Frank Benge - Page 2

ONCE is an eight-time Tony Award®-winning musical from 2012, based on the 2007 Academy Award®-winning film of the same name by John Carney. It is running now on ZACH Theatre's Topfer Stage in the first Texas regional theatre production. ONCE is a contemporary love story about a complex and decidedly odd relationship that is driven by the power of music to connect people. ONCE is the story of an Irish musician and a Czech immigrant who are drawn together by their shared love of music. Their surprise friendship and eventual collaboration, heightened by the raw emotion of the music they create together, evolves into a powerful but extremely complicated romance. What makes this musical even more unusual is the fact that the cast also serves as the orchestra.

SOME HUMANS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS SHOW is a difficult show to describe as it is all over the map...and that is in no way a bad thing. This new work, by C.B. Goodman, was inspired by the 1903 public execution of Topsy, the elephant, and although there are clear echoes from the beginning, the inspiration never really becomes clear until the final moments, yet it never telegraphs the surprise ending, which takes a huge turn from the riotous belly laughs of the great majority of this highly entertaining and though provoking production.

Theatre Synesthesia has only been on the scene for a few short years, yet in that short time, they've managed to get on several award lists and have even walked away with a few of those awards. Their work has been exclusively dedicated to producing the writing of playwright Casey Wimpee... until now. On October 11th, they venture into new territory by producing Austin playwright Katie Bender's play THE FAULT. We recently had the opportunity to talk with founder and director, Devin Finn and playwright Katie Bender about this upcoming production from Theatre Synesthesia.

STELLA AND LOU is a 2015 play by Bruce Graham. It's set in Lou's Bar, the kind of joint where daylight is about as welcome as a penniless alcoholic who wants to run a tab. On one quiet night, two long time friends navigate small talk that begins with how things change with time and soon deepens as the topic comes around to past relationships. STELLA AND LOU is an intimate look at how friendships and the longing for companionship changes with the passage of time. It is also about how time affects the need for forgiveness.

THE WHO'S TOMMY is a rock musical with music and lyrics by Pete Townshend and book by Townshend and Des McAnuff, based on The Who's 1969 rock opera Tommy. There are several plot differences between the album, the film, and the stage production, though the general storyline is largely the same. The biggest difference in the story is the new finale, which was rewritten in 1993. Originally, Tommy instructs his followers to become deaf, dumb, and blind themselves in order to achieve enlightenment. In the 1993 rewrite, Tommy instructs them to not emulate him, but to live their own lives. In both versions, the crowd rejects both him and his message. Inspiration for the stage show came from the 1969 concept album, Tommy by The Who. It was the first album ever billed as a rock opera. The album has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and, before becoming a stage musical, it was also the basis for an all star recording that paved the way for the 1975 film of the same name. It first premiered on Broadway in 1993. Acclaimed director, Des McAnuff, and Pete Townshend sculpted the concept album into a stage show that won five Tony Awards including Best Original Score.

MONROE, a world premiere production, directed by Lara Toner Haddock, is the latest play by Lisa B. Thompson. The script is a heart warming and funny look at a Southern family. What makes it a remarkable evening of theatre is that it also shows how racial terror affects the minds and lives of these African Americans and their great strength that allows them to maintain their faith in a better tomorrow.Thompson has created some wonderful characters in this new play and shows that she has a deft hand at creating dialogue that leaps off the page. There's great wit here as well as heart. The scenes between the three women in the cast are absolutely delightful and the three actresses wring every possible laugh out of the audience with ease. MONROE reveals Thompson be a writer of great range as this new work is worlds away from her award winning play Underground, which won the 2017 Austin Critics' Table David Mark Cohen New Play Award.

MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET is a jukebox musical that uses the recording of an impromptu jam session that involed Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash as its basis. The recording was discovered in the vaults at the Sun Record Studios in Memphis, Tennessee in 1981. The recording itself was made on December 4, 1956. This session is considered a seminal moment in rock and roll. The musical opened on Broadway in 2010, after several tryouts and regional productions, and spawned a 2011 West End production. It uses 23 songs,not all of which are from the Sun Records catalog.

THE GOAT (or Who Is Sylvia?) is a Tony Award winning play by Edward Albee which opened on Broadway in 2002. It also won the 2002 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, and was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In it, Albee uses a married couple and their son to give audiences the opportunity to examine and hopefully question their own moral judgments on what society has labeled as taboo. Martin (Robert Pierson), his wife Stevie (Rebecca Robinson), and their son Billy (Preston Ruess), find their lives crumbling when Martin reveals he has fallen in love with a goat...the Sylvia of the title. Sylvia is a reference to the song 'Who is Sylvia?' from Shakespeare's play The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Proteus sings this song, hoping to woo Silvia. It was also referred to in Finding the Sun, a work by Albee from 1982.

Lisa B. Thompson burst onto the Austin theatre scene in a big way last season with her play UNDERGROUND, which was not only nominated for most of the awards given in Austin, but also managed to walk away with a few. She capped off the season by winning the New Play award from Austin Playhouse's annual playwrighting contest. The contest winning play, MONROE, is opening at Austin Playhouse on September 7th in a World Premiere production. Thompson, besides these two plays, is also the author of the book Beyond The Black Lady: Sexuality And The New African American Middle Class (University of Illinois Press, 2009) which received Honorable Mention in competition for the Gloria E. Anzaldua Book Prize from the National Women's Studies Association. Her work has appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Finding A Way Home: A Critical Assessment Of Walter Mosley's Fiction (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), and From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances (Wayne State University Press, 2011). Her plays include Single Black Female (Samuel French, Inc., 2012) which has been produced throughout the U.S. and Canada. BroadwayWorld recently had the opportunity to sit down with Thompson to talk, in depth, about her new play MONROE, right before it makes its World Premiere at Austin Playhouse to open their season.

If you've ever wondered what the home life of the guests on Jerry Springer was like, you're in luck! THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAILER PARK MUSICAL, written by David Nehls and Betsy Kelso, is an adult musical romp about the tenants of Armadillo Acres, Florida's most 'exclusive' trailer park. It was first performed at the very first annual New York Music Theater Festival in 2004 and made its Off-Broadway debut in 2005. When Pippi (Emily Villarreal), a stripper on the run, becomes the newest tenant, she comes between the agoraphobic Jeannie (Julie Foster) and Norbert (Jarret Mallon) her tollbooth collector husband. What ensues is a hilarious whirlwind tour of a world filled with adultery, strip clubs, flan, spray cheese, ex-boyfriends, permanent marker sniffing, storms, press-on nails and the Ice Capades. There's no deep message here, but there are plenty of laughs, winning performances and great singing voices.If you've ever wondered what the home life of the guests on Jerry Springer was like, you're in luck! THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAILER PARK MUSICAL, written by David Nehls and Betsy Kelso, is an adult musical romp about the tenants of Armadillo Acres, Florida's most 'exclusive' trailer park. It was first performed at the very first annual New York Music Theater Festival in 2004 and made its Off-Broadway debut in 2005. When Pippi (Emily Villarreal), a stripper on the run, becomes the newest tenant, she comes between the agoraphobic Jeannie (Julie Foster) and Norbert (Jarret Mallon) her tollbooth collector husband. What ensues is a hilarious whirlwind tour of a world filled with adultery, strip clubs, flan, spray cheese, ex-boyfriends, permanent marker sniffing, storms, press-on nails and the Ice Capades. There's no deep message here, but there are plenty of laughs, winning performances and great singing voices.

W;T is a 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning drama by Margaret Edson. The play also received the 'Best New Play' award for 1999 from the New York Drama Critics' Circle. Edson used her work experience in a hospital as part of the inspiration for her play. Functioning as both the narrator and a character in the play, the character of Vivian Bearing (Kristin Fern Jihnson) shifts between the present and the past, as she experiences stage four ovarian cancer through diagnosis to treatment with high-dosage experimental chemotherapy and finally, to her demise. Along the way, she also examines her life choices to discovers that she prefers kindness to intellectual detachment.

One of Austin's best kept secrets is Austin Cabaret Theatre, which quietly brings in the best of the New York cabaret scene for one night only performances. This is all due to one man, Stuart Moulton. Stuart lives in New York City, but his love of Austin is unmistakable. We recently sat down with him to talk about their upcoming eighteenth season.

P. L. Travers Mary Poppins magical nanny character was first published in 1934 and resulted in a series of eight children's books that ended in 1988. MARY POPPINS is a stage musical that uses the most iconic songs of the Sherman Brothers, with additional music and lyrics by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, and a script by Julian Fellowes. The musical is a hybrid of Travers children's books and the 1964 Disney film, which fuses various elements from the two. I have some serious issues with the script, which I intend to discuss, but director Ron Watson and his talented cadre of technical artists produce pure 60's Disney magic.

'The rest of the world might be going to hell, but stories are better than ever,' says Sandy (Tom Green), the boss and leader of the think tank in THE ANTIPODES, the newest play from Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Baker currently on stage at Hyde Park Theatre in what is the second production of this fascinating new work. Hyde Park has a history of producing her plays, most recently having staged both John and The Flick. In THE ANTIPODES, Baker examines the very nature of story telling and also has some fun with the concept of time and how it is perceived. It is also interesting to note that the definition of antipodes is 'the opposite'. Baker, in the very construct of the play, is giving us the opposite of traditional plot structure. Sandy reveals a great deal of what Baker is attempting to accomplish in his early remarks to the group: 'If you think about the greatest thinkers in world history: Jesus, Socrates, Confucius; None of those guys recorded anything or wrote anything down. And what we know about them we know through other people telling stories about their stories. Could we go back to the beginning? Could we remake our collective unconscious?'

MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers, is a musical theatre piece composed by Leonard Bernstein with additional lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and Paul Simon. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy, it premiered on September 8, 1971. Bernstein originally intended to compose a traditional Mass, but eventually settled on this more innovative form. It uses the Tridentine Mass of the Roman Catholic Church as its basis. While the liturgical passages are sung in Latin, MASS also includes added passages in English written by Bernstein, composer Stephen Schwartz, and Paul Simon (who wrote the first quatrain of 'Half of the People'). Intended to be staged theatrically, it has also been performed in concert format. This production has the added bonus of subtitling above the stage, although it really isn't necessar y.

Who hasn't been to one of the Broadway musical gems that play out in the open air amphitheatre during these blistering hot Austin summers? A gift to the community, the Zilker Summer Musical has been part of Austin for sixty years now. Always free to the public, this year's offering is ALL SHOOK UP, a jukebox musical from 2004 setting Elvis Presley's music to a book by Joe DiPietro. The story is based on William Shakespeare's 1602 play Twelfth Night. Since 1959, audiences have placed their blankets and lawn chairs under the stars at the Beverly S. Sheffield Zilker Hillside Theater to be treated to such Broadway hits as Hairspray, The Sound of Music, The Music Man, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Oklahoma, The Unsinkable Molly Brown and L'il Abner to name just a few. Shows that, in many cases, no other theatre in town would produce. BroadwayWorld recently had the opportunity to sit down with J. Robert Moore, the Artistic Director of Zilker Theatre Productions to talk about the Zilker musical as well as the organization.

RUTHLESS! is a musical spoof of show business with music by Marvin Laird and book and lyrics by Joel Paley that not only spoofs Broadway musicals, but is also a satire of non-musical movies about showbiz such as All About Eve. The musical premiered Off-Broadway in 1992. The show won the 1993 New York Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Musical.

Leonard Bernstein is an American treasure. He was one of the first American born conductors to receive worldwide acclaim. His fame is derived not only from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, but also from his conducting most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his prodigious body of music as the composer of West Side Story, Peter Pan, Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town, On the Waterfront, MASS and a range of other compositions, including three symphonies and many shorter chamber and solo works. Bernstein was the first conductor to give a series of television lectures on classical music, primarily aimed at youth, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. As a composer, he has created pieces that are, without question, part of the fabric of our lives. 'MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers' was composed by Leonard Bernstein with text by Bernstein and additional text and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy, it premiered on September 8, 1971. The performance was part of the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Austin will have the rare opportunity to experience this glorious piece as part of the Bernstein at 100 celebration this month. BroadwayWorld recently had the opportunity to talk to conductor Peter Bay, Musical Director and Conductor of the Austin Symphony Orchestra about the upcoming production.

Recently, BroadwayWorld had the opportunity to interview Dane Laffrey who recently received his first Tony nomination for his work on the Broadway hit ONCE ON THIS ISLAND. Dane's design is an explosive exercise in controlled chaos. Since ONCE ON THIS ISLAND is a tale of magical realism set in the Caribbean, Dane channeled the current conditions of regions hit by 2016's Hurricane Matthew. The stage is covered in sand, a crashed semi-truck takes up a corner of the space, a pool of water is held back by a pile of sand bags, and a downed power line has even crushed some of the seats. It's a complex set that has engrossed countless audiences seated in its theatre in the round setting. A seasoned scenic design veteran, Dane has designed sets for productions across Japan, Australia, Norway and the United States. Throughout his twelve years in the New York circuit, he's built sets for Broadway productions such as Spring Awakening and Fool For Love, along with off-Broadway hits such as The Maids and Woody Harrelson's Bullet for Adolf, as well as the upcoming production of Tennessee William's Summer and Smoke.

LUCKY STIFF is a musical farce with lyrics and libretto by Lynn Ahrens and music by Stephen Flaherty, that is notable historically for several things. To begin with, It was the first collaboration for the team whose later collaborations include Ragtime and Once On This Island. It was created and performed at Playwrights Horizons off-Broadway in 1988, and won the Richard Rodgers Award for that year. LUCKY STIFF is based on a 1983 novel The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo by Michael Butterworth. It received a full production in London's West End in 1997 but, to date, has never had a Broadway production. In 2015, a film version was created but it has only been seen at film festivals.