A Milestone: the 1000th Post at Austin Live Theatre

Austin Theatre, meet yourself.

Or, as Bogey said to Ingrid, "Here's looking at you, kid." 

This is the 1000th post on AustinLiveTheatre since I established it in June, 2008 with a review of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Austin Playhouse. I wound up that 900-word article with the comment, "We had a great time. As Austin newcomers, we were attending our second Austin Playhouse production - - and at the intermission I went out to the foyer and purchased season tickets for 2008 – 2009 from Producing Artistic Director Toner himself, who was happy to talk theatre with me."

Commemorating the milestone, ALT offers readers background on its origins, a summary of Austin media coverage of theatre matters, and a brief portrait of the Austin theatre scene.

Origins

After a diplomatic career of assignments abroad and in Washington, we chose to relocate to the capital of Texas. We found some superlative local theatre -- starting with The Seagull, produced with very little fanfare by Breakin' String Theatre. We were intrigued by the apparent lack of information about theatre doings in Austin. Taking an example from the cooking blog established by my daughter and her guy, I set up on Google's freebie hosting service blogspot.com my own blog: "Austin Live Theatre." The stated aim for the blog was to serve as "a voyage to discover the underreported Austin theatre scene." 

Ticket by ticket, trip by trip, ALT has done that. The following profiles emerge from some meticulous crunching of postings, links and information provided by ALT in calendar year 2009. 

Media coverage of Austin's Theatre 

Austin's free papers and free on-line press cover theatre much more extensively than the daily Austin Statesmanand its on-line counterpart www.Austin360.com. The numbers tell the tale:

  • Austin Chronicle, weekly free newspaper: 80 reviews, averaging about 1.5 per week
  • Austin Statesman: 46 reviews, averaging almost 1 per week. A number of the reviews appearing on-line do not make it into the daily paper.
  • Austinist.com: 43 reviews, averaging almost 1 per week
  • AustinOnStage.com: 24 reviews, about 1 every two weeks
  • Examiner.com (Ryan E. Johnson, blogging as "Austin theatre examiner"): 26 reviews, averaging 1 every two weeks
  • Daily Texan, University of Texas: 22, averaging one every 16.5 days
  • Austin.com: 17 reviews, averaging one every three weeks. Postings on this site are often stale or outdated.
  • KUT-FM: 17 reviews or features, averaging about one every third week. John Aielli discontinued at mid-year his occasional half-hour programs entitled "Aielli Unleashed." Most coverage is in the form of 2 minute spots done with Mike Lee for KUT's "Arts Eclectic."
  • KOOP-FM: 18 programs featuring musical theatre productions covered by AustinLiveTheatre. Lisa Schepps hosts the weekly "Off Stage and On the Air" Mondays at 12:30. This program, begun in 30-minute format and extended to 60 minutes, is also posted on-line. Ms Schepps interviews artists and directors; they may perform music live or she will play recordings from Broadway shows or other versions of upcoming presentations.
  • AustinTheatreReview (now defunct): Sean Fuentes' undertaking reviewed 9 local productions before going inactive in about September, 2009.
  • INSITE, the free monthly entertainment magazine: 4, averaging one feature article per quarter.
  • Television coverage is sparse. ALT does not monitor television programming but found and included links to short written or video features: two each from KEYE and News 8, one each from KXAN and KFOX.
  • Miscellaneous coverage: 10, including 5 postings by San Antonio weekly and daily papers and one each from www.soulciti.com, www.outinamerica.com, RepublicOfAustin.com, the Blanco, Texas newspaper, and a podcast by Stage Directions magazine.

Summing all the above, extended media for the Austin region provided 328 features or reviews for approximately 380 theatre productions in 2009 -- an estimate drawn from the fact that ALT posted 387 "upcoming" announcements that year. 

Those reviews were not evenly spread. They ranged from nine reviews for Capital T's production of Killer Joe at the Hyde Park Theatre (which ALT reluctantly panned), to a more typical score for well attended shows of two non-ALT reviews (28 productions) or one non-ALT review (57 productions, although this includes some Short Finge elements of Hyde Park Theatre's 100-item Frontera Fest). More typical, however, was no review at all-- the case for 195 productions, or 59.5 percent of those staged in the greater Austin area. 

 



Austin's Live Theatre

The 2009 data paint the picture: Austin is seething with theatre activity. The town deserves its reputation for original work but its theatre companies and groups are producing mainstream comedies, dramas, musicals and narrations as well. Quality is high, variety is striking, and ticket prices are low, usually ranging from $10 to $25. 

 

Some companies operate their own theatres on a subscription basis. Don Toner's Austin Playhouse is in its tenth season at comfortable but modest quarters at Penn Field on South Congress; Andy Berkovsky's City Theatre in a strip mall on Airport Road near Manor Road has a ten-play season of impressive scope and quality, playing usually to single-ticket purchasers but available on a seaon ticket basis. The Zach Theatre (formerly the Zachary Scott Theatre) under Dave Steakley offers season tickets and is about to begin building a third stage on its prime location on South Lamar Boulevard near Lady Bird Lake. Ken Webster, venerable before his time at the Hyde Park Theatre near 43rd and Guadalupe, doesn't take the subscription approach but provides a darkly exciting season of his own work and that of associated friends and companies. Out in Lakeway, thirty minutes west of central Austin, Todd Dellinger's Tex-Arts academy and performance space is thriving in the Kam & James Morris Theatre, offering multiple-show tickets for its season of locally produced "off Broadway" professional theatre.


More typical are the groups of artists and friends who gather to produce theatre at various third-party locales available to them. This broad category includes keen professional-standard drama from Austin Shakespeare and from Norman Blumensaadt's Different Stages. Others range from the omnium-gatherum operations of the Vortex Repertory and the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, both on Manor Road, to the Rude Mechanicals' garage-like Off Center in East Austin, to City of Austin venues: the Dougherty Arts Center on Barton Springs Road and the gorgeous medium-sized Boyd Vance Theatre at the George Washington Carver Center on Angelina Street in East Austin. The Blue Theatre, tucked behind the Goodwill warehouse on Springdale Road in East Austin, is barebones but relatively capacious.  Productions might pay a bit more to appear at the Hideout Theatre on South Congress, which is more often an improv hangout, or they might opt for coffee shops,  bookstores after hours, or the open air.

Mostly further from the center are not-for-profit community-based theatres that have developed in scope and ambition and offer full seasons of entertainment, including season subscription options. The queen of these is the Georgetown Palace, an artfully converted movie theatre with newly expanded adjunct buildings, just off the square in Georgetown. The Palace specializes in musicals and in comedy. Its consistently high-quality offerings benefit from the presence of retirement communities nearby but the crowd is of mixed ages and always enthusiastic.

Moving clockwise around Austin: the Sam Bass Community Theatre is a tidy small theatre in a converted railroad depot in Round Rock, with offerings ranging from easy comedy to Samuel Beckett (next up is Waiting for Godot). Bastrop has its Opera House, celebrating 25 years of leadership by Chester Eitze. In Lockhart, local companies combined to become the Gaslight Baker Theatre, using a history-filled entertainment hall just off the town square to produce a full season, tilted particularly to comedy. Wimberley has its Players with a snug new playhouse on Old Kyle Road and the EmilyAnn with a garden, an outdoor amphitheatre, a summer Shakespeare festival and an indoor studio. Near Marble Falls, the Hill Country Community Theatre in Cottonwood Shores does familiar musicals and comedies. And in Leander, the Way Off Broadway Community Theatre has just announced the signing a ten-year lease for a new permanent home where they will continue producing a ten-play season of dramas and comedies.

Universities and colleges produce full seasons of impressive quality. Even a casual reckoning suggests that between 700 and a thousand undergraduates are studying and practicing theatre in the region. The University of Texas is a self-sufficient oasis of the performing arts with extensive resources, staff, facilities and students. Also devoted to theatre arts are St. Edward's University on South Congress with a four-play season in the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, Austin Community College at its Rio Grande campus downtown, Texas State in San Marcos with a beautiful pond-surrounded theatre building and a specialization in musical theatre, and Southwestern University in the Sarofim Fine Arts Center in Georgetown.

And on, and on. Teatro Vivo does lively bilingual pieces, popular with the Tejano population but charming and accessible also to monolingual English speakers. Proyecto Teatro features all-Spanish theatre for adults, for children, and at Christmas time for the community, with La Pastorela. The Pro-Arts Collective, Uprise! productions, and Lisa Jordan (working at City Theatre) stage pieces emphasizing the African-American experience.

There's lots of overlap, but with some fudging ALT assembled the following profile of the 121 theatre entities noted to be active in 2009:

Ad-hoc theatre projects: 30, ranging from an Actors Equity Code Production of A Long Day's Journey into Night to annual or one-off undertakings

Theatre companies: 32

Community theatres: 9

Seasonal production projects: 9 (particularly summer musicals; doesn't count Zach Theatre's two perennial Christmas shows)

Association productions: 4 (for example, by Austin Scriptworks, a writer's association)

Private theatre education for youth: 6

Universities and Colleges: 7

High Schools: 5

San Antonio Theatre companies: 5 (of many more in San Antonio)

Theatre for Children: 4

Visiting Artists: 3

Puppetry: 2 (Trouble Puppet Company and the now-defunct Geppetto Dreams Puppet 
Company)

Clowns: 1 (Ben Schave & Kaitlin Reilly) 



You're looking good, Austin theatre. With better coordinated marketing both to tourism and to the many lovers of theatre art in Austin, you could flourish even more. ALT is making its contribution toward that goal.