Call Me Ann Rock Opera
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Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Call Me Ann Rock Opera, Performance Art Theatre, Houston, TX.
This original rock opera focuses on the story of Ann Richards: her background, her life, how she entered politics, her amazing successes and the consequences of her failed gubernatorial re-election campaign.
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He's a fake cowboy, riding off course
Too dumb to kiss the girl, he kissed the horse
You don't have to vote for this phony honking goose
That's one bad good old boy, there's no excuse!!
Watch the full vid! Link in bio. 🎥🐴
05/08/2022
Fun fact: Call Me Ann producer ukulalli met drummer Kirk Suddreath via The Catastrophic Theatre. During rehearsal one day he told her that he was part of a garage band working on a project about Ann Richards and would she like to come to a rehearsal and hear the songs? She did, and left that rehearsal convinced that this show belonged onstage. The rest is history!
Lots of our other cast & band members connected to the project, directly or indirectly, through the Catastrophic community. About half of our team is actually getting ready to start rehearsals for the Tamarie Cooper show this month! Theater family is amazing. ♥️🎭🤍🎶💙
Image reposted from
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05/03/2022
We are not okay. We are angry, and hurt, and tired. But we are not giving up.
We agree with Cecile. NO ONE should ever have to justify their personal medical decisions – about abortion or anything else.
Ann Richards rocketed into the national spotlight in 1988 with her legendary DNC keynote speech. It's one of the best political speeches ever made. Funny, wry, fearless. Do yourself a favor and go watch it on YouTube. 🤩
In developing our show, we knew the speech was one of the most pivotal moments in Ann's journey - yet at first we couldn't figure out how to dramatize it without dumbing it down.
How do you musicalize a speech that's so completely brilliant in its original spoken prose?
How do you distill 30 minutes of political genius into 3 minutes of stage time?
How do you pay homage to an iconic real-life performance without coming off as a poor imitation?
We actually considered just stopping the show and playing the original speech on the big screen. After all, we could never do better than Ann herself had already done 30+ years ago.
But then...inspiration struck.
On the Megabus from Austin to Houston one rehearsal weekend, our director Megan Weaver (who, yep, had recently seen Hamilton) got inspired to try adapting the speech into a rap.
At rehearsal that night, she gave Alli Partin Villines, Kirk Suddreath nd Sam Cannariato 3 pages of spoken word. Together they found a beat, a bassline, and a story-propelling tonal shift that paid homage to the great speech without trying to imitate it.
This is a rehearsal recording from our first or second rehearsal, back when we conceived it as a marching band sequence, with whistles and snares and spinning batons. In later rehearsals we decided to relax its energy by giving it a swing and a walking bassline, and turned it into a beat poem.
This isn't on the album. This is the only recording we have, aside from some fuzzy production video from the Houston Fringe Festival premiere. We gotta get this show produced live again so y'all can hear the full thing in person! 🎤✨
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04/18/2022
Throwback to this gem of a moment in the editing process for our Claytie and the Lady music vid. Can’t believe it’s been a year since the premiere! This whole process was such a labor of love, a breath of creative fresh air during the darkness of Covid. It was also a culmination of our Houston Arts & Culture Grant which was originally meant for a live production of Call Me Ann in 2020. 😢 But we made lemonade from those lemons, and had a blast doing it! 🍋🎥🤠
Also - that’s the real newspaper from Ann’s 1990 win!
Here’s the link to the video. Do check it out, it objectively rocks. 😉🤘♥️🤍💙
https://youtu.be/kNwGP32APPY
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As state treasurer, Ann Richards famously applied the common-sense budgeting methods she honed as a housewife to Texas’s financial system - and brought the state from deficit to surplus in just a couple years.
We’re talking the world’s 10th largest economy, revived with knowledge earned through stay-at-home momdom.
Domestic labor is skilled as f**k y’all!
Bonus fact: This melody is inspired by Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd. 🤠
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04/13/2022
More from the Call Me Ann family at Houston Art Car Klub last weekend. The creativity! The joy! ♥️💙🤍
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We love this so much! Our own Kristie Odom, Houston Art Car Klub artiste extraordinaire, expresses the heart and soul of all of us indie artists so eloquently: People need to see people having fun, being ridiculous, making magic and expressing themselves. Now more than ever.
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We are so incredibly proud to congratulate The Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson, United States Supreme Court Justice!
“We are not going to have the America that we want until we elect leaders who are going to tell the truth - not most days, but every day.”
-Ann Richards
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