Frank Benge - Page 11

Broadway World Austin continues our series looking into Austin area theatres with the Fine Arts Academy at McCallum High School. As Austin ISD's district-wide fine arts intensive high school program, it provides arts education for 9th - 12th grade students pursuing an accelerated arts curriculum as fine arts majors. McCallum Fine Arts Academy attracts a diverse student body from all over Austin, including students who attended public, private, and home middle schools. We sat down to talk to director Joshua Denning to get a deeper look into this program that is producing theatre that holds up to the work being produced on any stage in town.

A SHINING ATTRIBUTE by Candyce Rusk is a one act, solo work that tells the story of Bijou, a spirit that haunts a former burlesque house in Boston's Combat Zone. The Combat Zone was the name given in the 1960's to the adult entertainment district in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. In the early 70's the suggestively blue entertainment that was burlesque became less tease and more blunt nudity. A SHINING ATTRIBUTE explores the life and loves of Bijou, one of the denizens of The Combat Zone. This is a look at her downward slide through her final abusive yet oddly loving romance when she consorted with Greek mob boss Black Jack for her survival.

FIRST DATE THE MUSICAL is a new musical with a book by Austin Winsberg and music and lyrics by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner. It's based around the various permutations of blind dating. It made its world premiere in 2012 at Seattle's ACT Theatre in a 5th Avenue Theatre co-production and made its Broadway debut in 2013. FIRST DATE THE MUSICAL has a noticeable sitcom quality. It also has genuine wit, charm and a musical panache that is a breath of fresh air compared to the overblown musicals being created these days. Set mostly in a Manhattan restaurant, it shows the audience the extremely awkward first date of Aaron (Scott Garrett Graham) and Casey (Marett Hanes), a serial dater who's clearly more experienced with romance Russian roulette. This blind date is Aaron's reentry into the world of romance after being ditched at the altar by his fiancee, Allison (Kate Sullivan Gibbons), and his nervousness is clearly evident. The couple's inner thoughts are revealed in the evening's musical numbers.

A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS by Robert Bolt started out as a radio drama for BBC Radio in 1954. It was adapted into an hour-long live television version in 1957 and finally was reworked by Bolt for the stage in 1960. After success on the West End and on Broadway, it was subsequently made into an Academy Award winning 1966 film and a 1988 television movie. The title refers to Bolt's portrayal of More as the ultimate man of conscience remaining true to his beliefs while adapting to increasingly horrific circumstances. Bolt borrowed the title from Robert Whittington, a contemporary of More.

Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare is one of his plays that scholars either group with his tragedies or as one of the so-called "problem plays". FIXING TIMON OF ATHENS is part of an on-going attempt by the Rude Mechs to make more accessible and usable pieces of theatre out of the canon of Shakespeare's problem plays. With FIXING TIMON OF ATHENS Kirk Lynn has essentially cleaned-up and streamlined the play into a ten character piece that functions as a modern and timely parable about greed.

TRIBES by Nina Raine first premiered in 2010 at London's Royal Court Theatre. It won the 2012 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play in its Off-Broadway premiere. The play is a look at a dysfunctional British family, made up of parents Beth (Babs George) and Christopher (Mitch Peleggi) and their three grown children who are still living at home: Daniel (Aaron Johnson), Ruth (Ava L'Amoreaux) and Billy (Stephen Drabicki). Billy is deaf and was raised to read lips and speak but without knowledge of sign language. One evening in a nightclub, Billy meets Sylvia (Iris McQuillan-Grace), a woman born to deaf parents now slowly going deaf herself. As Billy falls in love with Sylvia, and she teaches him sign language, the play exposes the audience to the deep divide between the deaf and hearing communities.

Adrienne Dawes' new play, DENIM DOVES, is now in its World Premiere staging at Salvage Vanguard Theatre. Described as a collaboratively devised piece created with SVT and as a feminist farce, DENIM DOVES plays like a modern day version of a Greek comedy by Aristophanes. It's a deliriously silly bawdy romp that explores woman subjugated under a "dick-tatorship".

DISGRACED is the 2013 Pulitzer Prize award-winning play that asks difficult questions about religion, assimilation and individuality. It is now in its Regional Premiere at Austin Playhouse. DISGRACED tells the story of Amir (J. Ben Wolfe), a successful Pakistani-American lawyer, whose life unravels after he lends his name to the cause of an imam accused of terrorism. When he and his artist wife Emily (Molly Karrasch) host an intimate dinner party, the social niceties that can disguise a person's prejudice soon dissolve when the evening escalates into increasingly brutal language exposing all the prejudice simmering underneath the veneer of civility.

TERMINUS, now in a World Premiere engagement at The Vortex, is a new play by Gabriel Jason Dean. This intricately layered family drama is the latest chapter in Dean's cycle of plays about the Georgia working class, The Attapulgus Elegies. TERMINUS examines a family haunted by the traumas of race and class in the South both in the past and in the present. This projected seven play collection covers a twenty plus year span and chronicles the disappearance of a small mill town.

Broadway World Austin continues our series of interviews with Austin theatres with Ken Webster of Hyde Park Theatre, the Austin Chronicle Reader's Pick for Best Theatre Director in 2010, 2012, and 2013.

BLUE MAN GROUP is not your average stage show. BLUE MAN GROUP is a strange, zany, comical, and surreal experience. How do you describe the indescribable? Its not a musical, its not a play, its an experience. While performance art comes closest to categorizing them, what an audience experiences is really a unique communal party. Formed in 1991, BLUE MAN GROUP is best known for their creative stage productions around the world.

During the seventies, the adult film industry went through a very strange period of trying to make adult films with actual plots and dialogue. The attempts, to put it mildly, were laughable. The 'acting' was, at best, wooden and the dialogue ranged the gamut from stilted to repetitive. During this period, which has been dubbed 'The Golden Age of Porn' or 'Porno Chic', came some big box office successes. Among the biggest hits of this era was the film 'Debbie Does Dallas', released in 1978, close to the end of the period. By the early eighties, home video effectively ended the era where people went to movie theaters to see porn.

KILL THE CRITIC! by Todd Wallinger is a new period farce that had its second production here in Austin. Set in the fifties, it is a clever little script about an actor who kidnaps a critic to avoid another bad review. Unfortunately, this production by Stage Presence Players, had so much wrong with it that it is hard to know where to begin.

THE BOOK OF MORMON is a satirical musical with book, lyrics, and music by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone. Parker and Stone are the creators of the animated series South Park, which just wrapped up its 19th season. Lopez is best known as a co-composer/co-lyricist of Avenue Q and Frozen. THE BOOK OF MORMON is the story of two young Mormon missionaries who are sent to Uganda for their first mission. The boys have a naive outlook on life and little in common with each other. When they try to spread "the word" among the locals they find their audience has many things on their minds and religion is the last thing they are thinking about.

With only 30 audience members per performance, your experience with the Rude Mech's NOW NOW OH NOW begins when you get your tickets. Each audience member must choose from one of six symbols. Your choice will group you into a tribe of five members. You are about to embark on an adventure with people you've never met before. Oh, the places you'll go…

SKYLIGHT is a drama by British playwright David Hare. It premiered in London in 1995, played on Broadway in 1996 and was revived in 2015, winning the Tony for Best Revival of a Play. The play also won the 1996 Laurence Olivier Award for Play of the Year. Hare's brutal examination of an extramarital affair gone South, like all of his plays, is unapologetically political. In SKYLIGHT, we see his examination of the Britain that was deeply scarred by Margaret Thatcher. The play, in many ways, mirrors the divide currently happening in this country with our vanishing middle class. It is as much about the state of the nation as it is about the state of the heart.

David Sedaris wrote 'SantaLand Diaries', an essay that is a humorous account of Sedaris' stint working as a Christmas elf in 'SantaLand' at Macy's department store. Sedaris first read the essay on NPR's Morning Edition on December 23, 1992. Well-received, it became Sedaris' first major break. In 1996, Joe Mantello adapted Sedaris' essay for the stage as a one-man, one-act play, which debuted (as THE SANTALAND DIARIES) at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York on November 7, 1996. Mantello's adaptation has since become a seasonal staple of regional, college and high-school theatre.

THE WILD PARTY is a musical with a book by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe and music and lyrics by LaChiusa. Based on the 1928 Joseph Moncure March poem of the same name, the show is about the masks that people wear culturally and the removal of those masks over the course of a party. The 2000 Broadway production was originally presented as a series of vaudeville sketches, with signs at the beginning and the end that announced the next scene with a show card propped on an easel at the side of the stage. In this UT Department of Theatre and Dance production, that device has been abandoned. The piece, in this incarnation, uses a vaudeville straw hat act to bookend the production at open and close. The remainder of the show, for the most part, is the actual party and I found the device to be most effective putting more heart into the piece than the original concept did.

THE DUMBWAITER, by Harold Pinter, is a one act play written in 1957. Almost 60 years on, it still has a lot to say about our need to assert our individuality while seeking meaning. It still manages to make a profound statement about the human condition. The title refers not only to the food lift that delivers orders to the two hit-men, Ben (Ken Webster) and Gus (Jason Phelps), but also refers to Gus, who doesn't know that he is waiting to be the victim, and possibly even to Ben, whose blind obedience to higher authority eventually causes him to be confronted with having to eliminate his partner.

The journey of every gay person is different and, in ways, the same. The hurts, the emotional scars and the retrospectively funny stories are all part of the baggage of every gay person and part of what makes us the survivors that stand here today. In NAKED AS A GAYBIRD, writer and performer Jay Byrd starts the tale of his journey by literally dragging that baggage on stage and then proceeding to unpack it. In turns, his story is touching, hilarious, painful… and at every moment, damn entertaining.