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Our readers talk back.

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.

Books Editor Clay Smith and Litera columnist Ric Williams handicap which of the 200-plus international poets attending this year's Austin International Poetry Festival will be best bets.

Battle at the park over Riverside Drive

Boys will be boys -- especially if they're brothers and they're written by Sam Shepard. And this offering of True West from 4th &1 does a damned fine job of showing us what that means.

The Nushank Theater Collective produces a cast of powerful performers for its production of Oliver Mayer's glove love drama Blade to the Heat.

Tuna isn't the only Texas town with which actor-writers Jaston Williams and Joe Sears can be closely identified. Austin has played a significant role in the development of their town, and in return Sears and Williams have changed the face of the capital city.

Despite the economic downturn, Arts Center Stage is moving forward in its campaign to build the Long Center for the Performing Arts, and two of Austin's gay playwrights have cause to be happy.

If the Department of Environmental Protection hired someone to explain New York's City Water Tunnel #3, the largest non-defense public works project in the Western Hemisphere, that someone couldn't do a better job than performer Marty Pottenger, who delivers the truth of the project, as plain and raw as the earth that's being tunneled, as bright and ragged as the people tunneling.

The hottest arts venue in Austin this week may well be the UT Law School, where internationally renowned cultural figures, local arts luminaries, and prominent legal experts are converging there for a symposium on law and the performing arts.

In the Zachary Scott Theatre Center's production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Andrew Rannells is wonderfully ablaze in the role of the German-born rocker whose sex-change operation was botched, and everything about this hilarious musical spectacle has been fine-tuned to maximum pleasure.

As Playfest begins its 10th season this week, the Chronicle turned to actor-storyteller Bernadette Nason, one of the longtime regular contributors to the festival, to see what part theatre played in her childhood and how it influenced her current work.

Dance!

In Ambiguous Ambassador: SlutforArt, choreographer-performer Muna Tseng, working with multimedia artist Ping Chong, has created an elegant elegy to memorialize the art and life of her brother, photographer Tseng Kwon Chi.

In Austin Lyric Opera's production of the opera A Streetcar Named Desire, director Brad Dalton and his design team translate the unsettled mental state of Blanche Dubois into literal elements of the setting, creating a distorted, exaggerated, haunted work.

Rome & Jewels is choreographer Rennie Harris' new hip-hop version of the Romeo and Juliet story, set in the streets of Philly where the Caps and the Monster Qs fight for control.

The year 2001 saw a host of local cultural types taking journeys beyond their homes, traveling to other communities to share their art and finding new venues locally in which to produce their work and expand their creative sensibilities.

The first weeks of 2002 show that Austin artists are still busy taking their art to other parts of the country, and Physical Plant Theater needs your leaves.

The National Endowment for the Arts puts federal grants in the stockings of nine Austin arts organizations, and Ben Bentzin takes leave of Arts Center Stage.

Called by no less than The New York Times "the suavest of all male cabaret performers," Steve Ross is the personification of refined, romantic, elegant, and effervescent cabaret, and that makes him an ideal guest artist for the debut season of Austin Cabaret Theatre.

Like those Christmastime baskets full of cheese logs, summer sausages, miniature jars of jellies, etc., The Best Salvage Vanguard Holiday Ever features a diverse little gathering of tasty treats -- in this case, five-minute plays on a common theme -- and it's fun to snack on.

Reeling frenetically from song to show-biz anecdote to soap dialogue and back, like Judy Garland on a speed jag, with its star channeling everyone from Bette Davis and Phyllis Diller to Ethel Merman and Joan Crawford, Lypsinka! The Boxed Set is a hoot, a joyride through a neighborhood of tacky mansions haunted by grande dames of outsized egos and overwrought emotions.

In the Bedlam Faction's production of the Restoration comedy The London Cuckolds, "rubber-faced" is a highly appropriate way of describing the majority of the cast, and that's a problem. Rather than telling a funny story, the actors are begging for laughs at the expense of the script and the characters they play, and it leaves the play cold.

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.

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.

In bringing Stephen King's Misery to the stage, the Zachary Scott Theatre Center production paint the story's characters in the most awkward fashion possible and mixes horror and comedy to a degree that's confusing.

A new AFS series highlights the little-seen films of the Soviet New Wave.