Vikki Schwarz (she/her) is an Austin-area composer and arranger working in church music, elementary music, and local theater. She is the Music Director and Lead Composer/Arranger for Archive Theatre (Cyrano, Macbeth [nominated for Broadway World and B. Iden Payne Awards], A Sherlock Holmes Christmas, Raven-Winged Hours). She also composes and directs music for Diverse Dance Space Theatre, Austin Children’s Theatre, and Interwoven Theatre. Other works include My Big Fat Bahookie, Far From Avalon, Not My Mother, and A Fat Search for Love. Upcoming projects include Roaring & Three Musketeers for Archive Theatre, Lockdown (short form opera), and False Starts, Falls, Fouls or The Art of Making Mistakes (Diverse Dance Space Theatre).
The musicals of the 1920s-1940s are rich territory for parody since many imported the stylistic elements (vaudeville, dance hall style, revue, et al.) of popular entertainment of the era to carry the shows, often disadvantaging well-developed plot lines and complex characters.
Choosing to perform a Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams (1911-1983) play means genuinely committing to some of theater’s most salient aspects: in this case, a plot that must capture and then hold the audience in unfolding layers of tragedy, characters that are complex and often display less-than-desirable human characteristics, believable delivery of modified language to portray a specific region or temperament, performance of disconcerting and sometimes virulent spectacle on a human scale, and production design that rises to the needs of the story.
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