Doubling Your Fun: Two Cats, Two Roofs, Two Romeos and Juliets

 

 

 

 

With so many companies and productions busy in Austin and nearby, some duplications are inevitable.  The familiar musicals, of course -- Annie seems to come around in some form about every four or five months.  The huge and joyful production at the Georgetown Palace ran through the holiday season, Lee Colee's Broadway Bound boot camp in Wimberley did a fine short version, Tex-Arts has just done a junior production, and now Zilker Productions has settled in -- "for the duration," as they used to say during World War II.  Their Annie, free of charge to the public camping on the hillside in Zilker Park, runs almost a month and a half, until August 14.

 

For Christmastime 2008 one could attend no fewer than four productions of Christmas Belles.  I took my spouse to the one in Wimberley and she thought I was nuts to insist on taking in two more.  I passed up the version that played at the Harlequin Dinner Theatre in San Antonio.

 

But sometimes you'll have an unusual opportunity to see versions of a notable piece of theatre, opportunities to glimpse just how great the differences of interpretation and impact can be.  Theatre is, after all, a live art. Though texts may be standard or closely aligned, the real life and blood of a piece comes in the staging.  Austin, you now have the chance to examine Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare as examples of the powerful transformations of dramatic art.

 

 

Cat on A Hot Tin Roof: City Theatre Austin and Wimberley Players

Last weekend City Theatre opened Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  City's three-week run overlaps for two weeks with the WImberley Players' interpretation of the same play, opening on July 30. 

 

 

The original Broadway version of this play opened in 1955 and it was so smoking with sex that it just about burned the eyebrows off its mid-twentieth-century  audiences. After all, this was two years beforeLeave It to Beaver went on television. You may have seen the motion picture with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman -- in which the theme of homosexuality was so toned down that Tennessee William growled to the ticket holders outside the film premier, "This movie will set the industry back 50 years. Go home!"

 

Williams draws his characters with brutal strokes of the pen: Maggie the cat with her clinging slip, her sharp tongue and fierce determination; Brick the listless, steadily drinking former athlete; Brick's "no neck" brother, wife and their children; and Big Daddy, owner of a huge plantation, the self-made man who does not know that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

 

Director Jeff Hinkel and the cast kindly allowed me to attend an early full rehearsal of City's Cat.  Even at that stage, with lines learned but work still underway on timing and character development, this was looking to be an exceptionally strong evening of theatre.  Rachel McGinnis was slim and graceful, an artist of emotion even with her sodden husband, played by Tim Brown.  The character that struck me most powerfully was Garry Peters as Big Daddy.  Burl Ives played that role in the Broadway version and in the movie, stamping his rotund, sweating, lip-smacking interpretation into American memory.  Peters gives us a different Big Daddy -- a man with palpable strength and psychic violence, one who credibly can describe how he arrived in town as a hobo with nothing and by force of character became overseer for a huge plantation owned by the two old homosexuals who eventually left it to him.

 

David Schneider, board chairman of Lockhart's Gaslight Baker theatre, is the guest director for Wimberley's production of Cat on A Hot Tin Roof, scheduled more than a year ago.  He commented by e-mail,

 

 

"I think two “Cats” is a great opportunity to have audiences see how one work can be interpreted differently by two different directors.  Like making a cake, a different director, cast and crew change the recipe just enough to give you unique products.  Wimberley chose to do the original 1955 Broadway version, while City Theatre opted for the 1974 revival.  I opted for a softer Maggie, with just a little bite.  I focused on the longing Maggie has for Brick and his brooding over the death of Skipper.  Although the original set design is minimalist with light defining most of the playing spaces, I opted for a more realistic set.  Instead of the gallery across the back, I placed it stage-right with a portion of the wall cut away so the audience can see the action unfold.  The gallery is a focal point for several interactions between Maggie and Brick and is a stately 10 foot wide columned porch."

 

A Double Take on Star-Cross'd Romance

 

Romeo and Juliet, ever popular and a familiar introduction to Shakespeare, is running right now in two very different editions, not that far apart.  Out in Wimberley, Bridget Farias has assembled a cast of young persons for the EmilyAnn Theatre's annual summer program of Shakespeare Under the Stars.  There you are sure to see in their outdoor amphitheatre a leading pair who are not too different in age from the lovers as Shakespeare imagined them -- Kylie Zekko as Juliet and Dylan Bakka as Romeo.  Farias, a graduate of Texas State, is a gifted teacher, director and actress, likely to provide a traditional and graceful interpretation of the classic.

 

You'll probably find quite the opposite at the new stage for the Austin Drama Club, friends and thespian fanatics grouped around Japhy Fernandes.  The City of Austin shut down the ad hoc theatre they were operating in a rental house on E. 7th Street, but now they've succeeded in finding larger quarters out in the scrub brush hills west of Austin.  The Austin Drama Club is a carefree, innovative and irreverent collection of thespians and would-be thespians who have been doing more Shakespeare than anyone else in town.

 

 

Their Romeo and Juliet will be a serious interpretation but may make you think more of punk rockers than of the Old Vic.  They're entirely capable of revising characters, plot and outcome, so you never know quite what they're going to throw at you.  That makes for an unpredictable evening, to say the least.  My son still shakes his head in amazement when he recalls the Hamlet that we attended last year.

 

 

So pick and choose -- if you're brave, you can make a long weekend of it and catch all four stagings -- two in Wimberley, one west of Oak Hill and the Y and the other along Airport Road in East Austin!