Reviews for FronteraFest Performances
HOW TO BE AN ETHICAL SLUT by Brooke McCarthy
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 04, 2023
Brooke McCarthy does make the life of an "ethical slut" sound like fun, and the way she pokes fun at her own naïveté is endearing.
"Hello, sluts!" Brooke calls out cheerfully as she strides onto the Eloise Stage at Austin's Vortex. A pleased chorus of responses greets her from the audience. Brooke McCarthy's a vigorously happy performer, at ease in the cabaret/stand-up comic format of her show. She spiels a first-person narrative of her love life, each shift in the story marked by song. Some are mid-century standards—Peggy Lee's "Fever," and "Dancing Cheek to Cheek," Irving Berlin's 1930's composition …
Review: Booger Red by Jim Loucks at FronteraFest
by David Glen Robinson
Published on February 03, 2019
Loucks's curated accounts of Southern life keep it personal all the way, with a degree of honesty seldom seen on stage. His memorable characters reside in his body as well as in his voice.
Storytelling is in good hands with Jim Loucks. He is tall, many voiced, and gifted with outgoing generosity and the evident drive to create the finest one-person shows in this generation. Booger Red is another well-appointed household in the village of Loucks’ solo career. Booger Red is the performance tribute to Jim Louck’s father, Booger Red, a dynamic Baptist preacher in the mold of Billy Graham but without the stadium preaching series. As expected, Booger Red definitely lives …
Review: Strip by FronteraFest
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 26, 2018
An impressive multimedia blitz of live music expertly performed, dance and video, STRIP succeeds in its triple focus on tumultuous, tragic lives of often overlooked, almost closeted twentieth-century performers Candy Barr, Lenny Bruce and Josephine Baker.
Strip, the Musical is a showcase of the old Austin performance community, revolving around the central figure of Amparo Garcia-Crow, who's the producer, director, and writer of this huge independent show. As one of a talented group of UT-Austin drama students in the 1980s, Garcia-Crow launched a lifelong national performance career of multimedia, multimodal performances that defied characterization as only music, only theatre, or only dance.Her motto seemed to be “all of this, and more.” An …
Review: And Still The Dead Lay Moaning by Anthony Bromberg, FronteraFest at Santa Cruz Studio Theatre, January 19 - 30, 2016
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 20, 2016
The show felt long and slow-paced but even so a satisfying and appropriate work of festival theatre.
We knew where this one was going from the title. The writing challenge for Bromberg, a local talent, was to create a deepening mystery on the cause of death of the title character. Was it murder from a terrorist attack, a suicide, advanced cancer or something else? All these options were floated sequentially as the play progressed. It all deepened and unraveled, and resolution came much later with a fair amount of surprise despite the obvious outcome. …
Review: Liberté, Égalité, Adoptée by Maggie Gallant, FronteraFest at The Back Pack, January 19 - 31, 2016
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 20, 2016
Maggie Gallant's true courage in this first-person show is awe-inspiring.
The true courage of any one-person show performer is awe-inspiring. To pull it all off successfully in performance doubles the kudos thrown to the performer. Maggie Gallant runs the table in her Liberté, Egalité Adoptée, showing at various times through January 31st at Ground Floor Theatre in east Austin as part of the Fronterafest Long Fringe festival. This show compares favorably to last fall’s Naked as a Gaybird, Jay Byrd’s skilled and well-received one-man …
The Biscuiteater by Jim Loucks
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 24, 2015
Loucks is an excellent performer, and the highest mark of his skill is his ability to flash back and forth between two characters in dialogue, a chameleon changing colors while trapped in a kaleidoscope.
Austin’s newest theatre venue, the Ground Floor Theater, opened its performance doors to the world on January 19 with the first performances of the 2015 edition of FronteraFest Long Fringe. The theater is the brainchild of Lisa Scheps and Patti Neff-Tiven, producers who envisioned a theater to meet a dire need: an independent, community-collaborative theater to counter the recent shutterings of east side theaters. Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle has called the independent east …