Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2009 > December > 07
Monday, December 7, 2009
Open Source Bar Guide: Campus Area
Austin’s nightlife changes from night to night. It’s tough keeping track of all those bars, clubs and restaurants where we all socialize. Help us update our annual bar guide through this series of open-sources lists by micro-district. Send updates to mbarnes@statesman.com. The guide will be published alongside interviews with bar regulars on Dec. 10. (Thanks to readers who have already helped!) Follow the Nightlife category link below for previous posts.
Cain & Abel’s Bar & Grill. 2313 Rio Grande St. 476-3201
Charlie’s. 1301 Lavaca St. 474-6481
The Cloak Room. 1300 Colorado St. 478-2622
Crown & Anchor. 2911 San Jacinto Blvd. 322-9168
Cuatro’s. 1004 W. 24th St. 234-6361
The Dog & Duck Pub. 406 W. 17th St. 479-0598
Fino. 2905 San Gabriel St. 474-2905
The Flying Saucer. 815 W. 47th St. 454-7468
Hole in the Wall. 2538 Guadalupe St. 477-4747
Little Woodrow’s 2610 Guadalupe St. 478-2337
Mansion on Judge’s Hill. 1900 Rio Grande St. 495-1800
Nasty’s Bar. 606 Maiden Lane. 453-4349
Posse East Bar & Grill. 2900 Duval St. 477-2111
Sago. 4600 Guadalupe St. 452-0300
Spider House Patio Bar & Cafe. 2908 Fruth St. 480-9562
Scholz Garten. 1607 San Jacinto Blvd. 474-1958
Texas Chili Parlor. 1409 Lavaca St. 472-2828
Trudy’s Texas Star. 409 W. 30th St. 477-2935
United States Art Authority. 2906 Fruth St. 480-9562
Vino Vino. 4119 Guadalupe St. 465-9282
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Dancing with the Stars Austin at the Hilton Austin
The Texas Book Festival gala is smart …
Mort and Bobbi Topfer
The Texas Film Hall of Fame gala is glamorous …
Luke and Stephanie Lowenfield
Ballet Austin’s Fete is gorgeous …
Sidney and Paul Pan
The Austin Museum of Art’s La Dolce Vita is sensuous …
Brett Bachman and Elisabeth Challener
Zach Theatre’s Red, Hot & Soul is delirious …
Megan Bentzin and Adam Stuart
The Dell Children’s Medical Center Foundation gala is gargantuan …
Mary Talley, Kimberly Thomsen and Anne Elizabeth Wynn
Arthouse’s 5x7 event is wild …
Nathan Clark and Jordan McRae
The Center for Child Protection’s Dancing with the Stars Austin, presented by Lexus of Austin, is just plain fun …
Christi Ford and Shawn Traylor
Watching local celebrities wiggle, gyrate and generally shake their moneymakers with adept professional dancers is worth all the effort put in this year by co-chairs Mary Tally and Maria Groten …
Venus Strawn and Violet Bell
Sunday at Hilton Austin, Zach producing artistic director Dave Steakley won the giant disco globe award with a fast samba. Travis County Sheriff Greg Hamilton’s serious moves copped him the first runner-up spot, while former Miss Texas USA and TV personality Holly Mills-Gardner took second runner-up with a toss of her fringed dancewear …
Stephanie and Todd O’Neill (just married!)
High on my list were news anchor Michelle Valles and Paul Mitchell Systems’ Eloise DeJoria, who executed their sultry ballroom dances to perfection. Also impressive were Joanie Bentzin, Gigi Bryant, Charles Duggan, Richard Garriott, Susan Lubin (whose recorded voice was lovely!), Dan Neil and Mitchell Zoll …
A special treat: Mary Tally and the rarely spotted Kip Keller
Sure, there were nerves and flubs. But that’s all part of the fun. So was the Elvis impersonation by Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo, fronting a chorus line of local socialites …
The celebrity judges — Ed Clements, Carla McDonald and Evan Smith — yukked it up gracefully while giving every performer a perfect 10 …
This is one gala where everyone feels welcome. Republicans and Democrats participated side by side. Although two sources told me there was some backstage friction between the political parties. Well, competitive ballroom dancing, like politics, is a blood sport …
To keep it sweet, I hear more than $600,000 was raised for the Center for Child Protection, which works with law enforcement to help young victims of crime. See what you can do when you work together — and have fun?
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The Joe Papp story, Part 2
For Part 1 of the Joe Papp story, scroll down to the previous post, or link here.
He also conquered Broadway again and again with hits such as “A Chorus Line,” “Sticks and Bones,” “That Championship Season,” “Two Gentlemen of Verona” and “Pirates of Penzance.” (He also produced “Hair” first, but not later on Broadway.)
Papp typically nurtured playwrights early in their careers, saying “I want to produce all your plays,” then expected filial loyalty thereafter. Without him, the world might not know David Rabe, Wallace Shawn, Ntozake Shange, Larry Kramer, Miguel Piñero, Jason Miller and numerous other writers. With his wife and literary manager, Gail Marrifield Papp, the producer often adopted projects in their infancy, most famously Michael Bennett’s slow development of “A Chorus Line” out of group therapy-type sessions with New York dancers.
Turan doesn’t shy away from Papp’s disasters, such as his takeovers of Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center (he immediately alienated his Upper West Side subscribers) and Broadway’s Booth Theatre (he opened and closed his New American Playwrights series there with “The Leaf People,” an experimental play about indigenous Amazonians’ first contact with outsiders, performed in an invented language).
Turan details Papp’s frightening rift with playwright Sam Shepard over the Public’s production of “True West,” of which star Tommy Lee Jones says: “Of all the versions of that play that were done at that time, around New York and around the country, ours was distinguished by being the worst.” (Shepard, who refused to travel to New York during rehearsals, bears considerable blame.)
But there are also all the glorious, unexpected triumphs, like the poppy production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance,” despised by Savoyard purists, but adored by almost everyone else. The casting process that brought Linda Ronstadt, then at the top of the charts, and Rex Smith, dismissed as a teen idol, together with theatrical stalwarts like Kevin Kline and George Rose is as sensational as it is enchanting.
Papp’s two raging passions — Shakespeare and social justice — are never far from the page in “Free for All.” Almost single-handedly, he made Shakespeare available to the masses, even defying New York power broker Robert Moses to do so.
Hoping to mirror the city around him, Papp also introduced counterculture, black, Hispanic, female and gay artists to the public, whether they were creating a choreo-poem (“for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf”); an intense prison drama employing ex-convicts as performers (“Short Eyes”) or incendiary tale crucial to the HIV-AIDS activism (“The Normal Heart”).
He could be a hectoring bully, who woke critics from their beds, shamed backers into donations and forced his tastes on audiences. Yet Papp left the theater a better place. Turan places Papp’s reputation on a higher plane.
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The Joe Papp story, Part 1
Kenneth Turan overcame three almost insurmountable obstacles. The journalist and co-author of “Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told” had already lost his literary collaborator, Papp, before the theatrical producer died in 1991. Prior to that, Papp had suppressed the material that Turan, longtime film critic for the Los Angeles Times, had collected about the New York Shakespeare Festival, Public Theater and Papp’s other theatrical ventures.
Turan trusts the reader to either know the speakers — some, such as Martin Sheen, Raul Julia, Sam Waterston and James Earl Jones, are celebrities whose careers Papp fostered — or to flip to the “Cast of Characters” printed at the back of the book. There, he identifies each quoted speaker with the slimmest of biographical sketches. (Example: “George C. Scott. Actor. Five Tony nominations. Four Oscar nominations. Oscar for ‘Patton.’ Died in 1999.”)
The results are dazzling. Turan has written a book — Papp is listed as co-author — as fluid as a novel and, at times, as chilling as a character-driven movie thriller. Especially for the inveterate theater fan, it’s the oral-history equivalent of a page-turner.
More to come …
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Arts Cottage Opening near Rosanky
After leaving the directorship of the University of Texas Performing Arts Center, Pebbles Wadsworth traveled extensively, in part because her lawyer husband, Chris, insisted she not take on any projects for at least a year, she says …
Jack Crosby, Pebbles Wadsworth and Richard Isackes
As soon as that year ended, Wadsworth put her considerable energy, connections and skill to work on moving a Victorian cottage from Smithville to her nearby ranch, C Rock, renovating it and creating a rural mecca for performing and visual arts amid the rolling pastureland southeast of Bastrop and southwest of Smithville …
Sherry and David Dalgleish
The Arts Cottage welcomed its first full audience on a drizzly, muddy Sunday. Yet it was all good cheer inside, as 50 or so patrons — including a former UT president and some high-powered philanthropists — snacked on bites from Smithville’s Back Door Cafe, waiting for announcements and performances …
Andrew and Mary Ann Heller
The work of Austinite Roi James, as well as Smithville artists (a poet, a jeweler, a sculptor) claimed their share of the conversation before Wadsworth managed to seat everyone and explained the Arts Cottage concept …
Terri Moore, Bill Livingston and Pam Buchanan
Not surprisingly, the idea is as big as the cottage is small. Wadsworth wants to prove that rural communities can establish sustainable arts centers for education, exhibition, performance, seminars and workshops. She’s formed a nonprofit and wants to spread the blueprint to other small communities …
Paulino Lopez and Judith Rhedin
Performances were delayed an hour, so, alas, I missed them to make other engagements. Yet I’m absolutely certain this is not the last you’ll hear of the Arts Cottage, which combines some of the best ideas from Round Top and Winedale with a particular emphasis on the local community.
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Home Slice’s Carnival-o-Pizza
What a glorious Austin tradition in the making! …
Brandie Boyd, Andrew Meyer and Mary Gamble
Home Slice’s Carnival-o-Pizza had barkers, booths, balloons, families, performers, pizzas, beer, ice tea and, of course, the brilliantly named Hands on an Eggplant contest …
Jordan Huneryager and Michael Martinez
Most of the action was squeezed between the South Congress Avenue pizza parlour and the evolving commercial structure next door …
Andi Davison and Sarah Wolf (with Clink Events)
But the excitement spilled onto the sidewalks and Home Slice’s inside and back patio spaces …
Jessica Letteer and Gabe Bishop
The Eggplant competition — borrowed from Hands on a Hard Body — pitted pizza lovers gathered around an eggplant hoagie on a pedestal until the last person earned a year’s supply of New York-style slices …
Tab and Laura Bedeian
On a cold, clear Saturday afternoon, it was only one of several events on ever-happening SoCo.
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