Austin Wide Open has published an article about Esther's Follies.
To read it, click here.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Friday, July 13, 2007
Meet Ray Anderson
His job includes getting impaled
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
Magician Ray Anderson, with assistant Cynthia Wood, has been performing at Esther's Follies in Austin for 24 years.
AUSTIN -- Although he's been working his steady five-days-a-week job for the last 20 years, taking sick leave can be difficult.
After all, who else is there to saw the lady in half or to get impaled on the 4-foot spike?
Meet Ray Anderson, one of the longest-serving house magicians in the state, if not the entire nation.
The Star-Telegram caught up with him recently to learn about what might be the strangest steady jobs in the universe, or at least on Austin's Sixth Street, where he works at the iconic Esther's Follies comedy revue. Anderson was just coming off a stomach virus.
But he said that didn't mean he'd be taking any sick days.
"The show must go on, even if you're puking in a bucket off the side of stage," he joked. "I maybe missed one show [during my entire career] because people expect me to be there. I'm falling on swords and flying through the air five times a week. It's odd that way."
What is now known as Esther's Follies first opened 30 years ago. It's one of the nation's oldest live variety-show comedy revues, and it features jugglers, singers, dancers and Anderson, the magician.
He began there 24 years ago as a guest performer. Gradually his role grew, and he now might be considered the star attraction.
Anderson says he's proud of his steady job, although like any other it can sometimes become a grind. He wakes up. He goes to work. He gets sliced into pieces by razor-sharp knives. He goes home.
"I do call it work. When I leave my house, I don't say, 'I'm off to the theater!'" he said with a mock English accent. "But it's also different from most jobs in the sense that it's the job I've always wanted, even since I was a little kid. And to do that for a living, well, it's hard to get bored."
Anderson performed his first show at age 15 for the local Lions Club in Victoria. He said he got paid $5. From there, he went to the University of Texas, to study theater.
Anderson does big-stage illusions, complete with gigantic contraptions, despite the relatively small size of the Esther's stage.
There are lots of laughs, but Anderson can sometimes have a bad day at the office.
Like the time the time the floating lady suddenly stopped floating.
"She was levitating in the air, 6 or 8 feet up, and she fell straight to the floor," said Anderson, who said his assistant was unharmed in the mishap. "Boy, that's a show people will remember."
So while other Texans toil behind a desk every day, Anderson is doing things like getting handcuffed to a steel torture device.
"It all becomes very normal to us," he said. "I don't think about it being strange when I'm getting pierced through the stomach or flying. I know it may be different from sitting behind a desk every day -- but I guess that has its hazards, too."
Esther's Follies
The iconic comedy show is located in a colorful theater on Sixth Street, in the heart of Austin's entertainment district. Esther's Follies began in 1977 under a slightly different name and is now one of Austin's more popular tourist stops. Shows are 8 p.m. Thursday and 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Tickets are $20 for open seating and $25 for reserved seats. Online: www.esthersfollies.com.
North Texas magic
The 105-year-old Society of American Magicians is holding its annual convention Wednesday through Saturday at the Adams Mark Hotel in Dallas. It will sponsor two shows for the public, both at the Majestic Theater. At 8 p.m. Friday, the society will present its Oceans 7 show, featuring leading cruise ship performers. At 8 p.m. Saturday, it will present Viva La Magia show, featuring some of the best magicians from Spain, Argentina, Italy and Portugal. Tickets are $25, available through Ticketmaster or at the Majestic box office. Online: www.magicsam.com/SAM2007.
R.A. Dyer reports from the Star-Telegram's Austin bureau. 512-476-4294
rdyer@star-telegram.com
rdyer@star-telegram.com
AUDTIONING FOR TALENTED COMEDY WRITERS AND ACTORS
ESTHER'S FOLLIES is auditioning! The legendary 6th Street vaudeville show is currently interviewing experienced actors and comedians with seasoned comedy writing skills. Shows Thurs-Sat, plus rehearsals and writers meetings (appx 22 hrs/wk). Great pay--varies upon experience. Excellent job for the right person. Auditions are by appointment only at the Esther's Follies theatre, 525 East 6th Street. To schedule an interview, call 512.983.8408 or email texascomedy@sbcglobal.net .
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Esther's Follies 30th Anniversary
Looking through the window at three decades of laughs
By Patrick Beach
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Photo Gallery
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Esther's Follies began the same summer "Star Wars" came out, and 30 years later, the improbably iconic little musical comedy troupe is as permanent a part of Austin's psyche as George Lucas' space epic is to the world's. Funny, no, how one day you look up and so much life has gone by?
Thirty years of jokes and sketches and music. Thirty years of Shannon Sedwick as Patsy Cline pulling golf clubs and pipe wrenches and telephone handsets and saws out of her dress. Of flubbed lines and pratfall and laughs so sustained they sound like they might last forever. Thirty years? How?
Patric Schneider for the AMERICAN-Statesman
Today, Esther's Follies still give us big laughs, big hair and oversized props. Ted Meredith, left, Shannon Sedwick, Espie Randolph, Kerry Awn, Ellana Kelter, Cynthia Wood, Shaun Wainwright-Branigan and Noel Wells take the show over the top three nights a week.
Photo gallery: Esther's Follies
What a bunch of characters
A sample of who plays - or has played - whom in Esther's Follies. (Not every performer or every character is in every show. Your mileage might vary.)
* Shannon Sedwick: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ann Richards, Nancy Pelosi, Patsy Cline
* Kerry Awn: Buck Husky, Evan Rude, George W. Bush
* Ray Anderson: The Amazing Frank, a sleazy magician with a suspicious bulge
* Espie Randolph: Condoleezza Rice, Whitney Houston
What the members say
'I think of people with real jobs and it reminds me of how powerful theater is. That's how I justify being a professional clown.' - cast member Shaun Wainwright-Branigan
'I feel like it's a dream job. I consider myself very fortunate to be part of this cast.' - cast member Donnie Loa
'This is pretty much a six-day-a-week job. I've never done one gig that was this demanding. But it's a great job.' - musical director Doug Ewart
'I like being backstage and hearing people laugh and laugh and laugh. Those are geniuses in there.' - cast member Ellana Kelter
Related ventures
* The Velveeta Room, 521 E. Sixth, which next year will observe its 20th anniversary.
* Shannon Sedwick and Michael Shelton also opened Patsy's Cowgirl Cafe, 5001 E. Ben White Blvd., which offers down-home cooking, sandwiches named for local notables and live music.
The vital information
Esther's Follies, 525 E. Sixth, plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays and 8 and 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. For reservations, call 320-0553. Tickets are $20 for open seating; $18 for students, seniors and the military Thursdays and Fridays only; and $25 for reserved special section seats.
Because you asked, many things, but it ultimately comes down to the window. On all but a paltry handful of Thursday, Friday or Saturday nights, the theater inside the whimsically painted building at the corner of Sixth and Red River streets is filled with people — these days, increasingly older people — primed for a good time. They watch the show. Through the window behind the stage, they also watch the ceaseless Sixth Street parade outside of revelers, drunks and freaks, who in turn frequently stop to watch the show, and watch the people watching them watch the show.
There's a singular, delightful spontaneity in how the inside people and the outside people react that makes Esther's more than A Show. It's why some locals go as if the place was their church, why people from all over the country recognize Esther's players, why Esther's is on the short list of must-dos for tourists. At a time when "Keep Austin Weird" is a shopworn cliché on a gracelessly aging hippie's mildewy T-shirt, keeping Austin weird is what Esther's Follies does and has done — at minimum around 8,000 times, probably closer to 10,000 — since the hot "Star Wars" summer of '77.
Which is why the Austin City Council proclaimed 2007 Esther's Follies' year. Which is why everybody who ever hit the boards there should take a bow.
vv
Was any of this planned? Now that's funny. Um, no.
Dial back to another hot summer, this one the bicentennial year, for a brief history on how it began. Shannon Sedwick and Michael Shelton met when they were both 18, both part of a little theater group that Shelton joined "to meet girls" while attending the University of Texas. Sedwick grew up in the Fort Worth area with parents active in the community theater; Shelton's father was a football coach, and theater wasn't much a part of his family's life. They decided to leave school to go into business for themselves and soon enough, they leased what would become the legendary Liberty Lunch on the spot where Austin's new City Hall now stands. There was food and live music and tequila shots at dawn (this latter drawing an arched institutional brow from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission). And water.
"It was the hottest summer in decades," recalls Shelton, now, like Sedwick, 57, "so water became the overriding theme." In August they decided to do a water ballet, calling the happening Esther's Hard Corps Ballet, directed by Doug Dyer, whom Shelton and Sedwick knew from UT.
Esther as in Williams. But then you knew that.
Then they moved the show to Sixth Street — first into the building that's now home to Flamingo Cantina — and, with the exception of one ill-fated summer where they were across from where the downtown Threadgill's is now, they've been on Sixth Street ever since. Not that Sixth Street was Sixth Street. Back then Sixth Street was massage parlors and head shops and the people who frequented them. Jell-O shots had a long way to go in its battle to replace Mad Dog as the hot neighborhood cocktail. There was a palpable whiff of menace after dark.
Continuing the aquatic theme, this became Esther's Pool, a play on words because there were pool tables there, which patrons sat on during shows. William Dente was Dame Della Diva (a portrait of whom hangs in Esther's current home). Terry Galloway did skits. And Doug Jaques painted a huge, amazing mural. The crowds started coming and kept coming. Such were those magical times.
We interrupt this reverie for a special bulletin for all those in love with a bygone Austin that never really was: First, get over yourself. Second, the show had heart and ambition and talent ... but it wasn't all that great.
"Everybody felt like they were all part of the fun," Sedwick says. "Because the show certainly was weak at the time."
The first Esther's burned in a fire believed to have been caused by an ex-circus clown's cigarette, but the blaze didn't claim the group's costumes, housed separately in a little lean-to, so Sedwick and Shelton — by now the leaders of the troupe that had been something of a formless if not slightly anarchic collective — took their duds and marched down the street to the Ritz Theater.
"Many, many people came to our aid," Sedwick recalls. "That was sort of the first time we realized we were something that Austin really appreciated, that we weren't just a struggling little troupe but everybody would help us. That was the first time we ever felt like a community entity. That made us wake up to the fact that we could do more for the community, too, so we started doing more benefits at that point."
Ann Richards and other members of the yellow dog establishment became friends. Sedwick joined a number of Sixth Street organizations and the Downtown Austin Alliance — she's still president of the Old Pecan Street Association — and Esther's became part of the culture. Which explains why they were able to get away with things such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers dancing naked onstage and having artist Jim Franklin throwing pumpkins from the Ritz marquee for Halloween. Because this is what we do in Austin. We look for people who nurture cultured craziness. And we give them plaques.
But the Ritz was without air conditioning, miserably hot in summer and cold in winter, so after yet another bounce to Sixth and Neches, Esther's at long last landed at Sixth and Red River, onetime home to the JJJ Tavern, "a pretty well-known beer establishment where people knew they could knock on the back door and get into the gambling and other nefarious activities," Sedwick said. The former Cactus Theater next door would become Esther's affiliate the Velveeta Room, a venue for stand-up comedy and, much more recently, Esther's "Skinny Dip," a place for the troupe to perform material too weird or blue or both for Esther's, which only has so much room for new stuff lest the fans revolt. Because to go to Esther's and not see Patsy Cline pull a saw out of her dress could spark riots in the street.
v v
"I'm not into doing theater. I've always had stage fright. ... It's hard for me to work with a group of people."
This is Shelton talking, and it seems a fairly incredible thing for someone who's spent the past three decades in theater to say. But he is not much onstage, especially these days. So what does he do? Everything else. Shelton is a man happiest when deep in a construction project. It was he who put in the window at the current Esther's after the "revelation" of what a window onto the street might offer at the site of the current Flamingo Cantina; who speaks up when the material isn't as sharp as it could be; and who knew, when Esther's moved in 1990 into a building twice the size of the previous that "the jokes had to be funnier and more consistent."
And, increasingly, that the pace of the show had to acknowledge Americans' Incredible Shrinking Attention Span. As 15-year cast member Cynthia Wood puts it, "The way it's changed most is the speed of the show. Sketches are shorter, musical numbers are shorter. It's fast-paced. If you don't like something, wait five seconds."
(The breakneck speed of the show also explains why clothes fly backstage, and why now and then some players finish dressing onstage.)
"You can set your watch to what's going to be happening," says veteran cast member Kerry Awn, who plays George W. Bush ("I'm not discriminatious!") and the comically exasperated Buck Husky. "Here's a medley, here's Patsy Cline, here's magic, here's a song-and-dance number. They've got it down to such a science now, it's incredible."
The downside to demands for such precision — and to the audience's demand to hear a good number of the same old chestnuts they've heard for years — means that it's sometimes hard to get a new piece of writing in the show, according to Awn and others. Which doesn't mean they don't try. There's a writer's meeting at the top of the week, followed by rehearsals, where they run through bits again and again. Cast members — particularly magician Ray Anderson, the de facto star of the show since the death of the beloved Margaret Wiley some years ago — suggest tweaks and fine-tuning: This one's gotten too fast and it's hard to understand. It would be funnier like this. Even as cast members crack each other up, you get the sense that this is something they take quite seriously. Nobody rolls their eyes when it's time to run through something again, once more. With feeling.
vv
One weekend night, magician Anderson is in the middle of a trick when an Austin Police Department prowler with flashing lights pulls up on Sixth Street, plainly visible through the window.
"We gotta hurry," Anderson says. "My ride's here."
Ah, he's got a million of 'em. Another time when a pack of vaguely yokel-y gawkers walk by, he says, "God, Arkansas' gotta be empty tonight ... Ah, screw the trick — let's just look out the window."
Truly for Ray Anderson, the windows giveth more than they take away.
"Most magicians would look at these windows and scream in horror. They would think there's no way," Anderson, 46, says late one afternoon before a performance. "But very early on, I just really embraced the windows, and it really became a part of what I was known for in magic circles. That is the thing they remember me for: He's the guy who performs in front of the windows with people outside. So it's become a hook and something that's a little bit different from most magicians."
In a cast brimming with complete and unreconstructed hams, Anderson takes showmanship to another level, blending precision and the ability to improvise when the unexpected happens.
He started doing magic tricks as a kid in Victoria after his parents couldn't find him the doctor's kit he'd asked for Christmas. Coming to UT on a theater scholarship, Anderson took in Esther's and was captivated.
That was a quarter-century ago. In that time, Anderson has graduated from close-up magic and illusions of modest ambition to props that can cost $10,000 and upward of three months or more to fabricate. He lays on and then is impaled by a spike. He's locked in a box with a nasty-looking thing called the Claw over it, the Claw held up by a rope that's on fire, ready to split him in half once the rope burns through, only to vanish from the box and appear in the back of the house.
And the crowd, as they say, goes wild. But it isn't just the complexity and surprise of Anderson's more elaborate illusions; they're also responding to Anderson's humor and charm and veteran actors' skill at delivering a line said 5,000 times before and making it sound fresh.
Once the magic is set, Anderson says, it's pretty much "rinse and repeat," and he enjoys doing things exactly the same way every time. Not that there aren't mishaps. Once he ripped his pants and didn't have underwear on. Once he levitated someone 8 feet in the air, only to see the unlucky participant fall.
We'd tell you what he says such moments feel like, but this is a family newspaper. Perhaps we can say he says it feels like being naked in front of a crowd and having an insufficient something or other.
And speaking of family, sometimes Esther's feels like one. Anderson is mentoring Sedwick and Shelton's son, Noah, 7, in magic. (Daughter Suze is 13.)And when there's rare Esther's downtime, Anderson has traveled with Sedwick and Shelton.
Some nights after the late show, cast members unwind in the Velveeta Room or get a late dinner together. The ensemble chemistry remains when the crowds disperse and the house lights go up and reality comes charging back in after being held at bay for 90 minutes.
And there will always be another show. Even as older cast members pop prescribed pain pills to help them through the moves, there will always be amazing and talented young people coming into the cast. Sedwick and Shelton know they've missed a lot — not taking a weekend off for 20 or 25 years will do that to you — but it's all but impossible to keep the rapport one develops with cast members and the audience if it's interrupted too often. Only in the last five or six years have they taken breaks, and that's only two or three weeks when huge events are going on and it's impossible to have a normal Sixth Street weekend — as if there is any such thing.
"Frankly, both of us would like to take off a lot more," Shelton says. "We'd love to travel."
But they don't much because it's not easy to tear yourself away from a labor of love that's become an Austin institution. There's a reason they've stayed. There's a reason cast members tend to stay, too. And no matter how much thankless work goes into the job, you never get tired of the laughs, or the surprise and spontaneity the window cultivates.
So here they are, as always,
And here, as always, after beginning a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the show goes on.
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