Houston's Miller Outdoor Theatre and Paul Beutel: They're Playing His Song

After 35 years of making invaluable contributions to capital city culture, Austin Arts Hall of Famer Paul Beutel is headed home. The Miller Outdoor Theatre in Houston has hired the Bayou City native to be its first artistic director, and as of June 1, he'll be in charge of programming the only all-free outdoor proscenium theatre in the country. For Beutel, "it's a 'full circle' thing." His love of the performing arts was really jump-started by appearing in the choruses of The Boy Friend and Carnival at Miller Outdoor Theatre in 1969. That's the year he moved to Austin, where he became one of the musical stage's leading leading men over the next dozen years, lighting up productions of Pippin, Once Upon a Mattress, They're Playing Our Song, and Chicago, in which his portrayal of lawyer Billy Flynn won him a B. Iden Payne Award. While here, Beutel also served as film and theatre critic for the Austin American-Statesman, manager of publicity and promotion at UT's Performing Arts Center in its early years, and, most famously, executive director of the Paramount Theatre, where he successfully steered the historic venue out of financial peril and into the beloved place it holds in Austin's heart. If there was something at the Paramount that people cherished – the Tuna plays, Stomp, Austin Musical Theatre, the Paramount Summer Film Classics series – you can thank Beutel for its being there. No doubt the Miller Theatre board is looking for that programming savvy and sound fiscal sensibility to take its historic venue to new heights. Beutel admits he'll miss Austin, but he had left the Paramount last year and was looking for a new challenge. "Now, I am tremendously excited about coming back to Houston and particularly about working at Miller," he says. We wish him well.