Auditions for Marvin's Room by Scott McPherson, Trinity Street Players, January 18, 2014

Trinity Street Players audition notice: Marvin's Room by Scott McPherson, directed by Cathy Jones. Auditions and performances at  First Baptist Church, 901 Trinity Street, Austin. Auditions on Saturday, January 18th at 1 p.m. with callbacks on Monday if necessary.


Winner of the 1992 Outer Critics Circle and 1992 Drama Desk Award for Best Play, Scott McPherson's Marvin's Room is a dramatic comedy featuring two estranged sisters who reunite to take care of their invalid father while one faces her own imminent death.


Roles for 4 women, 3 men and 2 male teenagers:

BESSIE (40 years) – Bessie is a leukemia patient, caretaker of Marvin and Ruth; loving and devoted.
LEE (late 30s) - Bessie's sister; self-centered and high-strung.
HANK (17 years) - Lee's troubled son, committed to a mental institution; moody.
RUTH (70 years) - Bessie's aunt; slight hunchback from collapsed vertebrae; aging and forgetful.
DOCTOR WALLY - Bessie's befuddled doctor.
BOB - Dr. Wally's brother and inept receptionist.
DOCTOR CHARLOTTE - Hank's unruffled psychiatrist.
CHARLIE - Hank's younger brother; quiet.
RETIREMENT HOME DIRECTOR - frustrated director of assisted living facility.

Please email marvins-room@trinitystreetplayers.com for an audition time on January 18th. Please bring theatre resume and headshot to auditions. You may request sides in advance to prepare for the audition.

Performances will be on Friday & Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons, March 28 – April 13, 2014.
For more information, please contact us by emailing marvins-room@trinitystreetplayers.com.

Sound & Recording Tech Relocating to Austin, January 2014

Received December 23, 2013:

My name is Evan Cox and I'm emailing Austin Live Theater because I wanted to know if ALT or CTX Live Theater need an audio person directing audio signals for any specific play. I have some musical theater experience in acting (The Fiddler on the Roof, Guys and Dolls) and with my recent education, I want to apply my knowledge to the technical side of theater. I have attached my resume that includes my Skills, Education, and Experience. Please contact me if you need someone who can be there by January to run sound for you all!

Thank you for your time and consideration!

Sincerely,
Evan Cox
(956) 326-8621 | cox.evan88@gmail.com

Click to view resume

Auditions in San Antonio for Portmanteaux by Deborah Yarchin, Overtime Theatre, December 26 and 27, 2013

Auditions for Portmanteaux by Deborah Yarchun,
Thurs 6-8 pm and Friday 4-6 pm; callbacks Friday 6-8 pm Overtime Theatre Center, 1203 Camden Street, San Antonio, 78215 - click for map

Auditions will include cold readings from the script or a one minute prepared contemporary monologue.
Portmanteaux by Deborah Yarchun: (Jan 24 – Feb 22) 

Liza, a recent college graduate and composer, works a manic number of odd jobs. When she’s not Duck Tour guiding, selling ads for a magazine about creepy places in Pennsylvania, catering, or tutoring, she creates soundscapes of her isolated existence in her now roommate-devoid, shelled out apartment. Her life-agenda is thrown into disarray when she collides with Dale, a young anarchist with a diametrically opposed concept of life. Through misadventures including an ill-fated attempt to fly a kite, urban spelunking, and an epic rideshare journey, Dale and Liza alter each other’s worlds.

(*) 'Two-fers' for Cameo Theatre's White Christmas, December 14, 2013 - January 1, 2014

From livingsocial.com:

"Irving Berlin's White Christmas": 2 Tickets

Cameo Theatre • San Antonio, TX

Select Dates in December and January

• Two Tickets ($36 instead of $72)
• Choice of Ten Performances
• Hear All the Songs from the Film Plus More!

Make your days merry and bright with a ticket to the stage production of Irving Berlin's White Christmas at Cameo Theatre. With two tickets to one of ten shows through January 1, you and a special date can get caught up in this classic story of two "dynamite acts" in the days of the dinner show, including original Irving Berlin favorites like "Sisters," "Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep," and of course, "White Christmas."
Choose from the following offers:
• $36 ($72 value) for two adult tickets to a show on December 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, or 29; or January 1
• $42 ($84 value) for two adult tickets to a show on December 31
Cameo Theatre's Website | Facebook

more about the show

A timeless tradition without which no holiday season would be complete, "White Christmas" tells the story of dynamic duo Bob Wallace and Phil Davis's rise to song-and-dance fame following World War II. Fueled by an interest in two lovely sisters with their own singing act, the pair of performers end up in Vermont putting on an elaborate holiday production that will warm your heart and have you on your feet by the finale.

Extra: Click to read Deborah Martin's December 17 view at www.mysanantonio.com

 

Click to go to the LivingSocial offer page

(*) Circle Arts Theatre 2014 Season, New Braunfels

New Braunfels

(*) Playhouse San Antonio Invites Applications for Unpaid Internships

Madeleine Garcia and Gabriella Melendez (Playhouse San Antonio)

Our interns are going to take over the world! Want to be a Playhouse intern? Apply today for the Spring! www.theplayhousesa.org/internship-application.

Funding Appeal for The Relentless Pursuit of Ice by Max Langert, Punchkin Repertory at FronteraFest, January 2014

Posted at IndieGoGo on December 15:

PunchkinRepVideo from Jessica on Vimeo.

Missionary Position — Pleasure Journeys for the Intrepid Lady Explorer, Glass Half Full Theatre, Dec. 12 - 14, 2013

 (www.glasshalffulltheatre.com)

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

The Missionary Position: Pleasure Journeys for the Intrepid Lady Explorer is a droll and satisfying show just completing its initial one-weekend run at Salvage Vanguard Theatre in east Austin. It's likely to return, and the public should keep it in mind as a performance worthy of  their ticket-buying dollars. 

The show was a period piece on lady explorers in late Victorian times. Caroline Reck and Cami Alys of Glass Half Full Theatre portrayed our intrepid lady explorers of the title, reporting to us the findings from their worldwide travels.



The setting  was a Chautauqua-type lecture hall, arranged in the weight room of a (no doubt) males-only health club, complete with punching bags hanging and swinging, ready for use. The audience was assumed to consist only of ladies, who had paid to receive insight from the intrepid travelers. Male audience members winked and played along. The performers skillfully created their comic world with the willing participation of the audience, amply compensated with gut-busting laughs.



It is no spoiler to reveal that the lecture concerned a line of menstrual garments designed with the benefit of the worldwide ethnological journeys of the stalwart ladies. They were trying, with spotty success, to fund their voyages by hawking these liberating devices to their audiences.



Late in the show it occurred to at least one casual observer that no obvious puppets or black-garbed puppeteers appeared in the show, despite their advance billing.  One of the punching bags wore a toy top hat, however, and our explorers demonstrated ladies’ self defense techniques on the punching bag with their bumbershoots. This highly abstracted male figure, representing a hostile attacker, swung crazily about under the jabs of the umbrellas, while the audience willingly chanted the attack points: eyes-bollocks-feet, approximately. The chanting audience completed the anatomy of the puppet as it enacted its part as a sinister character.



I didn’t really “get it” until much later; I whiffed in the event, and many in the audience probably also struck out. Still, the concept that the puppet is constructed and animated in the mind by the voices of the audience is sublime.  Though the attempt might have been only partially successful this time around, I await with anticipation the next go-round and further surprises of puppetry this group may spring on us. In promotional material Connor Hopkins of Trouble Puppet Theatre was given credit for puppetry in this show.



The charms of the ladies were immense, and the performance was multilayered, authentic, and anything but a simple laugh fest. Period elements were fairly stern: references to the White Man’s Burden, widows' rights to inherit property, and traveling without male escort all received breathless applause from the ladies of 1901. There was no mention of the right to vote, which lay in the future. (In the United States, women’s suffrage was gained with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, but the social movement for women’s voting rights began in the 1850s. Source: Wikipedia). Despite this comedic take on late Victorian times, the production avoided the common pitfall of patronizing historical views from the standpoint of 21st century moderns. This show was funny as well as thoughtful and mature -- certainly a rare combination.



Glass Half Full Theatre is deft and innovative even when performing a period comedy. The company provides full value, playing with (not against) the audience, and also reveals its innovative spirit and high creativity as it does so. This is a company to follow. Their program reports their next show will be a restaging of their Once There Were Six Seasons, to play at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, May 20 through June 7, 2014. 

Auditions in Wimberley for 'Charley's Aunt,' December 21-22, 2013

The Wimberley Players is proud to announce auditions for Charley’s Aunt by Brandon Thomas, directed By Tracy Arnold, on December 21, 2013 at 1:00 p.m. and December 22, 2013 at 2:00 p.m. at The Wimberley Playhouse, 450 Old Kyle Road, Wimberley TX, 78676 (click for map)

Show Dates: February 7, 2014 – March 2, 2014, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2:30 p.m.

*Please Contact Adam Witko to indicate which audition you will attend. Adam is at 512/632-7632 or adam@adamwitko.com *

(www.wimberleyplayers.org)At the auditions you will be asked to fill in an audition form. Please bring your personal calendar or schedule. You will be required to list any conflicts you may have during the rehearsal period which may start as early as January 3^rd until opening on February 7^th. 

If you have a resume and headshot please attach to your audition form. You will not need a prepared monologue. We will be reading sides from the play. You may asked to read individually but most likely with others. Scripts are available and can be checked out in advance by contacting Adam Witko. 

Description of Charley’s Aunt:  Jack Chesney loves Kitty Verdun and Charley loves Miss Amy Spettigue. They invite the ladies to meet Charley's wealthy aunt from Brazil, "where the nuts come from." Cancelling her visit at the last minute, the millionaire aunt sends the boys into cataclysmic confusion. What do they do now? The problem is solved by drafting their undergrad pal into a black satin skirt, bloomers and wig. As "Charley's Aunt", this charming frump is introduced to the ladies, to Jack's father and to Stephen Spettigue, Amy's guardian. When the real aunt turns up, classic comic confusion ensues.

Click to view character descriptions at Central Texas Live Theatre

(*) Guys and Dolls, musical by Swerling, Burrows and Loesser, Playhouse San Antonio, December 6 - 22, 2013

(www.theplayhousesa.org)

by Michael Meigs

Broadway! The 1930's! Folks like Arthur Freed and Busby Berkley portrayed that fairytale sophistication in the black-and-white films they cranked out of Hollywood, but an even more magical version came from the typewriter of Damon Runyon, the sportswriter, gambler, drunk and divinely gifted portraitist of the demi-monde of Broadway. 

Runyon knew those people intimately and his colorful prose was laden with slang and surprising turns of phrase often inherited from Yiddish. His writing portrayed a gallery of hustling lowlifes with hearts of gold and a stubborn attachment to their own odd notions of honor. He specialized in short stories with unexpected endings, a bit like those of O. Henry, but his were all written in the immediacy of the present tense, like anecdotes told over a couple of beers. Few read Runyon these days, and that's their loss.

His semi-fictitious creations live on in movies -- twenty films have retold his stories -- and plays, including Guys and Dolls. This light-hearted musical brings together two extremes of New York life: the crap-shooting, horse-betting gamblers and the uniformed Salvation Army staff with drum, trombone, kettle and their message of reform and a better life. Nathan Detroit is the small-potatoes organizer of the "longest established floating crap game in the City of New York," and Miss Sarah Brown is the uniformed Salvation Army sergeant heading the scarcely attended 49th Street Mission.

As in Runyon's fiction, these gamblers aren't real criminals; they're dreamers and grifters, perhaps with a inclination to a simple con, but I am telling you that they are in all ways sincere. Their markers -- should you be uninformed, those are their promises to pay, upon their honor -- are regarded with a seriousness not to be neglected or surpassed.

I am quick to say that the Playhouse production of Guys and Dolls does not entirely stick to the 1930s view of these denizens of the metropolis, but director and choreographer Michelle Pietri puts a robust and very masculine set of guys before you to scheme, avoid John Law and pitch the woo to dolls who are in my estimation most acceptable representatives of the female of the species.

Paige Blend as Miss Adelaide (photo: Siggi Ragnar)Putting aside the Runyonisms for the moment, there are two absolute standouts in this large cast, performers with total concentration and the gift of delivering their characters with special grace and style. 

 Paige Blend is Miss Adelaide, the woeful nightclub songstress left waiting for the altar for 14 years while Nathan Detroit attends to business. She has presence, voice, quickness in detail and the vivacity of a true comedienne. She's got some of best numbers in the show -- "Adelaide's Lament" about allergies caused by a continuing lack of matrimony, her duos "Sue Me" with Nathan Detroit (Miguel Ochoa) and "Marry the Man Today" with Miss Sarah Brown (Caroline Kittrell). She completely inhabits the persona of that not-too-bright but ever-so-sincere character. Her two nightclub numbers with the Hot Box Girls -- "A Bushel and a Peck" and "Take Back Your Mink" -- are adorable.

J.J. Gonzalez as Bennie Southstreet, a minor adjunct to Nicely-Nicely Johnson (chunky comedian Gerardo Vallejo) is the other. Bennie is written as a simple foil to a second banana, a handy harmonizer and straight man. But Gonzalez is intent every second we see him, reacting subtly to events around him. In a way, he represents us, the audience to the events of the play. In the key scene of the second act where the gamblers reluctantly attend a Salvation Army all-night revival meeting Director Pietri made the right choice to put him at center stage on the bench end closest to the audience.

 Robert Nauman, Gerardo Vallejo, J.J. Gonzalez (photo: Siggi Ragnar)

Read more at Central Texas Live Theatre. . . .

(*) San Antonio Auditions for Student Production of Bye-Bye, Birdie, Northside Performing Arts, December 16 - 17, 2013

AUDITIONS – BYE BYE BIRDIE

Each year, we produce an average of nine main stage productions and six workshop productions starring students from all around San Antonio. Through our programs, young performers grow in confidence, improve technique, see teamwork in action, and make lasting friendships while working together to put on a show.

Our spring 2014 Production is Bye Bye Birdie.

AUDITION: Monday, December 16 at 7:00pm OR Tuesday, December 17 at 7:00pm. Students should prepare a one-minute song to sing and be prepared to read from the script.
REHEARSALS: Saturdays 3:30-5:00pm April 19
PERFORMANCES: April 24-26, 2014
TUITION: $250.00 (There is a $25.00 Registration Fee for new students)

Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, November 14 -24, 2013

by Michael Meigs

Federico García Lorca's Bodas de Sangre takes places in the stark and arid landscape of the mind. The setting is rural Spain, somewhere far out in the countryside, and the characters are peasant families. They have no names, with the single exception of Leonardo, the angry and frustrated young farmer who precipitates the tragedy.

García Lorca identifies the others by role: the intended groom (novio), the bride (novia), the mother, the neighbor, the father of the bride. The story is simple: the confident young novio goes courting and fixes upon an eligible young woman related to men who killed his father and his brother. We watch the courting and attend the wedding; we also witness the anger of Leonardo, who still burns with a passion for the novia even though their acquaintance was broken years ago when Leonardo married the novia's cousin.

Jose Antonio Rodriguez, Anna C. Shultz (photo: Bret Brookshire)

Blood will have blood, despite all efforts to forget, to reconcile and to wash lives clean.

García Lorca had already achieved renown as a lyric poet when this, his first great success, was staged in Madrid for the first time in 1933. He doesn't fill these characters' mouths with abstractions or self-indulgent speculations, however; dialogue in the first half of the play is quick, sentences are short, and speech is often staccato. The early dialogue is sharp and cutting, much like the "little knife" that the novio's mother laments -- "A knife is such a simple object but it can take away the life of a man."

Contrasting with this energy are songs with imagery as lyrical as any of the author's poetry. In the second scene, Leonardo's wife and mother-in-law sing a cryptic lullabye about a mythic horse that refuses to drink; during the act two wedding preparations both servants and guests join in song, each offering a line or couplet.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Chicago, 15th U.S. Tour in Austin, November 19 - 24, 2013

by Michael Meigs

An enthusiastic voice behind us as we exited Bass Concert Hall at the University of Texas last night: "That was nothing like the movie!"

Live performance, even in the cavernous space of the Bass, can seize your attention and send your heart racing in ways that no flat screen image ever can. And that's what happens in the 15th (annual?) tour of Chicago, playing in Austin through this coming Sunday.

(Terra C. MacLeod)

The story is familiar and, frankly, banal, a combination of 1920's tabloid sensationalism, some 1930's B-movie styling, and a dose of Cinderella (and I don't mean Disney's Cinderella). Roxy murders her lover and when her big dumb good-hearted husband realizes what happened, he recants his own false impression; she gets sent to the state pen in Joliet, where a different hierarchy rules. Tough women sing in cages (Cell Block Tango) and vie with one another for favors from Mama the warden and from Billy Flynn, the lawyer who'll lie, cheat, misrepresent and do just about anything (except, interestingly, overtly request sexual favors) to earn his colossal fee by obtaining a non-guilty verdict. Tabloid notoriety promises to become celebrity that offers prospects of a career in vaudeville.

(Terra C. MacLeod and cast)

The thrills of this stage version are delivered hot and steaming by the choreography. It's classic Bob Fosse style done for the 1997 original staging by Ann Reinking and meticulously recreated by David Bushman. Muscular, supple and proudly strutting their stuff in revealing costumes, this cast of a dozen dancers astonishes and surprises again and again. The moves are cool, the scenes are fast and full of style, and over the course of the two hours of entertainment you'll have the opportunity to pick your very favorite. The final curtain call brings them on individually with their own names to receive the acclaim of the crowd.

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

Closing Week Video Promo: THERE IS A HAPPINESS THAT MORNING IS, Mickle Maher, Capital T at Hyde Park Theatre, October 24 - November 23, 2013

Capital T's video prequelfor the final (extended) week of performances, November 21-23, 2013:

by Michael Meigs, Nov 9

by Dr. David Glen Robinson, Nov 19

Opening This Week in Central Texas, September 2 - 8, 2013

Opening This Week 

September 2 - 8, 2013

Click images for additional information

Click HERE for a list of all productions CONTINUING on stage

Opening around Austin . . .

Always, Patsy Cline, New Braunfels benefit for Circle Arts Theatre, 
September 6 - 15

Bastrop Opera House, Sept. 6 - 28

in Wimberley

Seminar:
What Makes Austin Theatre Unique?
UT at Zach Theatre, September 6, 7 - 9 p.m.


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IN SAN ANTONIO
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Cameo Theatre, September 7 - October 6

Opening This Week in Austin and (*) San Antonio, November 26 - December 1

Opening This Week

in the Austin - (*) San Antonio region

November 26 - December 1, 2012

Click images for additional information

Click HERE for a list of all productions CONTINUING on stage

Opening in Austin . . .

 

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IN SAN ANTONIO
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