Frank Benge - Page 6

PERFORMANCE PARK is an interactive and immersive theatre piece, conceived and directed by Bonnie Cullum, that transforms the Vortex compound into a choose-your-own-experience environment where you are free to wander and pick what you will watch, what games you will play and the order in which you experience them. It is entirely unlike most other theatrical experiences in that you have the option to take a break to digest what you have seen and try to figure out what it all means and what you should do next.

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE is a 2014 stage adaptation by Lee Hall of the 1998 Academy Award winning film by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard of the same name. It was first created under the auspices of Disney Theatrical Productions and Sonia Friedman Productions. The story concerns an imaginary love affair involving Viola de Lesseps (Claire Grasso) and playwright William Shakespeare (Stephen Mercantel) while he was writing Romeo and Juliet. Many of the characters are based on historical figures, and many of the characters, lines, and plot devices allude to Shakespeare's plays. The production, now playing at Austin Playhouse, is one of their biggest productions to date. This script has become one of the most produced plays in America this season, and rightfully so, as it as entertaining as the 1998 film was.

THE SECRETARY is a world premiere comedy by Kyle John Schmidt that shines a dark and wry light on America's love affair with guns. Initially developed at the Ingram New Play Lab at Nashville Repertory Theatre and workshopped earlier this season at Hyde Park Theatre, this razor sharp black comedy gets a slick, polished and professional production from Theatre en Bloc, now playing at The Long Center. When the sweet elderly secretary at a local high school deals with a threat in her office by firing off six bullets, the local gun manufacturer gets the idea to name their brand new gun 'The Secretary', after her. Sales are slumping and they take advantage of the unfortunate modern reality that news of each new shooting is good for business. As production begins on their newest firearm, their guns begin going off without anyone pulling the trigger. Featuring an all female cast, THE SECRETARY is a black comedy with an extremely timely message.

Austin theatre troupe paper chairs has been creating original works of theatre here for the past eight years that consistently push boundaries both verbal and visual. These fresh and exciting works are, in no small part, due to two women who were among the founding members, Elizabeth Doss and Lisa Laratta. Opening on March 23 is their latest offering, THE REPENTANCE OF ST. JOAN, a new play by Austin playwright Patrick Shaw. Broadway World recently had the opportunity to sit down with them to get a deeper look into both the company and their upcoming production.

A GENTLEMAN'S GUIDE TO LOVE AND MURDER is a 2014 musical comedy, with a book and lyrics by Robert L. Freedman and music and lyrics by Steven Lutvak. This winner of four Tonys, including Best Musical, is based on the 1907 novel 'Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal' by Roy Horniman. The novel was also the source for the 1949 British film Kind Hearts and Coronets. The film and musical are both examples of black comedy and the musical also spoofs the antiquated musical form known as operetta. This frenetic farce has a marvelous score that recalls the best verbal gymnastics of Gilbert & Sullivan and Stephen Sondheim.

BAD JEWS is a 2012 play by Joshua Harmon that is billed as a dark comedy. Harmon says his inspiration for the play came 'after attending a service in which grandchildren of Holocaust survivors were invited to speak.' When the beloved patriarch of a New York Jewish family dies, he leaves behind a treasured family heirloom that is a culturally significant piece of jewelry. The item in question was a piece of jewelry, traditionally worn by men, that he succeeded in hiding from the Nazis during the Holocaust. His grandchildren gather to attend to family business and end up fighting over not only the family heirloom, but over faith, cultural assimilation, and each other's life choices while reliving, sharing and remembering.

WHITE RABBIT, RED RABBIT has been called a play. This experiment in audience participation is an experience that has become a global sensation that no one is allowed to talk about. The award-winning playwright, Nassim Soleimanpour, is Iranian. While he himself has been censored in his homeland, this work has escaped his country and thus has escaped censorship and is always presented without a set or director. Each actor (it is a different actor each night, and each actor can only perform it once) opens and performs the script, following Soleimanpour's instructions, before the audience that evening. They experience it right along with the audience for the first time. WHITE RABBIT, RED RABBIT is a unique experience that is different each night and is unlike anything you've experienced before

Beth Leavel, Tony Award winner for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, winner of the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical, and Outer Critics Circle Award winner for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical for playing Beatrice Stockwell in The Drowsy Chaperone, recently brought her cabaret show, KICKING AND SCREAMING, to the Sterling Events Center, as part of their 17th season. Ms. Leavel charmed the audience for 90 minutes with stories of her life in the theatre and sang songs that she has become famous for, along with some musical surprises that were an absolute delight.

THE LAST FIVE YEARS is a 2001 off-Broadway musical by Jason Robert Brown that took the author's own failed marriage to Theresa O'Neill as inspiration for this intimate yet powerful musical. It was also adapted into a film in 2015. The story is a look at the five-year relationship between Jamie Wellerstein, a rising novelist, and Cathy Hiatt, a struggling actress. Structurally, it is unique in that the story is not only mostly sung through, with just the barest of spoken dialogue, but also in how it tells the story from two different perspectives. Jamie (Joseph Urick) tells the story chronologically, while Cathy (Ginger Martel) tells the story backward. They only sing together once, during their wedding in the middle of the show. While the characters do sing together at the end, the songs are counterpoint to each other rather than both characters singing the same song. THE LAST FIVE YEARS is the inaugural tour being presented by ARIA Creative in association with the newly formed Texas Light Opera.

'Is it now? I thought I had more time.' So begins Will Eno's new play WAKEY WAKEY, currently receiving a regional premiere production at Hyde Park Theatre. It is, in fact, only the second production of Eno's new work. These first words are spoken by Guy (Ken Webster), a man who is coming to terms with the knowledge that his time here on Earth is extremely limited. He is about to die. In a profoundly moving and luminously human meditation, Guy proceeds to utterly shatter the fourth wall in order to engage the audience in questioning why we are here and examining the various paths we take only to all arrive at the same place when all is said and done. WAKEY WAKEY is a subtly sublime examination of what, in the human experience, is actually worth celebrating and treasuring; and it does it while maintaining a decidedly dark, yet humorous tone. While this may sound like a depressing subject, Guy reminds us that 'We're not here to mope, right? We're here to listen to music and drink some grape juice, maybe get a free T-shirt. We're here to say goodbye, of course - there's always someone or something to say goodbye to, and it's important to honor the people whose shoulders we stood upon and fell asleep against.'

AGENT ANDROMEDA: THE ORION CRUSADE answers that age old question: 'what would the love child of Cirque du Soleil and Flesh Gordon look like?'. The answer is this riotously funny burlesque science fiction production that is part brilliant aerial work and part circus spectacle. The piece may have been inspired by sci-fi classics like Barbarella, but it has become its own wholly unique work that is simultaneously sexy, visually arresting and funny.

ENRON is a 2009 play by British playwright Lucy Prebble. The play is based on the financial scandal and eventual collapse of the American energy corporation, Enron, based in Houston,Texas. Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling (Annemarie Alaniz) and his boss Ken Lay (Kayla Johnson) are the main characters along with Skilling's protege Andy Fastow (Caroline Beagles), who rises to become the chief financial officer. Prebble's play is a heady mix of multimedia razzle dazzle, morality play and political satire. To avoid being dry as dust, Prebble has taken complex financial concepts and framed them in terms of the entertainment world: market analysts become a boy band, the Lehman Brothers are presented as Siamese twins, Arthur Anderson is a ventriloquist act, to name just a few. Capitalism is, in general, presented as the tricks and illusions of the sideshow con man. Spanning the years between 1992 and the present, Prebble's play does take some dramatic license. Prebble makes Jeffrey Skilling, Enron's top executive, the main villain, instead of founder Kenneth Lay. Skilling gets the top job because of his vision of the future: Enron won't just provide natural gas; it will trade in energy, the internet, video streaming and even the weather. Skilling makes Andy Fastow the chief financial officer when he comes up with the plan to create shadow companies to disquise Enron's escalating debts as assets. Eventually, the whole corrupt bubble bursts.

Coming in March, The Baron's Men will be presenting the rarely performed The Curate Shakespeare AS YOU LIKE at the Curtain Theatre. This unique piece of theatre is subtitled 'the record of one company's attempt to perform the play by William Shakespeare.' The piece came about when the playwright, Don Nigro, was asked by a professional theatre company to adapt AS YOU LIKE IT for performance by a company of seven. Mr. Nigro wrote an original play about a motly company of actors, led by a daft curate, who present Shakespeare's AS YOU LIKE IT. The result is a comedy about their attempts to impersonate all of Shakespeare's characters. The play has had numerous productions nationwide and has become a cult theater classic. We recently had an opportunity to sit down with director Kate Clark for a deeper look at bringing this wholly unique piece to Austin audiences.

NOISES OFF, English playwright Michael Frayn's 1982 farce, had its start as a one-act play called Exits, written in 1977. The title comes from the theatrical stage direction used to indicate when a sound comes from offstage. The three act comedy is three looks at the first act of a British sex farce called 'Nothing On'. 'Nothing On' is your run of the mill sex farce where young girls run around in their underwear, old men drop their pants and a multitude of doors are constantly opening and closing. Act One is the less than perfect final technical rehearsal of the play. Act Two takes place backstage, during a matinee performance a month later, showing the audience the complete chaos that has erupted behind the scenes and is mostly done in silence. Act Three is the final performance of the tour where everything that can possibly go wrong does. The audience never sees the rest of 'Nothing On'.

Cirque du Soleil's CRYSTAL: A Breakthrough Ice Experience is their first show to marry their traditional acrobats and clowns with world-class ice skaters and the end result surpasses their usual offerings with a new kind of show. The show is a beautiful combination of skating and aerial work that takes your breath away time and again as the lead character is lifted, with a single hand, and taken aloft, for a ballet of movement far above the ice. Crystal and her partner perform a spellbinding aerial straps/skating pas de deux that blurs the boundary between ice and sky.

Playwright Rob Urbinati had a clever idea with DEATH BY DESIGN: Take the sophisticated and witty banter of the characters of Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde and drop them into the middle of an Agatha Christie murder mystery. In order for all of this to work, he wrote it as a farce. Edward Bennett (Bill Clausen), a playwright, and his actress wife, Sorel (Ashleigh Pedersen) have just had a disastrous opening night and they've escaped London to hunker down in their country digs, only to have their peace shattered by the arrival of one unexpected screwball guest after another. When one of the guests is murdered, the manor's maid is determined to solve the crime.

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME is a 2003 mystery novel by British writer Mark Haddon. The novel won the Whitbread Book Award for Best Novel and Book of the Year, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. The title is a quote from Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1892 short story 'Silver Blaze'. The play, by Simon Stephens, is a significant reworking of the source material. While the novel presented the story in first-person narrative, the play is presented as a reading of Boone's writing, read aloud by his teacher, Siobhan (Katie Kohler). The end result is that the play is presented as a beautifully theatrical play-within-a-play, both wonderfully self-aware and playful. Set in Swindon and London, THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME is about a 15-year-old amateur detective named Christopher Boone (Preston Straus) who is also a mathematical genius. He appears to have an unspecified autism spectrum disorder which is never explicitly stated in the play. The curious incident of the title is the mystery surrounding the death of a neighbor's dog, Wellington, found by Christopher, speared by a pitchfork. Christopher is exceptionally intelligent, but ill-equipped to deal with everyday life. His quest to solve the mystery takes him far beyond where he ever thought he could go, becoming a lesson on life and self reliance. Winner of the 2015 Tony Award® for Best New Play, THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, is now receiving a Texas premiere at ZACH Theatre, in a marvelously inventive production that immerses the audience into the sensory overload of Christopher's world.

Set over the course of a business lunch in a Japanese restaurant in an undisclosed U.S. locale, 893 | YA-KU-ZA follows Aya's (Mia King) bid to become the first female member of the infamous Japanese crime syndicate. A meeting has been arranged with a man known only as 1 (kt shorb) to discuss bringing Aya on board and what 1 expects from her. Daria Miyeko Marinelli's new play explores the themes of ambition, power, and loyalty, by asking what it means to be first and then examining what one is willing to do to get there.

IF I FORGET is the newest play by Steven Levenson, best known as the librettist for the smash hit musical Dear Evan Hanson. It is currently receiving a Texas premiere in a smart and stylish production from Southwest

Due to inclement weather, The University of Texas at Austin campus will be closed on Tuesday, January 16. Consequently, tonight's 8pm performance of FINDING NEVERLAND at Bass Concert Hall has been cancelled.