Reviews for ALTA Teatro Performances
Review: Burundanga by ALTA Teatro
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 26, 2014
ALTA Teatro gives a vigorous, polished and highly comic presentation of this comedy by Catalan playwright Jordi Galceran, who writes with the zip of Neil Simon and the courage to mock mercilessly the Basque terrorist group ETA , the clandestine band of separatist thugs that has carried out kidnappings and killed more than 800 in Spain since 1968. Ironically enough, the opening performances of Burundanga in Cataluña coincided almost to the day with ETA's announcement of "a …
Review: Natividad - A Homemade Pastorela Play by ALTA Teatro
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 06, 2011
Director Alejandro Pedemonte and playwright Miguel Angel Santana have put together a thoroughly contemporary Christmas story.
Every year since 1997 Austin's Spanish-speaking community has crafted a Christmas play, taking the model of the traditional Pastorela pageant of long date, in which the birth of Jesus is witnessed by a simple shepherd girl. As in virtually all folk theatre, the story can be told many different ways and styles. The sponsoring coalition ALTA (the Austin Latino Theatre Alliance) recruits a different director every year for the Spanish-language enactment, so that each Austin Pastorela is unlike …
Review: La Pastorela 2010 - A Shepherdla's Story by ALTA Teatro
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 09, 2010
The cast doesn't bother with a curtain call. Instead, San Miguel with his self-assurance commands us forth to the plaza, where to the children's delight they find a devil-shaped piñata awaiting, suspended from the balcony.
La Pastorela, the tale of the shepherds on their way to Bethlehem in search of the promised newborn babe, has a lot of history behind it. That Bible story came to the New World with the Spanish troops and frailes who occupied the New World, of course, and while accepting that account, the indigenous peoples interpreted in terms of their own experience. La Pastorela tells the story of Gila, the shepherdess who receives a visitation by the Archangel Gabriel, with …