008.   It's the last one that will appear.

The new site is Central Texas Live Theatre (CTXLT.com).  Click to go the new site:

Austin Live Theatre began here at www.blogspot.com.  I kept this blog alive even after my family gave me the Christmas present of a .com website for my theatre musings, principally because Blogspot's connection to Google promised enhanced web visibility.  Starting sometime in 2010, I put everything up at the blog, including all those inside pages at AustinLiveTheatre.com that I was creating whenever I got word of another live theatre production in the greater Austin area.

In late 2012 I extended the sites' coverage to San Antonio and nearby towns.  I found I'd bitten off more than I could comfortably chew.  With much more information to gather and process, creating a new page for every production became more tedious and time consuming.  

I decided last October that I would instead simply link theatre companies' websites and Facebook postings to the listings in the Central Texas theatre calendar. Since that time the content of this blog has been essentially the same as that of AustinLiveTheatre.com. 

At about the same time the firm that hosts my site began admonishing me to upgrade my content management software, still in its 2009 version.  Since late November I've been operating a 'beta' site with up-to-date software and security at www.CTXLT.com.  It still needs some fixing, polishing and improved formatting, but as of today that site is the principal -- and only -- location for this ongoing coverage of theatre art in Central Texas.  My various URLs all now redirect to www.CTXLT.com. 

I greatly appreciative those who've followed this blog, especially the 28 who subscribed to to it.  I invite you to use the RSS feed for the new site. Here it is:

(for www.ctxlt.com)

One of the principal lessons I've learned over the past 5½ years is that theatre is about community.  

That's not true of big media.  Films are not community; Broadway touring shows are not community.  A live theatre production in your own town is an event that enhances empathy, concern, and a sense of belonging, whether you're a theatre artist, a technician or an audience member.  

I concluded some time ago that my original goal of increasing the audiences for live theatre was quixotic.  This undertaking is unlikely to move those who don't already know live theatre very far off their couches or out of their bars.  

Instead, with Austin Live Theatre and its successor Central Texas Live Theatre (CTXLT) I aim to inform artists and potential artists, to provide informed commentary, and to help bridge the distances between the many theatre communities active across the region.  

After all, knowing more about one another reminds us of what we have in common.  That includes not only the art form itself but also the shared emotions and human concerns that give theatre its relevance and vitality. 

 

Michael Meigs

Video by Trevor Chauvin: Spring Awakening at Playhouse San Antonio, May 17 - June 9, 2013

A video blog (3:44) by Trevor Chauvin introducing the cast for the production by







(Playhouse San Antonio, 800 West Ashby at San Pedro Avenue, San Antonio)
of
Spring Awakening
Music by Duncan Sheik, Book & Lyrics by Steven Sater
 





The Playhouse (Russell Hill Rogers Theater)   800 W. Ashby Pl., San Pedro Park at Ashby, San Antonio, Texas, 78212
 May 17-June 9, Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 2:30pm
 $25-Adult; $22-Senior (60+) and Military w/ ID; $15-Child and Student w/ ID 
 For More Information: (210) 733-7258 and boxoffice@theplayhousesa.org
 Purchase Tickets Online
 An innovative, fearless, hard rock look at teenage sexual awakening in the spring of their lives, and the disastrous consequences brought about by the ultra-conservative, repressive society in which they live. Set in 1891 Germany, Spring Awakening is as current as Roe v. Wade and as American as apple pie.
 
EXTRAS:
Rehearsal blog by Deborah Martin of the San Antonio Express-News, April 9
Feature by Jenni Mori, www.theatre-for-change.blogspot.com, April 17

Liz Fisher on Maxsym Kurochkin's Vodka, Fucking and Television, Breaking String Theatre blog

Liz Fisher's Vodka, Fucking and Television

by Graham Schmidt on the Breaking String blog, July 15

Liz Fisher (image: Will Hollis Snider)

 

I caught up with Liz Fisher a few days ago for a cup of coffee and some talk on her upcoming work with Breaking String - a full-on production of Vodka, Fucking and Television by 2012 New Russian Drama Festival spotlight artist Maksym Kurochkin, to be staged at Hyde Park Theatre this coming November. Fisher's pale blue eyes, smokey voice and arresting stage presence have knocked out thousands of Austin theater-goers over the past decade, and her work with Breaking String's been extensive, with award-winning performances in The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and as a co-producer of the inaugural 2011 New Russian Drama Festival.

Fisher - an old hand when it comes to new plays - projects palpable excitement at the idea of staging a Kurochkin piece. "Maksym writes these sprawling, epic stories, some of them even have a mythic feel, mixing reality with fantasy, spanning centuries. This one's a four-hander, it's compact, but even here he's skewering audience assumptions, pranking all over the place, pushing against his own limits.”

Fisher's upcoming production grew out of her work on the second annual NRDFest this past March (here's a rundown on Breaking String's efforts to link Austin with Moscow's contemporary theater scene). To complement the American premiere of The Schooling of Bento Bonchev, she worked up a staged reading of Kurochkin's 2003 comedy. Vodka introduces the "Hero" - a writer at the end of his rope who tries shedding the vices that hold him back. The plot hinges on a delightful, irreverant device: Kurochkin presents these vices as characters - Vodka, Fucking and Television - who are challenged to justify their presence in the hero's life, or get the boot.

From her first encounter with Max's work, Fisher sensed its "Austin" vibe. "It felt young, fresh, smart, darkly comic, and there's so much new work being staged here. And of course, with Vodka being a four-hander, it was perfect for a staged reading. Right after the festival, Robert Faires said it'd be easy to mistake Max for an Austin playwright, and I think he really nailed it."

Read more at the Breaking String blog. . . .

Austin Playhouse: A New Building, A New Blog

The ten-year-old Austin Playhouse led by the Toner family has launched a blog to involve its many supporters in the story of its move from rented space near St. Edward's University to a specially-built facility with two theatres at the Mueller complex off Airport Road. The company is promising a full season for 2011-2012 (The Lion in Winter, Boeing Boeing, Man of La Mancha, A Room with a View and Born Yesterday). The company has vigorously promoted season ticket sales, despite the uncertainty about the completion date for its new theatres, probably in early 2012. They expect to announce performance dates in the next few weeks.

Here are extracts from the first extensive posting at the new Austin Playhouse blog:

This summer has been full of fundraising meetings, planning meetings, architect meetings, and more fundraising meetings. In the midst of all the meeting madness we thought it would be fun to remember how we got here and exactly why we're doing this.

Austin Playhouse was founded by Don Toner and members of the Artistic Company in 1999. We’ve come a long way from our first season, where we were invited to perform Light up the Sky, Mahalia, and The Fantasticks at Concordia University. Our second season we produced four plays in various venues around town including Arcadia at Hyde Park Theatre, Blues in the Night at a downtown nightclub, and The Man Who Came to Dinner and The Seagull at McCallum High School. [ . . .]

During our years at Penn Field we enjoyed a strong growth of our audience base, but we also experienced skyrocketing rental rates. We started our stay at Penn Field paying roughly $5,000 a month. By 2010 the rate was $12,000 per month. Our growth as a company was severely limited by this monthly burden. Additionally, after a few seasons we found ourselves quickly cramped in the small space, without room for costumes, props, offices, rehearsal or scene building space. We also wanted to offer our amazing patrons a world-class facility and that simply was not possible at Penn Field. [. . . .]

The Austin Playhouse company has renovated warehouses and old movie theatres, but we’ve never had a brand new facility built just for theatre. We found a beautiful location in Northwest Austin along Spicewood Springs Road and began drawing plans and initiating a fundraising campaign. [. . .] Unfortunately, in the course of performing due diligence on the site it became clear that the land would not be able to support a theatre and adequate parking.

So the search continued as the rent continued to rise...

Click to view full text at austinplayhouse.blogspot.com . . . .

Interview: Tony Kushner Talks about Tennessee Williams, Ransom Center Blog

Published at Cultural Compass, the blog of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, May 19:

Q and A: Playwright Tony Kushner speaks about influence of Tennessee Williams

In light of the Ransom Center’s current exhibition Becoming Tennessee Williams, Cultural Compass spoke with Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner about Tennessee Williams’s legacy. Read a transcript of the interview with Kushner, in which he discusses how Williams has influenced him, his first encounter with Williams’s works, Williams’s courageousness, and more.

How has Tennessee Williams influenced you?

Profoundly. Of the three major, post-war American playwrights—Williams, Miller, and O’Neill—I had the easiest time connecting to Tennessee when I was young and starting to think about being a playwright. When I read A Streetcar Named Desire for the first time, I fell in love with Tennessee because he was a southern writer and I grew up in Louisiana. The voice was very familiar and powerful to me because he was gay. Even though there were no overtly gay characters, you could feel issues of sexuality that seemed of great moment to me right under the surface of the plays.

Williams, much more than any other American playwright, succeeded in finding a poetic diction for the stage. I immediately identified with that ambition, with the desire to write language that simultaneously sounded like spontaneous utterance but also had the voluptuousness in daring, peculiarity, quirkiness, and unapologetic imagistic density of poetry. Also because it is a written language, the tension between artifice, naturalism, and spontaneity in art has always been exciting to me. I felt that I experienced it really viscerally in terms of American playwriting first in Tennessee’s writing.

[Image: Tony Kushner meets students during a 2006 visit to the Harry Ransom Center ]

Read full interview at the Ransom Center's blog Cultural Compass . . . .