The rock musical SPRING AWAKENING is live on stage at ZACH Theatre.
Here’s a clip of the cast singing “Totally F***ed” from the show: http://youtu.be/DbfoMP9IUsM
Tickets and info at http://www.zachtheatre.org/show/spring-awakening or 512-476-0541 x1.
On November 7, ZACH Theatre will join theatres nationwide with a one-night-only performance of Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays — hysterical, touching and revolutionary new short plays by Pulitzer-, Tony-, Obie-, Emmy- and even Academy Award-nominated playwrights. Featuring all your favorite Austin actors, designers and artists, this will be an incredible night of theatre. Tickets are just $20 for ALL seats, and proceeds benefit Get Equal TX.
More info on the plays and how to buy tickets can be found on ZACH’s website by clicking here.
Here’s a look at the lineup of playwrights to be featured on Nov. 7 on ZACH’s intimate Kleberg Stage:
Mo Gaffney, with Kathy Najimy, wrote and starred in the Obie award-winning The Kathy and Mo Show: Parallel Lives Off-Broadway. The show became an Ace Award-winning HBO special, as did Mo’s other Kathy and Mo Show incarnation The Dark Side. Other writing credits include the pilot Days Like This and consulting on the Roseanne show. Acting credits include, The Minneola Twins at the Roundabout and The Vagina Monologues at the Westside Arts. In television Mo has been a regular on Normal, Ohio and Run of The House and had recurring roles on Absolutely Fabulous, Mad About You and That 70’s Show among others. Films include Other People’s Money, Drop Dead Gorgeous and Happy, Texas. Currently she can be seen on Showtime’s The House of Lies.
Jordan Harrison’s play Maple and Vine recently premiered in the 2011 Humana Festival, and will be produced this season at Playwrights Horizons in New York, A.C.T. in San Francisco, and Next Theatre in Chicago. Jordan’s other plays include Doris to Darlene (Playwrights Horizons), Futura (Portland Center Stage), Amazons and Their Men (Clubbed Thumb), Act a Lady (2006 Humana Festival), Finn in the Underworld (Berkeley Repertory Theatre), Kid-Simple (2004 Humana Festival, SPF), The Flea and the Professor (Arden Theatre Company) and The Museum Play (Washington Ensemble Theatre). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, a Theater Masters’ Innovative Playwright Award, the Kesselring Fellowship, the Heideman Award, Jerome and McKnight Fellowships from The Playwrights’ Center, and a NEA/TCG Playwright-in-Residence Grant. Jordan is currently working on commissions for Ars Nova, Playwrights Horizons, and South Coast Repertory. A graduate of the Brown MFA program, he is an alumnus of New Dramatists.
Broadway: Never Gonna Dance (book). Off-Broadway: Three Viewings and A Picasso at M.T.C.; Scotland Road and The Turn of the Screw at Primary Stages; Tuesdays with Morrie (with Mitch Albom) at the Minetta Lane; Murder by Poe and The Spy at The Acting Company; Neddy at American Place; and Fellow Travelers at Manhattan Punchline. Other plays: Ten Chimneys, Compleat Female Stage Beauty, Murderers, Korczak’s Children,The Government Inspector. Film/TV: Stage Beauty, Casanova, The Duchess, and episodes of Columbo. Grants/Awards: NEA, TCG, Lila Wallace Fund, Rosenthal New Play Prize, Frankel Award, Charles MacArthur Fellowship Award, Edgerton Grant, McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and Barrymore Award Best New Play. Member of the Playwrights Center, the Dramatists Guild, the Writers Guild, and New Dramatists.
BROADWAY: 33 Variations (writer and director, Tony® nomination Best Play, Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award); I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright (Obie Award, Tony®, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortell nominations); WEST END: Gross Indecency (Writer/Director, Gielgud Theatre), I Am My Own Wife (Duke of York Theater), This Is How It Goes by Neil LaBute (Donmar Warehouse). OFF BROADWAY/REGIONAL: Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo; Macbeth with Liev Schreiber; One Arm by Tennessee Williams; Master Class with Rita Moreno; El Gato Con Botas; The Laramie Project (writer and director, Drama Desk nomination); The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later (co-writer/director); Gross Indecency: The Three Trials Of Oscar Wilde (writer-director Lucille Lortell Award for Best Play, Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play and Joe A. Callaway Award for Direction.) FILM/ TV: The Laramie Project (HBO, two Emmy nominations for writing and directing, Opening Night Selection at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, National Board of Review Award, the Humanitas Prize, Special Mention the Berlin Film Festival); The L Word. He is the Artistic Director of Tectonic Theater Project and a Guggenheim Fellow in Playwriting.
Plays include: Bash: Latter-Day Plays, The Shape of Things, The Mercy Seat, The Distance From Here, Autobahn, Fat Pig, Some Girl(s), This Is How It Goes, Wrecks, Filthy Talk for Troubled Times, In a Dark Dark House, reasons to be pretty, The Break of Noon and In A Forest, Dark And Deep. Films include: In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, Possession, The Shape of Things (a film adaptation of his play by the same title), The Wicker Man, Lakeview Terrace and Death at a Funeral. Prose includes: Seconds of Pleasure, a collection of short fiction.
Wendy MacLeod’s play The House of Yes became an award-winning Miramax film starring Parker Posey. Her other works for the stage include Sin and Schoolgirl Figure, both of which premiered at The Goodman, Juvenilia and The Water Children, both of which premiered at Playwrights Horizons, and Things Being What They Are, which premiered at Seattle Repertory Theatre and had an extended run at Steppenwolf in Chicago. Her new play Find and Sign will premiere in January at the Pioneer Theater in Salt Lake City. Her prose has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Poetry magazine and on All Things Considered. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, she is the James E. Michael Playwright-in-Residence at Kenyon College.
is the two-time Obie Award winning author of Marisol, Cloud Tectonics, References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, Sonnets for an Old Century, Boleros for the Disenchanted, and other plays. Rivera was nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA, and a WGA award for The Motorcycle Diaries. His screenplay of Kerouac’s On the Road will premiere in 2012. Celestina, based on Cloud Tectonics, will mark his debut as a feature film director. Rivera is a playwright-in-residence at the Lark Theatre. Upcoming are the NY premiere of Massacre (Sing to Your Children) at Rattlestick, a film about the rescue of the Chilean miners, a pilot for HBO, and a musical based on a beauty pageant at the Buen Pastor Prison, Colombia, for The Civilians.
Paul Rudnick’s plays have been produced both on and off Broadway and around the world. They include I Hate Hamlet, Jeffrey, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, Valhalla and The New Century. He has won an Obie, an Outer Critics Circle Award and the John Gassner Playwrighting Award, and his collected plays have been published by Harper Collins. His novels are Social Disease and I’ll Take It, both from Knopf. His articles and essays have appeared in Vogue, Esquire, Vanity Fair and the New York Times, and he’s a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. He’s rumored to be quite close to Premiere magazine’s film critic Libby Gelman-Waxner, whose collected columns have been published under the title If You Ask Me. His screenplays include Addams Family Values, In&Out and the screen adaptation of Jeffrey. Harper Collins has published a collection of his essays, entitled I Shudder.
Doug received Tony® and Drama Desk nominations for Grey Gardens. In 2004, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award® for Best Play for I Am My Own Wife. In 1995, Mr. Wright won an Obie Award for Quills. He went on to write the screenplay adaptation; the film was nominated for three Academy Awards. His most recent Broadway credit was The Little Mermaid. Directing credits include Kiki And Herb: Pardon Our Appearance in Washington DC, Philadelphia and London, and his own adaptation of Strindberg’s Creditors at the La Jolla Playhouse. Doug is secretary of the Dramatist Guild, and serves on the board of the New York Theater Workshop. He lives in New York with his husband, singer/songwriter David Clement.
With over 20 performances of popular ZACH hits ranging from Porgy and Bess to Hairspray, Dave Steakley’s 20th Anniversary Celebration was a night to remember.
Thank you to all ZACH’s donors, sponsors, actors, designers, fans and friends for helping make this such an incredible night! A special thanks to Seabrook Jones for photographs.
Feel free to share these photos, but please remember to credit Seabrook Jones wherever they appear.
Jordan Barron plays Moritz in the rock musical SPRING AWAKENING, live on stage at ZACH Theatre.
Here’s a clip of Jordan singing “B**** of a Living” from the show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oElKF8QwJo
Tickets and info at http://www.zachtheatre.org/show/spring-awakening or 512-476-0541 x1.
This Friday, Oct. 14, Ellen Sweets – author of the new cookbook Stirring it Up with Molly – will join playwright Margaret Engel and actress Barbara Chisholm after a special performance of Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins. From “extremely elegant to hilariously inelegant,” it turns out that knowing Molly in the kitchen is a great way to reflect on who she was.
To see an exclusive interview with Ms. Sweets, check out ZACH’s YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zpcEXNiVls.
Here’s what The Huffington Post’s David Finkle has to say about Stirring it Up with Molly:
Easy Reader: Ellen Sweets’s Stirring It Up With Molly Ivins a Five-Star Feast
Sometimes when dreams don’t come true, they come partially true. On Rick Perry’s entering the presidential race, I dreamed (that’s to say, daydreamed) that superb Austin, Texas-based political commentator and first-rate reporter Molly Ivins, who died in 2007, was still here. She’d know everything — good and bad (mostly woundingly comic, I figured) — about the publicly God-fearing, evolution-theory-questioning, job-creating(?) candidate. I could almost hear her passing along everything worth passing along, and she’d sure as shootin’ do it in her inimitable thigh-slapping fashion.
Well, don’t you know that within days after fixing on this unsatisfied need, I become aware of Stirring It Up With Molly Ivins: A Memoir With Recipes by Ellen Sweets (University of Texas Press, 272 pp., illustrations, $29.95)? Turns out that the author, a writer and often food editor, had been friendly with the late, great Molly for several decades during which they shared a love of cooking and eating.
Turns out further that knowing Miz Molly — as the well-named Sweets sometimes refers to her — in the kitchen, at the supermarket and grocery store, and around the dining-room and restaurant table is a great way to reflect on who Molly Ivins was, how profoundly and amusingly she thought and the enormous amount she had to contribute to our understanding of Texas and national politics. Not the least of her contributions, it so happens, are the recipes for her favorite foods, which ranged along the wide spectrum between extremely elegant to hilariously inelegant.
“Beer-in-the-Butt Chicken” is only one example of the latter sort but — as Molly adapted them — that’un gives an idea of the humor with which she embraced life, right up to and including her death from cancer. A woman who scoured stores and the Internet for every type of classy and less classy utensil, Molly was unflaggingly eager to gather friends around her not only in order to feed them but — as the devoted Sweets emphasizes — because they would feed her with their wit and knowledge of the world. A list of the people with whom she broke the bread she often baked isn’t exactly endless but it sure is long and includes, not surprisingly, many of the leading liberal thinkers (often Yellow Dog Democrats) of the last half century.
As a reviewer whose oven is only turned on to heat the apartment when the heat goes on the blink, I can’t comment on the proof of the 46 puddings included (some Ivins’s, some Sweets’s, some borrowed from friends, associates, swanky estaminets and greasy spoons), but I can say that this is a collection that’s had an effect on me other cookbooks have rarely had: It’s made me consider taking up cooking. As a chocoholic, I certainly pored over the ingredients needed for “Texas Mud Pie.” I can also say that when Sweets mentions adding a “smidge” of this or a “skosh” of that, I nod approval, since my grandmother, a surpassing cook, was also from the “glub-glub” school of food preparation.
What I can say is that as Sweets recalls the myriad meals Ivins and she readied or participated in — and her memory for which meals went with what get-togethers does strain credulity, but it doesn’t necessarily break it — the enthusiasm she brings convincingly evokes Ivins. Although the volume is not meant as a biography, it gives a substantial sketch of Ivins’s 62-year life — her coming from a well-heeled family and at odds with a difficult father who eventually committed suicide, her career in journalism and progress from early reporting days in Houston and Minnesota and through a trying period with The New York Times, her travels with friends on, for instance, a fishing trip with a glass-ceiling-shattering group of women friends dubbing themselves the Salmonettes, her bout with alcoholism and her final cancer battle.
Before Sweets is finished tributing her marvelous, larger-than-life (and yes, large) friend — whom she does admit could be a tough cookie on occasion (no recipe for that) — Sweets echoes the very reason why I’ve been longing to hear Ivins’s twangy voice. She writes, in sync with my wish, “If only Molly were here to direct some of her formidable energy Perryward.” Amen! She also quotes Molly as insisting she wasn’t funny but only knew funny stories.
Here’s where I come to the full disclosure part of this review. I knew Molly Ivins, though my first impulse isn’t to call her a friend but an acquaintance. On second thought, however, I will call her a friend on the theory that if someone with whom you’ve spent some time when you thought she was hardly taking you in suddenly makes a sincere and accurate observation about you that you thought only you knew, that’s a friend.
This astonishing exchange took place at the home of Boulder, Colorado couple Tracy and Michael Ehlers, with whom Molly stayed when she attended the Conference on World Affairs (CWA), a yearly convocation on the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus at which she was a star speaker and where I also frequently showed up. I, too, heard Molly exclaim she wasn’t funny but only knew funny stores. Yes, she knew funny stories, but she was also — as she constantly is in Sweets’s account — funny as all-hell.
Unfortunately, I can’t say I was ever at her home for one of those unforgettable meals. I’m not even sure I ever ate anything she made with her own accomplished hands and creative impulses. Perhaps, she did rustle up one or more of the dishes Tracy and Michael put out on the many late nights they entertained lucky CWA participants. I can say I have eaten one of the dishes for which Sweets includes the recipe. It’s the “Curried Peas” Molly loved that are served by CWA mover-and-shaker Jane Butcher at her annual Thursday night blow-out. And yup, those peas are scrumptious.
And yup, this book by literal keeper-of-the-flame Ellen Sweets is one you can take to your heart and your hearth.
Click here to view this article on The Huffington Post website. For tickets to this Friday’s performance of Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, call ZACH’s box office at 512-476-0541 x1 or buy tickets online.
From KVUE News:
What’s being called a “red hot” play makes its way to Austin in November. “Red Hot Patriot” will be back for its second run at ZACH Theatre.
The one-woman play features Barbara Chisholm playing the role of Molly Ivins. Chisholm was voted Best Actress by the Austin Chronicle and her work has spanned over 20 years. She joined KVUE to talk about her performance. Please click here if the video does not appear on this screen.
“Red Hot Patriot” runs through mid-November at ZACH Theatre. For more information, click here.
“ZACH Theatre’s current season-opening production of Spring Awakening captures the energy and heart of the hit show that shocked and exhilarated audiences.” – The Austin American-Statesman (Read more.)
Check out ZACH’s new commercial with music from the show and a sneak-peek at the actors and set you’ll see live on stage at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcsngaP_DDY