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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > November > 02
Monday, November 2, 2009
Review: ‘Murder Ballad Murder Mystery’
It’s a not a spoiler to say that everyone dies by the end of ‘Murder Ballad Murder Mystery,’ a new musical play by Elizabeth Doss, a co-production of Vortex Repertory-Tutto Theatre Company.
Dying — well, murder — gets going from the get-go in this free-spirited if problematic production directed by Dustin Wills.
Doss, Wills and set designer Lisa Laratta place this wanna-be allegory in a stylized world that’s a kind of bayou/Southern gothic. Actors cavort in a shallow pool center stage or climb the sprawling platform structure that rings the center seating section. A motley four-piece bluegrass band strolls around, acting as clowns and chorus both. There’s a husband-killing tough ol’ gal, legendary murderer Stagger Lee, a Bonnie and Clyde-esque young couple and a pair of young backwoods sisters whose crashing boredom leads to — oh, take a guess.
The dead and the living, the past and the present, are intimately intwined in Doss and Wills’ Americana vaudeville-esque setting. And Mark Stewart and Andy Tindall’s twangy bluegrass music provides the aural atmosphere in the perpetually half-lit world. And the ensemble cast is full of energetic acting.
But with little linearity to it, ‘Murder Ballad Murder Mystery’ trades a little too much on atmosphere. Plenty is suggested and yes, quirky, delightful scenario after quirky, delightful scenario is unveiled and presented for our consideration.
But as imaginative as each of those scenarios are, they lack a kind of friction with each other. Never quite able to stick together, the individual pieces of ‘Murder Ballad Murder Myster’ just miss at being a whole.
‘Murder Ballad Murder Mystery’ continues through Nov. 7. www.tuttotheatre.org
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Kleins bring passion, curiosity to Austin arts scene
Since its unveiling in January, Teresita Fernandez’s “Stacked Waters” has become perhaps the most public mark of the Kleins’ philanthropy and art world sophistication since the couple moved to Austin from Houston four years ago.
With its 3.100-square-feet of blue tiles, the soaring two-story installation in the atrium of the Blanton Museum of Art is a bold and adventurous and has a sense of playfulness about it, much like the Kleins themselves.
Read a major profile of the Kleins here.
‘Teresita Fernandez: Blind Landscape,’ a retrospective of the artist’s work, opened Sunday at the Blanton and continues through Jan. 3. Read a review of the exhibit here.
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‘La Boheme’ keeps it young
Since its debut more than a century ago, Puccini’s tragic romance about two young lovers struggling in 19th-century bohemian Paris has arguably become the basis of all subsequent struggling-artist love stories.
And while the production presented by Austin Lyric Opera that opens this weekend keeps Puccini’s story in the 19th century (created by the San Diego Opera, the sets riff on the art of painter Toulouse-Lautrec), the cast for this “La Bohème” is most decidedly young
Here’s 30-year-old French tenor Sebastien Gueze who plays Rodolfo in a recent production of ‘La Boheme.’
