Frank Benge - Page 9

SILENCE! THE MUSICAL is a 2005 musical created by Jon and Al Kaplan and Hunter Bell as a parody of the 1991 Academy Award-winning film The Silence of the Lambs. The project began in 2003 as an internet musical made up of nine songs that retold the entire story. The audio tracks became so popular that a stage production was conceived and mounted. The show has received awards and accolades including Outstanding Musical (New York International Fringe Festival), Best New Musical (Off Broadway Alliance), and Top Ten Plays and Musicals (Time Magazine). This production from Doctuh Mistuh Productions is a remount of their 2014 B. Iden Payne award winning Best Musical production. It also won B. Iden Payne Awards for Best Actress and Best Director

CARNIVAL is a musical that originally appeared on Broadway in 1961, with a book by Michael Stewart and music and lyrics by Bob Merrill. You may better know Merrill as the writer of the lyrics for Funny Girl. It is based on the 1953 MGM film Lili. The show is seldom produced; outside of the original production's National Tour; only a handful of productions have been done professionally, and one of those was a staged concert version. The main reason is the difficulty of the music. I am pleased to report that not only does the Summer Stock Austin production handle the score beautifully, the entire production is a dazzling, magical delight.

Few creations have enjoyed the cultural longevity of Charles Addams characters The Addams Family. This satirical inversion of the typical American family was first introduced back in 1938 as a series of 150 single panel cartoons in the pages of The New Yorker that continued until Addams' death in 1988. The characters, an eccentric clan that delights in the macabre and yet are totally unaware that others find them frightening or at the very least bizarre, have been adapted for other mediums multiple times: a 1964 television series, the 1973 and 1998 animated series, three feature films in the '90's, five video games, a pinball machine that remains the best selling of all time and in 2010, the Broadway musical THE ADDAMS FAMILY. The musical has a book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice with music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa and is currently receiving a witty and tuneful local production at the Long Center by Summer Stock Austin.

THE GLASS MENAGERIE was Tennessee Williams first successful play. It premiered in Chicago in 1944 and later transferred to Broadway. This four character memory play took Williams from obscurity to fame, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1945. The most strongly autobiographical of his work it features characters based on his overbearing mother and his fragile sister Rose. Before the play Williams had covered the material in both a short story called 'Portrait of a Girl in Glass' and a screenplay written earlier called The Gentleman Caller. The play is the most lyrically beautiful of all of Williams work, due mostly to the poetry of Tom's soliloquies to the audience. It examines the isolation of people who can't connect to each other or the world at large.

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR started out in 1970 as a rock opera concept album with music by Andrew Lloyd-Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice. The response to the album was so great that a stage version debuted on Broadway in 1971. Like opera, the musical is sung-through, with no spoken dialogue. Loosely based on the Gospels' accounts of the final week of Jesus life, the story begins with the preparation for the arrival of Jesus and his disciples in Jerusalem and ends with the crucifixion. Unlike the narratives in the Bible, the show focuses on the interpersonal and political struggles between Judas Iscariot and Jesus. A large portion of the plot centers on Judas, depicting him as a tragic figure who is unhappy with the direction in which Jesus is steering his disciples. The show contains many intentional anachronisms, including slang and ironic allusions to modern life and attitudes.

Playwright Eva Suter has taken tropes from 70's sci-fi and plot elements from Shakespeare's Othello to create HOLD ME WELL. In her play, making it's World Premiere (outside of the UT production a few years back), Suter has crafted a dystopian tale of a desolate Central Texas inhabited solely by women after a catastrophic war has eradicated the male population and the Y chromosome. The threat of another war with an unseen and vaguely described outside force looms in the future as these five women struggle to save 'the stock' which is the future of humanity.

THE FLICK is the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning play by Annie Baker that also won the 2013 Obie Award for Playwriting. Set in a run down old movie palace called The Flick, the action of the play concerns three low wage ushers: newbie Avery (Delante G. Keys), veteran Sam (Shanon Weaver) and film projectionist Rose, (Katie Kohler), who are responsible for the tedious labor that keeps the place running, from cleaning up spilled drinks from the floors to taking tickets. The show is a comedy of the mundane - the everyday annoyances and frustrations of the workplace.

Austin Shakespeare, central Texas' classical theater company, will collaborate with ACMC for the first time to create a music-filled production of Shakespeare's Henry VIII at 7:30 pm on Saturday, July 16th at the University of Texas' beautiful Bates Recital Hall. Part of the 20th Anniversary Austin Chamber Music Festival, this one night only event will feature professional actors in Tudor period costume performing alongside a piano quintet.

After its successful run in 2014, Doctuh Mistuh Productions will be bringing SILENCE! THE MUSICAL back to Austin, Texas for a three week run, August 18 through September 4. DMP will be remounting the revival at Austin Playhouse in Highland Mall. Amy Downing will be reprising her award-winning performance as Clarice Starling. She will be joined by original cast members Huck Huckaby (Hannibal), David Ponton (Buffalo Bill), Libby Dees Detling (Catherine & Senator Martin), and Matt Connely (Papa Schtarling). New cast members include Andrew Cannata (Dr. Chilton), Scott Shipman (Jack Crawford), Jessica O'Brien (Ardelia Mapp), Kathryn Lane (Dream Clarice) and Brian DeFilippo (Dream Hannibal). The production will be stage and music directed by DMP Artistic Director Michael McKelvey.

Street Corner Arts has announced Michael Stuart, Aaron Johnson and Christopher Alvarenga will star in their upcoming production of ORPHANS by Lyle Kessler.  The production is directed by native Austinite Sarah Kimberly Becker. Earlier this Spring, Street Corner selected Johnson and Becker to helm their pioneer production of the Company's Sidewalk Series. The program, in its inaugural year, mentors promising Austin theatre-makers in producing and fully realizing a production. 

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines, he died in poverty at the age of 46, and is only now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE is a short story written in March 1927. In the tale, an unnamed narrator pieces together the story of an area known by the locals as the 'blasted heath' in the wild hills west of Arkham, Massachusetts. The narrator discovers that many years ago a meteorite crashed there, poisoning every living being nearby. The vegetation grows large, but is inedible due to a metallic taste, animals go mad and are grotesquely deformed, and the people go insane and die one by one. Seeking to create a truly alien life form, he drew inspiration from numerous fiction and nonfiction sources. First appearing in the September 1927 edition of Amazing Stories, THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE became one of Lovecraft's most popular works, and remained his personal favorite short story. It was adapted into feature film versions in 1965, 1987, and 2010. Forbidden knowledge is a central theme in many of Lovecraft's works. His characters are often driven by curiosity or scientific endeavor, and in many of his stories the knowledge they uncover proves so Promethean in nature that it leaves the character regretting or destroyed from what they have learned or being destroyed psychically. In the case of THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE, all of these are true.

JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN is Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's second-to-last play written in 1896. The source material for the play comes from an incident from an earlier period in his life, revolving around the suicide attempt of an army officer accused of embezzlement. While the play falls along side of the naturalism and social commentary of the works of Ibsen's middle period, the ending also clearly hints at Ibsen's final phase of more symbolic work, which can clearly be seen in his final play, When We Dead Awaken.

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler. Inspired by the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night, it involves the romantic lives of several couples. Since its original 1973 Broadway production, the musical has been produced in the West End, by opera companies, and in a 2009 Broadway revival. It was adapted for film in 1977. It received Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book and Best Original Score.

DOGFIGHT is a musical with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul and a book by Peter Duchan. It is adapted from Nancy Savoca's 1991 film and premiered Off-Broadway in 2012. The current production by Austin Theatre Project is the Central Texas premiere. An intimate new musical with a small cast, DOGFIGHT shines a light on the nastier aspects of young Marines, especially the ritual where each man tries to find the ugliest girl to bring to a bar to win a bet. It is this ritual that gives the work its name. A look at swaggering, macho culture at its worst, dehumanizing both the women and the faceless enemy the boys are being dispatched to fight.

BUYER AND CELLAR, by Jonathan Tolins, is a deliciously dishy piece of theatre that came to life because of Barbra Streisand's book My Passion for Design. The play, a winner of the 2014-2015 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show, tells you right from the start that the only thing that is the truth about what you will be seeing is that Streisand really does have an underground mall where her possessions and costumes are all displayed… and she is the sole customer. Alex (J. Robert Moore) is a struggling Hollywood actor who takes the oddest of odd jobs: working in the underground mall at Streisand's Malibu home. He is alone there, trapped between the sounds of the frozen yogurt machine and the popcorn machine, until he has a surprise visit from the Diva herself. They begin to play and bond in the basement; but as their bond deepens, Alex begins to wonder if their budding relationship will ever make it out of that basement. The show is hilariously funny, and a touching examination of the isolation and loneliness of fame.

PAGEANT, when it originally opened in 1991, was almost ground breaking. The idea of doing a musical parody of a beauty pageant performed by men in drag was fresh… and a little bit crazy in all the good ways. However, twenty five years later, in 2016, the concept creaks in a world where we have RuPaul's Drag Race and traditional beauty pageants have been relegated to cable channels few people watch.

ONE MAN, TWO GUVNORS by Richard Bean is an English adaptation of The Servant of Two Masters, the 1743 Commedia dell'arte play by Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni. Bean has replaced the original Italian setting with 1963 Brighton. It first opened at the National Theatre in 2011, toured the UK and then opened in the West End in November 2011, with a subsequent Broadway opening in April 2012. The basic premise centers on eternally ravenous Francis Henshall (Martin Burke) who ends up being employed by two men at the same time: Roscoe Crabbe, a local gangster, and Stanley Stubbers (Tyler Jones), an upper class criminal. Francis works frantically at keeping the two from meeting, so that neither finds out that Francis is working for two men at the same time. What no one knows is Roscoe is really Rachel Crabbe (Amy Downing) in disguise. Her twin brother Roscoe was killed by her lover, Stanley Stubbers. Subplots include Pauline Clench (Madison Weinhoffer) who was to marry Roscoe in an arranged marriage by her father Charlie "The Duck" Clench (Michael Stuart) but is planning to elope with amateur actor Alan Dangle (Andre Martin).

OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS by Joe DiPietro, opened Off-Broadway in 1998 and ran for over 800 performances during the original two year run. Audiences may be more familiar with DiPietro as the author of the long-running musical revue I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. It is easy to see why the show was a long running success. It is a script full of warmth, wit and familial truth that speaks directly to the generation gap experienced by Baby Boomers.

With a host of summer offerings in Austin, here are the Austin Editorial staff's Top Seven Picks for summer theatre excitement:

Using true events as source material, TREVOR by Orange is the New Black writer Nick Jones, is at once witty, hilarious and gut-wrenching. The story is about former show biz chimp Trevor (Jason Newman), a 200-pound chimpanzee, and his owner Sandra (Rebecca Robinson), who has an almost maternal attachment to him. At the core, the play is a look at misunderstood communication. Sandra thinks she knows what Trevor is thinking, but the audience is aware of how far off she actually is. Trevor is almost singularly focused on returning to his show biz existence when he worked with Morgan Fairchild (Rebecca Pearcy) in a 'commercial about water bottles or possibly paper'. It is this communication failure that leads to mounting tensions and the ultimately tragic ending. Consider just how frustrating it is not being able to truly communicate with the person you depend on. Yes, this happens in human relationships all the time, but when you make one of the elements in the equation an animal with violent tendencies, both the tension and the very real chance for disaster rise exponentially.