Real Estate and Perfect Mates

Cabaret

Top 10 Performing Arts Triumphs

1. Cabaret (UT Performing Arts Center) There is glitz and glamour and "big production values" and throngs pouring out of theatres gaily humming snatches of songs, and then there is this. Stunning is perhaps too easy a word for this story of the seediest side of life in 1929 Berlin, where true love gets kicked in the teeth by right-wing, jackbooted thugs (the real ones) and any show of aberrant individuality leads to the gas chamber. In spite of the world's morbid encroachment on the individuals who circulate Fraulein Schneider's bordellolike rooming house, there is always the cabaret: sharp-witted, burlesque, and so, so naughty. Stunning.

2. Waiting for Godot (UT Performing Arts Center) I almost wrote that Cabaret was real "meat and potatoes" theatre, but, of course, for real meat and potatoes, you should go to Ireland, or at least bring the Irish to your table. The PAC did just this, and the feast was two Beckett plays: Krapp's Last Tape and Waiting for Godot (the accent, by the way, is on the first syllable: God-oh; say it with a thick brogue), produced by the Gate Theatre of Dublin. Simple in its staging, but layered in its performance, this production proves that all you ever really need for your theatrical feast is a good script, good actors, and an audience hungry for a play that takes a little more time to properly digest.

3. The Collected Stories of Billy the Kid (Doghouse Theater) Andre Carriere's adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's poetic novel proved that riches can be mined even in a drizzly back yard in West Campus. Maybe the smallest production in town last year, but full of images grim, fanciful, and larger than life.

4. Katherine Catmull in How I Learned to Drive (Subterranean Theatre Company/ State Theater Company) and Body and Soul (Subterranean Theatre Company), Dan Bisbee in Fractured Greeks (VORTEX Repertory Company), Greg Gondek in Bleacher Bums (Subterranean Theatre Company), and Paul Norton in Closer (Zachary Scott Theatre Center) It isn't as if this group of actors has been unusually exceptional this year. They just continue to be exceptional.

5. Annual Buttering Up of the Editor Award: Abundance (Athena Dramatics/Zachary Scott Theatre Center) While this production of Beth Henley's play was directed by the Chronicle's Robert Faires -- well, it was good, dammit! It's worth noting, too, that this piece, like Billy the Kid (and even Cabaret and Godot) took its characters through some very ugly personal circumstances in a rough world peppered with tricky history: a theme for the year, perhaps?

6. Verdi Requiem (Austin Symphony Orchestra) My father used to play the Dies Irae very loud, very often, in the living rooms of my distant youth, and that short section of Verdi's surprising and beautiful Requiem can leave something of an impression, to say the least. So to finally get the chance to hear it live was quite the treat. ASO provided an overpowering and gratifyingly big Dies Irae but matched that immensity with some of the most lovely, melodic, and delicate pieces of choral music you're likely to have heard last year.

7. The Opening of the Blue Theatre. Let the exodus to East Austin continue, especially under the stewardship of Ron Berry and Dana Younger, who have turned yet another shabby warehouse into an artplex. The two men continue to make improvements on the space, the next being the screening room next door to the theatre.

8. A Macbeth (State Theater Company) The staging by Guy Chandler Roberts may have had its problems, style over substance being the main one, but such style! Christopher McCollum's set was a shout for high-concept designs and raw theatre. And while we're on about style over substance ...

9. ... Why live theatre is the best entertainment around, or We're Only Human, Really. Actors may be human, but the poor moth that caught the crushing brunt of guest actor Stacy Keach's wrath during Love Letters (Actors Repertory of Texas) was not. Still, it provided one honest moment among the fluff of chair-bound script reading by Keach and his divine co-star, Joan Collins. Meanwhile, barrel-chested baritone Carlos Moreno proved more human than heroic as he stumbled fearfully upon the great golden eagle in the very expensive production of Aida (Austin Lyric Opera). Here's to humans! (clink!)

10. Gut Girls and The Madwoman of Chaillot (UT Department of Theatre & Dance) The Department of Theatre & Dance has quietly put on some very strong work this fall with its increasingly adept designing, directing, and acting.