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More money for the Long Center, more art for AMOA, and more national exposure for a Flaming Idiot.

The nominees for the 2017-18 Austin Critics Table Awards

In Ballet East Dance Theatre's Tribal, the company's original dances made you aware of the people around you and your connections to them

Director Don Toner makes his exit from the State Theater Company, and Austin creeps back into the pages of American Theatre magazine.

Proposed hotel and golf course would be constructed on city-owned parkland.

Council denies historic zoning for old house on St. David's property.

Off The Desk:

The nominees for the 2016-17 Austin Critics Table Awards

Managing the busy new Mexican American Cultural Center is inspiring work for Amparo Garcia-Crow

With its exploration of men's actions in the midst of war, Herman Melville's Billy Budd could not be more timely and relevant, but while Mainline Theater Project's production is perfectly cast, poor artistic choices cause the show as a whole to fall flat.

Second Youth Family Theatre's production of The Hobbit offers much that is magical, but awkward staging and inexperienced actors keep the show from achieving true enchantment.

Town Lake Park stakeholders say ARTS Center Stage is trying to pull a fast one on getting a bigger parking garage constructed; City Manager Jesus Garza is up for a raise, or is he? Mayor Kirk Watson announced his re-election bid and Amy Babich runs for city council.

Turtle Gets a New Shell

A historic merger between the Paramount Theatre and the State Theater Company.

In the Second Youth Family Theatre production of the Maurice Sendak-Carole King musical Really Rosie, a cast of young performers brings a gang of rowdy Brooklyn kids to life with a spark and sass that suits their streetwise scrappiness and executes the show's musical numbers with the polish of much more experienced stage performers.

Sad songs for local choral companies -- Austin ProChorus ends its song and Chorus Austin lets go its executive director -- but a sweet tune for Arts Center Stage: a million-dollar donation from Southwestern Bell.

City Centerpiece

Get an arts fix this week

Leaders in the campaign to build the Long Center for the Performing Arts have decided to scale back the long-delayed project and build only two out of four theatres in an attempt to get it off the ground.

Long Center supporters do a funding turnaround by asking the city for $25 million in bond money, and Austin Musical Theatre finds new life as Broadway Texas.

By billing it as a "neurotic" comedy, Naughty Austin seems to position Beyond Therapy in the Woody Allen movie genre, and its production best compares to the filmmaker's late career efforts -- one that he seemingly wrote during a spare hour in a psychiatrist's waiting room

Fans of J. R. R. Tolkien needn't wait until the December 12 opening of the film of Lord of the Rings to take a journey to Middle Earth. Second Youth Family Repertory Theatre, an Austin arts company acclaimed for its intelligent, highly theatrical stage shows for family audiences, will ferry you there this weekend via its production of The Hobbit.

The Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Austin's latest voyage on the HMS Pinafore benefits from the presence of director Ralph MacPhail at the helm. His light comic touch keeps the boat bobbing along merrily, a most agreeable ship of fools.

Off the Desk:

A few weeks ago, Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides -- about the interrogation of a world-class conductor and possible Nazi sympathizer during WWII -- wouldn't have seemed all that relevant to the world's headlines. Now, it does, this solid production from ActAustin and the Magnolia Theatre Company may make you consider the characters (and thus the situation) beyond the decorated stage's rectangle of light.

Off the Desk:

The many paths we walk can shape the people we become in life. Ballet East united old and new troupe dancers and choreographers to present multiple works in Paths.